Keller's policy re anonymous sourcing seems reasonable enough, doesn't it? It's interesting to compare/contrast what goes on under his guidance with what Hersh does, though. Hersh also uses a lot of unnamed sources; but he also goes to great lengths to qualify their positions, finds multiple sources that corroborate, or have opposing information, and adds people who will go on the record, even if only to say yeah, that's likely, or it's more likely something else.

That takes a lot more legwork than what Gordon turned in today. It takes access to a larger number of sources who are ... main point ... at pay grades beneath the 'high level government sources' that (some) reporters would rather deal with, because it brings them in closer proximity to power (and saves them some time). Kids and whores, as the saying used to go ...

Even if you aren't intentionally a government shill (or alternatively, even if you absolutely one hundred percent believe what's in it), you'd have to have a sense, looking at your piece (if it's Gordon's), that it's rather thinly sourced relative to the consequences of what you're reporting. Hersh clearly internalized that ethic; Gordon didn't.

That can only be doen-if we get Dems in (like Barack Obama)-who don't want to punish the GOP for GW's bad policies..

You lost me there. Why is it necessary to give the extensive rot that is the GOP a pass (on the flawed predicate that it was just 'GW's bad policies') in order to seat democrats or flip red states or do any of the things you mention?

Isn't this itself something of a 'blue-dog strategy' itself?

This might be what you're looking for:

"Would war on Iraq be just? Pope John Paul II and other Catholic leaders say no."

http://www.americancatholic.org/News/JustWar/Iraq/

As you probably know, there has been a long-lived academic school of philosophy called 'Just War Theory'. Two of the most well known American political philosophers who've written about it are Michael Walzer, who made his bones with 'Just and Unjust Wars', and Jean Bethke Elshtain. Both were part of a CFR symposium on Just War Theory in the run-up to the Iraq disaster.

Wikipedia on JWT:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_war

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/war/

Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry:

http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/pol116/justwar.htm

Ditto, from me. Tell him the cabal needs him!

The Jerusalem Post also had an item about this yesterday (courtesy of Salon's 5 Things):

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1209627027461&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

The ambassador on Fox makes it official, this is a media tour to promote ... uh, something.

The JP story adds the alarming detail that Iran has smuggled in E. Euro cruise missiles that can avoid the Arrow (i.e. Patriot-derived air defense system the US provided $2-3 billion for)system ... just to make sure no one worries about delivery systems the way we famously didn't in advance of Iraq. The urgency! We must strike before it is too late!

We can now look forward to more right-wing 'scholars' putting out 'well-researched' pieces about Ahmedinejad's 'apocalytic vision' which will get endless play in the usual media suspects.

You hit it. It doesn't matter who is in power. Examine the career patterns of any given neo-con over the past ten-twenty years; there are established holding-areas on the other side of the revolving door where they can go to ground when a Dem administration is in office. Think tanks, fellowships, university departments and right-wind endowed chairs, NDU and so forth.

Obviously, they don't go away. They continue to speak, to organize, to publish and to program.

In some ways, they're more dangerous then because they have more time to plan, solicit support in the defense 'periphery', recruit, publish revisionist accounts that paper over everything that went wrong on their 'watch' (and more stab-in-the-back nonsense), disseminate the half-baked theories and frameworks, which will then be taken up, diluted and fragmented, and then popularized for rhetorical leverage later by Fred Hiatt, David Brooks, Robert Kaplan and other 'popular' writers ... all without having to account for anything contemporary that they've been in charge of.

All the more reason to put as much pressure as possible on the next administration to bring these people to account. They will have less time to spread their subterranean poison if they are having to fight a defensive war.

Our thinking is pretty much identical on this, methinks. Some of these creatures will be beyond reach, because they had only their intellectual 'fingers' on any of this (and they'll retire to their sinecures at Hoover, IAS/Princeton, etc). But I think it's very effective to show them the color of their own blood. Bullies don't go on the offensive when someone they've terrorized gives them a nosebleed.

Also, more importantly, if there is even a hope of restoring any integrity to the institutions they've crapped all over, there needs to be a cleansing, using a strong abrasive.

do NOT start waving Ahmadinejad's bolivations as evidence.

You meant 'bloviations'. It's only 'bolivations' when Hugo Chavez does it. :>

Seriously, it's funny to me how we can examine and understand (well, talk about anyway) the most obscure and minute differentiations in our own politics but when we look at other countries we pretend that they have no politics of their own, no internal disagreements, no legacies, no family interests, nothing. They all wear a political unitard. One size fits all.