Ledeen and Rove - pure evil and total darkness

i confess to having been only dimly aware of michael ledeen... i know he's been a strong force within the neocon cabal that's driven us to the brink of complete foreign policy and international relations meltdown, but i had never associated him with outright evil of the sort that karl rove has inadvertently shown us on occasion - until this...

- from an August 2002 interview with FrontPageMag.com

Question #10: Let's put Saddam aside for a moment. Personally, I am very pessimistic about the West's ability to defeat this new threat in militant and radical Islam. I think that the Soviet and Fascist threats were easier to deal with. In the end, I fear that the radical Muslims, especially in the Arab world, will always stick together, and we will be dealing with millions upon millions of religious fanatics who not only seek our death, but also their own. How can we be confident in facing Islamic messianism? I don't think we've ever seen a threat like this and I doubt that our Western democracies have the resolve or capability to defeat it. Please tell me I am wrong.

Ledeen: Yes of course we're going to win, and we're going to remove the tyrannies in Iran and Syria, and either Saudi Arabia is going to change their policies -- shutting down the radical schools and mosques -- or we will have to go after them as well. Remember there are lots of overqualified unemployed Hashemites nowadays. You don't believe we will win because you haven't studied our history. If it were Europe you might be right; Europe is ready to surrender to anyone. They tried hard to surrender to the Soviet Union but it just didn't work out for them, poor things. But we are talking about America, and Americans love to fight and love to win.

up to this point in meteor blades front-page daily kos post, i saw ledeen as just another neocon ideologue, huffing and puffing about the u.s. manifest destiny as world savior, but it was his comments about europe that stopped me cold... and it's not even his views ABOUT europe that i find so appalling... it's the cold, cruel - yes, evil - way he phrased them... it's the same reaction i had to ron suskind's description * of what he heard while waiting outside karl rove's white house office... there's a difference between being an ideologue and being pathologically evil... congratulations, mr. ledeen... you've joined karl at the top of my list of darkest forces...

* Eventually, I met with Rove. I arrived at his office a few minutes early, just in time to witness the Rove Treatment, which, like LBJ’s famous browbeating style, is becoming legend but is seldom reported. Rove’s assistant, Susan Ralston, said he’d be just a minute. She’s very nice, witty and polite. Over her shoulder was a small back room where a few young men were toiling away. I squeezed into a chair near the open door to Rove’s modest chamber, my back against his doorframe.

Inside, Rove was talking to an aide about some political stratagem in some state that had gone awry and a political operative who had displeased him. I paid it no mind and reviewed a jotted list of questions I hoped to ask. But after a moment, it was like ignoring a tornado flinging parked cars. "We will fuck him. Do you hear me? We will fuck him. We will ruin him. Like no one has ever fucked him!" As a reporter, you get around—curse words, anger, passionate intensity are not notable events—but the ferocity, the bellicosity, the violent imputations were, well, shocking. This went on without a break for a minute or two. Then the aide slipped out looking a bit ashen, and Rove, his face ruddy from the exertions of the past few moments, looked at me and smiled a gentle, Clarence-the-Angel smile. "Come on in." And I did. And we had the most amiable chat for a half hour.

every so often, someone will tip his hand, and you can see the real person behind the imago... rove's revealing moment for me was the above... for ledeen, it was the interview with frontpagemag... in that one brief instant, the mask is off, and you can see the true evil underneath...

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