“The GOP nominee, whether Romney or Santorum, will be staunchly in favor of a military option, if needed, to stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon … He or she will be opposed to slashing defense,” wrote conservative Jennifer Rubin on her Washington Post blog, Right Turn, in a piece titled, “Credit Santorum with sinking Ron Paul.”
That said, Paul’s clearly going to remain a factor throughout the race, perhaps all the way to the GOP convention in Tampa, Fla. It’s possible he’ll be a force shaping the GOP going forward. That’s his follower’s dream – and perhaps Mitt Romney’s (or Rick Santorum’s, or Newt Gingrich’s) nightmare.
“If Ron Paul comes to the convention with 100s of delegates – he can veto the veep pick, shape the platform, cause a ruckus in Tampa,” tweeted ABC political reporter Terry Moran on Tuesday night.”
Comment:
Rubin, who has a column at Human Events, comes out of the school of neo-conservative hawks. That being the case, her support of Romney has led her into bizarre contradictions of her past positions, notes Jonathan Chait at New York magazine. Whereas she now suggests moderation on both the issue of moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, as well the pardoning of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard, she was a strong advocate of both before, says Chait:
“Here she is last year praising the Jerusalem Embassy Act, and lauding Marco Rubio for pledging to move the embassy to Jerusalem. Oh, and you can read her here, here and here writing approvingly of the movement to pardon Pollard. You can only imagine how she would have responded if, in 2008, Obama had given the same remarks Romney made yesterday.”
The intellectual contortions have annoyed Jeffrey Lord of The American Spectator:
“…to pretend that Rubin’s continual swipes at others (Newt Gingrich, Herman Cain, Rick Perry) are anything other than her inability to control a serious case of Establishment-media approved Romneyphilia is not something that will be allowed by her readers.”
Apparently, actual conservatism is not needed to be a conservative candidate. The only thing really essential to this kind of contentless “conservatism” is support for imperial might, we’d guess.
And so it is. Hunting around, we came across a piece in Salon that explains Rubin’s position on defense.
The Salon piece notes her endorsement of a singularly revolting rant by Rachel Abrams, who is the wife of Eliot Abrams of Iran-Contra fame, the step-daughter of leading neoconservative thinker Norm Podhoretz, and a Board Member of Bill Kristol’s Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI). The rant Rubin retweets goes in part like this:
“Then round up [Gilad Shalit’s] captors, the slaughtering, death-worshiping, innocent-butchering, child-sacrificing savages who dip their hands in blood and use women—those who aren’t strapping bombs to their own devils’ spawn and sending them out to meet their seventy-two virgins by taking the lives of the school-bus-riding, heart-drawing, Transformer-doodling, homework-losing children of Others—and their offspring—those who haven’t already been pimped out by their mothers to the murder god—as shields, hiding behind their burkas and cradles like the unmanned animals they are, and throw them not into your prisons, where they can bide until they’re traded by the thousands for another child of Israel, but into the sea, to float there, food for sharks, stargazers, and whatever other oceanic carnivores God has put there for the purpose.”
So that’s why Jennifer Rubin thinks US defense should never, ever be cut…