Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal editorial board was on C-Span last night defending his paper’s editorial condemning the New York Times for printing the leaked story about the administration’s surveillance of financial transactions.

While he is unquestionably a brilliant young man who served as Editor-in-Chief of the Jerusalem Post at age 28, he is sadly, also a sell-out who clearly believes his sheer brilliance will give credibility to equivocation and patriotic sounding generalizations in defending the Bush administration.

I would like to briefly discuss just two such statements he made yesterday.

While accusing the NYT for irresponsibly exposing secret gov’t intelligence programs, he suggested that it is “precisely this kind of liberal freedoms, like speech, that are the reason we prevailed over the Nazi’s and other authoritarian regimes.”

I disagree. Our success in WWII was about our military strength ushered to a sufficient strength levels by Roosevelt (you know, the New Deal guy) despite the years of strong popular isolationist sentiment.

As Hitler, Stalin, the North Vietnamese, the Taliban (against the Soviets) and so many others prove in fact, a strong liberal democracy is NOT required for a strong military. The truth, and far more important is the fact that such liberalisms protect US from the threat of a take over of our own gov’t by a authoritarian domestic political movement, and in this case, an overly zealous executive bent on subverting those freedoms under the guise of stupid ideas like “we gotta fight’em over there so we don’t have to fight’em over here.” …whatever the hell THAT means.

The other shameless comment proffered by this otherwise brilliant, never-served, sell-out was an equivocation used to justify Bush’s misuse of bad intelligence in his push for the invasion of Iraq.

I paraphrase, but closely; Mr. Stephens suggested that “Clinton had used similar justifications for bombing Iraq for four straight days in the late nineties.”
It needs to be pointed out that Clinton’s four day bombing spree of Iraq was not the same as taking the country to war, deposing a soveriegn, and occupying another country.

In quickly researching the smart smart young man, Bret Stephens of the WSJ editorial board, I came upon more suspicion of his motives than literary or even political critique of his writings (taken from this article), such as:

“Stephens, who could not speak, read or write Hebrew. Stephens who had no management experience at a newspaper. Stephens who proudly admitted that the Post was now being written for the US market and not for Israel. Stephens who never spent one day in the Israel Defense Forces. Stephens failed the Post, its readers and the State of Israel.”

“The words “team work” got lost under Bret Stephens. I still have an e-mail illustrating the height of arrogance as Stephens stated to another Post editor, “I don’t care what you think, it’s important only what I think.”

“”Otherwise, what can explain the Jerusalem Post Editor-In-Chief’s decision to make Paul Wolfowitz the newspaper’s Man of the Year? Inside sources tell me that members of his own staff (actual Israeli ones) think this was a totally wacky choice. Listen, it’s totally cool if Bret likes to spend his time writing about being a neocon, defending neocon ideas, paying homage to neocons icons like Wolfowitz,explaining why he is a Clinton-hater; noting that the sight of the former president made him “want to puke.”

At first Mr. Stephens came across as a real sort of “old school” journalist who held the value of objectivity above all others (if that really exists) as he answered questions about the WSJ editorial. It was not until the call-in segment that Bret began to weaken and betray his agenda resorting to rhetoric and highly refined versions of the neo-con talking points which depend so heavily on an uniformed listener.

In a moment of poorly veiled desperation he actually compared Bush’s ethical problems with Clinton’s attempt to keep private his uncontrolled sexual prowess. I have personally never uttered this over-played slogan, but now I must; “no one died when Clinton lied”.

While I can understand why so many bright, young, educated, overly ambitious, young men have so completely abandoned all integrity in their zeal to suck off the teats of power (it’s hard to make a decent living these days), I do not understand how the Wall Street Journal can so unabashedly abuse the most basic ethics of journalism by hiring such “openly” neo-con people? It’s not as if neo-cons represent more than a miniscule portion of our society.

Be afraid.