(Republicans won the last major election, so the Post must hire more conservatives to reflect their new stature. Once Republicans lose a major election, the Post will of course hire some former Republican speechwriters and aides, so that they don’t have to stoop to finding respectable work. But on the other hand, Ezra Klein.)

In the coming debate at the Post between the neocons — who urge immediate military action against Iran — and the moderates — who have reluctantly come to the tragic conclusion that military action against Iran is the only viable option — Rubin will join the neocons.

Former Post reporter/blogger Dave Weigel — who knows the conservative beat as well as any journalist in the nation, but was fired from the Post for saying a mean thing about Matt Drudge — applauds the hiring.

Today he writes about the slightly bizarre desire of some “Tea Partiers” to repeal the 17th Amendment (because, again, their worship of the Constitution is limited to the bits they like). He concludes that it’s a waste of time, but not because the 17th Amendment is a good thing. No, popular election of Senators by citizens, instead of the appointment of random beneficiaries of patronage by state legislators, is, Yoo agrees, an attack on federalism.

There’s a lot of truth to the argument that the enactment of the 17th Amendment undermined federalism. State legislatures have a greater institutional incentive to protect federalism than do the people of a state. The people of a state may want to expand federal program spending in order to get their share of tax revenues, even at the expense of greater national power over issues reserved to the states. Although they are also elected by the people, state legislators have more of an incentive to protect the original distribution of powers between the national and state governments.

Here is what James Madison had to say about the matter (during congressional discussion of the Bill of Rights in 1789):

[T]he State Legislatures will jealously and closely watch the operations of this Government, and be able to resist with more effect every assumption of power, than any other power on earth can do; and the greatest opponents to a Federal Government admit the State Legislatures to be sure guardians of the people’s liberty.

The 17th Amendment weakened the states’ ability to resist the expansion of federal powers.

So… direct election of Senators threatens federalism because citizens don’t like federalism. As long as people keep liking the stupid federal government so much we’ll never be rid of it. (And this from a guy with a ridiculously expansive view of executive power!)

But, Yoo concludes, rescinding the amendment would be way too difficult (in part because it would involve getting a bunch of state legislatures to vote for repeal), so he urges activists to focus on cutting taxes, instead. Still: Why do conservatives hate democracy so much?

This Quinn/Chalabi chat was a breathtaking display of shamelessness, culminating in this immortal line, from Chalabi: “The weapons of mass destruction was to our view a marginal issue.”

Yes, well, that’s not the way the rest of us remember it.

It was a remarkably friendly conversation — despite some brief discussion of how bad or not-bad Iran is –considering that Chalabi is a miserable fraud with blood on his hands. Quinn basically just let him bullshit. (What the hell is Chalabi’s “idea” exactly? I mean — he already got to try out his idea, and now thousands of people are dead for no fucking reason.)

For some reason, this old Quinn-penned profile of Chalabi the hard-working and charming gourmand is no longer on the Washington Post website.

It’s just a dumb analysis born of a facile understanding of history, which is unsurprising because no one will ever convince me that Paul the younger is actually smart, but Paul’s defensible misgivings about the future stability of the nation do just sound, to his followers, like “OBAMA = HITLER.” I think he understands that, but doesn’t really care. (Just like libertarians and “responsible” conservatives of yore usually understood that their intellectual defenses of states’ rights just provided respectable cover for racist segregationists.)

Anyway the ol’ “Aqua Buddha” pseudo-kidnapping thing is briefly rehashed, but the real meat — even better than the Hitler stuff — is the question of whether and how Paul will be co-opted by the establishment. Rand is already happier with the military-industrial state and the drug war than his father is, and it looks like he’s willing to cozy up with the GOP foreign policy establishment. Zengerle describes a meeting Paul took with neocons Bill Kristol, Dan Senor, and Tom Donnelly. Senor’s takeaway: “He didn’t seem cemented in his views. He was really in absorption mode.”

Here’s the story of how the great libertarian hope comforted AIPAC (emphasis mine):

The following month, he met with officials from the powerful lobbying group AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), which has frequently clashed with Ron Paul over what the group views as his insufficient support of Israel. Paul, according to one person familiar with the AIPAC meeting, “told them what they wanted to hear: ‘I’m more reasonable than my father on the things you care about.’ He was very solicitous.”

All of this has left Republicans in a state of high anxiety about which positions Paul will maintain—and which ones he’s willing to bend on—once he enters the Senate. “After the primary, there’s been a split and a debate,” a Republican strategist involved in efforts to derail Paul this past spring tells me. “Half of us think Paul is far more ambitious than his father—he doesn’t just want to prove a point, he wants to be a player—and that his ambition will outweigh his ideology”

Isn’t this thrilling news, Rand Paul supporters who bucked the GOP establishment? Rand Paul is “more reasonable” than his father! (Reasonable, apparently, is the opposite of principled. Don’t tell these guys.)

Or at least some did, even as Republican politicians remained silent on the Florida outrage. What should have been an opportunity for reflection on the national mood of Muslim-bashing bigotry — and especially how that mood was conjured — instead became an occasion to preen and pretend that the little band of idiotic rubes in Florida could not possibly have been inspired by the “sophisticated” critics of Islam on Fox News, talk radio and the Internet.

Nobody is more repelled by the prospect of flaming Muslim holy books than Jonah Goldberg, according to him. But having forthrightly declared his dismay, the National Review blogger seems bewildered by the reaction of his readers — some of whom sharply question his tart condemnation of Jones and suggest that he and Petraeus were promoting Islam over Christianity. The distressed Goldberg, who pilloried liberals as “fascists” in his own famously tortured interpretation of history and didn’t bother to note the irony in his discovery that there are real live book-burners on his side of the spectrum. And notwithstanding this experience, he may still believe, as he wrote in late August, that “Americans who oppose what amounts to an Islamic Niketown two blocks from ground zero are the real victims of a climate of hate, and anti-Muslim backlash is mostly a myth.”

Obviously, Goldberg isn’t listening to the likes of Newt Gingrich, the former House Speaker and aspiring presidential nominee, who compared Islam to Nazism and Japanese imperialism in symbolic offensiveness to Americans. Having repeatedly denounced the construction of the Park51 center as a “radical Islamist” provocation that should be prohibited by Congress, Gingrich has yet to emit a tweet admonishing those who would torch the Quran.

Still, most conservatives would no doubt be alarmed by a book burning, whether of the Quran or any other work. Yet they seem strangely oblivious to how Islam was relentless demonized by figures in their movement, especially over the Park51 controversy, and how that furious drumbeat would encourage the burning of the Quran. They consistently refuse to take responsibility for their own role in encouraging those rancid emotions.

Indeed for many years, neoconservative intellectuals have allied themselves with the religious right, which is scarcely news; they agree on many issues, most notably in their unquestioning defense of Israeli policy. And they agree — or agree not to disagree — on attitudes toward Islam. In practice, those tacit agreements have meant that conservatives and neoconservatives disregard the sulfurous flood of anti-Muslim rhetoric and “revelation” spewing from preachers far more influential than Pastor Jones. Rarely condemning the faith-based hostility of their allies, the conservatives and neocons have chosen to ignore it.

A telling incident occurred during the 2008 presidential race, when John McCain sought and received the endorsement of a nationally known Texas pastor named John Hagee. When Hagee’s sickening quotes about Catholics, Jews and Muslims were disclosed in media reports, McCain dumped him. But Bill Kristol spoke up on behalf of his friend Hagee — who looks forward to a “final confrontation” between the West and Islam because the Quran supposedly commands Muslims to murder and enslave Christians and Jews. “I think, actually, some of the attacks, especially on Reverend Hagee, are unfair,” said Kristol on “Fox News Sunday”. He knows, of course, that none of the criticism of Hagee was unfair — unless it was unfair to quote him accurately from his own books and sermons.

Despite the constant outpouring of anti-Muslim demagoguery from religious right figures such as Hagee, Rod Parsley, Franklin Graham and literally dozens of others, it is also true that Christian and Jewish leaders, including important evangelicals, have behaved with considerably more vigilance and principle in defending the religious liberties of Muslims than conservative politicians and commentators.

With very few exceptions, the failure of the political right to defend those liberties is so broad and complete that a recent word of dissent from that quarter is well worth quoting at length — particularly because it comes from a surprising source. The credentials of Daniel Pipes as a critic of radical Islam can scarcely be questioned; he has gone so far as to justify the Japanese-American internment as a precedent for profiling American Muslims. Anyone who doesn’t believe that Islamophobia has infected the right should listen carefully to him.

Even as Pipes hails the rise of an “angry, potent movement” in the reaction to Park51, he sounds worried:

The energetic push-back of recent months finds me partially elated: Those who reject Islamism and all its works now constitute a majority and are on the march. For the first time in fifteen years, I feel I may be on the winning team.

But I have one concern: the team’s increasing anti-Islamic tone. Misled by the Islamists’ insistence that there can be no such thing as “moderate Islam,” my allies often fail to distinguish between Islam (a faith) and Islamism (a radical utopian ideology aiming to implement Islamic laws in their totality). This amounts to not just an intellectual error but a policy dead end. Targeting all Muslims is contrary to basic Western notions, lumps friends with foes, and ignores the inescapable fact that Muslims alone can offer an antidote to Islamism.

What Pipes and his cohort won’t acknowledge is that an angry movement against the construction of an Islamic community center inevitably encourages a movement against Islam and Muslims itself. Yes, most conservatives despise the burning of the Quran — but shouldn’t they ask themselves who lighted the match?