Jen Rubin and me — not the same person

I swear, and we even have witnesses: Joel Pollak can vouch for her being at his Chicago fundraiser last night, and I was at Josh Block’s farewell party at the Finnish embassy in DC.

But, apparently, Hillary and Flynt Leverett seem to think it so — which would probably come as more of a surprise to Ms. Rubin than myself. (I think she’s a good writer — I don’t know if she’d say the same about me.)

Here are the Leveretts assessing the impact of their Race for Iran blog in a post that runs even longer than a few of my choicer entries:

On foreign policy questions, Robert Dreyfuss of The Nation calls www.RaceForIran.com “essential”.  Certainly, our longstanding and ongoing identification of the strategic imperatives for the United States to realign its relations with the Islamic Republic draws critical attention from neoconservatives and others with neoconservative-like foreign policy views.  Michael Ledeen recently described us as the “Flynt and Hillary Iran appeasement team”; Ron Kampeas, Washington bureau chief of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, characterizes us as the founders of the “Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett school of Iran suck-uppery” (he even cites former Senator Chuck Hagel as a disciple of our “school”). 

Ledeen, Kampeas, and others who share their views react so strongly to our work because, first of all, we ask the kinds of “hard questions” about claims of Iranian “threats” and bad “intentions” that should have been asked, but largely were not, in the run-up to America’s invasion of Iraq–when many of our neoconservative critics and their Democratic enablers were helping manufacture, promulgate, and legitimate fraudulent arguments for a war that has cost the lives of at least 100,000 Iraqis and more than 4,000 American soliders, while also seriously damaging America’s strategic position. 

"Suck-uppery?" I said to myself, adding the question mark because myself just isn’t clever enough to come up with such a neologism.

Within seconds, the magic of Google (The Leveretts are too busy to provide links)  revealed itself unto me its true author: Commentary’s own Jennifer Rubin:

Hagel seems to be a member in good standing of the Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett school of Iran suck-uppery. In 2007 Hagel wanted to open direct, unconditional talks with Iran. (”It could create a historic new dynamic in US-Iran relations, in part forcing the Iranians to react to the possibility of better relations with the West.”) In 2007 he voted against designating the Iranian Revolutionary Guard as a terrorist organization. In 2008 he voted against Iran sanctions.

The Leveretts may have been confused because I quoted Jennifer’s post in a Chuck Hagel-for Defense "pros and cons" post — one in which I also quoted Politico’s Ben Smith outlining the pros.

Or they may still be smarting because I questioned Hillary Mann Leverett’s claim a year ago that criticizing Iran’s theocracy is the same thing as anti-Semitism. Or something.

But, whatever, The Leveretts are on a roll. Next blog post, maybe they’ll confuse Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with Martin Luther King.