Behold, Neocon Egypt Hypocrisy!

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Professional prognosticator and leading Iraq War cheerleader Max Boot is still telling Arabs what to do, albeit with a liberal-sounding post-Egypt twist:

There is a lesson here for those not too fanatical or deluded to learn it. Put down the bomb, the sniper rifle, whatever weapon you have, and grab a placard, go on Twitter, organize a rally. True, many peaceful protests have been repressed too, as we have seen most recently in Iran; but they offer a much surer road to regime change than does blowing up innocent people.

Fair enough. Unless it comes from Boot, an unreconstructed neocon with a loose grip on factual arguments, who’s written books called Small Wars and the Rise of American Power and War Made New…and whose first hawkish defense of war in Iraq, written for the New York Times in October 2002, was titled “Who Says We Never Strike First?” “We’re going to be called an empire whatever we do,” he wrote the following year in the USA Today. “We might as well be a successful empire.”

As Mideast scholar (and MJ contributor) Juan Cole puts it, “Boot never saw a war he didn’t love, never saw a conquest he didn’t find exhilarating, never saw an occupied land he didn’t think could be handled…Bootism is the disease, not the cure.”

[UPDATE: Joshua Foust, blogging at iWAR: The Weird Analytics Review, unpacks Boot’s bombast even further.]

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

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So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

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