Like father like son

Norman Podhoretz, who you might recall “hopes and prays” that Bush will bomb Iran, has passed on his crazed genetics to his son, the Podhoretz mini-me.

Unsurprisingly, it is Norm’s son, John, who — beyond his garden-variety excitement over bombing Iran — made one of the most reprehensible and deranged (though illustrative) statements of the entire Bush presidency:

What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn’t kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn’t the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?

At the time, Greg Djerejian said in response:

It’s quite sad that the son of an accomplished, prestigious American intellectual would muse so innocuously about the merits of mass butchery–basically the wholesale slaughter of a broad demographic of an ethnic group writ large–a policy prescription that is quasi-genocidal in nature.

… It may be “sad,” but at this point it is certainly unsurprising. And the “accomplished, prestigious American intellectual” who is John Podhoretz’s father shares the family enthusiasm for “mass butchery.” And while all of our media stars solemnly lament how the “fringe” liberal bloggers are ruining our political culture with all of their naughty words and extremism, the genocide-craving Podhoretz Family sits at the epicenter of a political movement that is still as predominant and powerful as it is deranged, and they are treated with the utmost seriousness and respect.

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