Until things converge cosmically in the febrile blogging brain

"I am not planning at the moment to blog about it . . . 'have to wait until things converge cosmically in the febrile blogging brain . . . At some point it might become a footnote to a future post . . . I will let you know if anything materializes," we emailed our young blogfriend Sol of Solomonia earlier today re the inedible Juan Cole's Clintonian parsing of John Fund's Opinion Journal Op Ed re the Yale faculty's apparent intention of hiring the notorious anti-Israel professor:

John Fund of the Wall Street Journal editorial page has published a large number of falsehoods about me. The most egregious is this:

He calls Israel "the most dangerous regime in the Middle East."

This [sic] a lie. I never said that. Try googling it.

Which we did. At first, all we could find was the original quotation from a New York Sun piece by Yalies Eliana Johnson and Mitch Webber with no attribution. It had been picked up by several bloggers and then, today, by John Fund, without a link. We went back to the googleboard and found the source at Mr. Cole's own blog in a March 23, 2004 entry:

The most dangerous regime to United States interests in the Middle East is that of Ariel Sharon . . .

As we wrote in Mr. Cole's comments -- which he seems inclined to delete before they've ever seen the light of day:

I guess it depends upon what your definition of Israel is. 'Sounds like you're parsing in the Clintonian "is, is" sense by claiming Fund "lied."

Now Sol emails this tantalizing query:

Mind if I post on this?  I think I might hit out at a couple of his whoppers.

You go, boy!

Comments

[John-Paul Pagano]

Look, I think Cole is a harmful idiot and a soft-Marxist anti-Semite, but

"[Israel is] the most dangerous regime in the Middle East."

and

"The most dangerous regime to United States interests in the Middle East is that of Ariel Sharon..."

are not the same sentiment, logically, lexically, or otherwise.

[David Foster]

In a democratic country, the whole idea of a "regime" as being identical with a particular individual makes no sense.

[Sissy Willis]

John-Paul: Your point is well taken, but as Sol responds to a similar comment at his own post:

"Fund's quote isn't precise, and I should have noted that, but I disagree that the meaning is any different. To me it is a distinction without a difference. Cole doth protest too much."