The Orwellianly Named Realists

This article is dedicated to Josh Hammer, primarily because of his 7/8/2022 article “Joe Biden Discovers the Realist Case for the US-Saudi Alliance.” The article is a good reminder of the disturbing nature of Hammer’s politics — and by extension the politics of conservatives more generally. Take this part, where Hammer talks about how Joe Biden criticized Saudi Arabia while running for President in 2020:

It seems Biden has had a change of heart. After all, Biden’s trip comes two years after a presidential campaign in which he pledged to make the Saudis “pay the price, and make them in fact the pariah that they are.” At the time, Biden was channeling the ginned up indignation directed against the Saudis, and [Mohammed bin Salman] in particular, due to the fact that Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi — a Saudi-born journalist who had a falling out with Riyadh and subsequently fell under rival Qatar’s sprawling ambit of influence — was killed in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, in 2018. (While Khashoggi’s death was tragic, it is still worth pointing out that he was a former Osama bin Laden comrade, a supporter of Hamas’ jihad against Israel, and a lifelong unrepentant Islamist.)

It should be noted that the above paragraph is also filled with quite a few lies. Khashoggi was friendly with Osama bin Laden — during the 1980s when bin Laden was involved in…