The sage of Frostburg, James Wolcott, smells another neocon conspiracy from “the usual suspects” over the threat from Hezbollah. As he takes time off from stroking his many cats, he strokes his crystal ball to see a new wave of bogus scare-mongering over the threat from Hezbollah here in the United States.

As to whether Hezbollah is an exceptional threat inside America’s borders I’m fairly skeptical myself.

But what I find amusing about Wolcott’s latest panty-bunching over perfidious neocons is his contention that the neocons have only recently invented the notion that Hezbollah is a bad bunch (Of course his use of the word neocon is typical lazy lefty nonsense typical of the Brits and people who want to be Brits). Anyway, in the last few years it was opponents of the war in Iraq (i.e. opponents of “neocons” in Walcott’s understanding of the term) who wanted to elevate the status of Hezbollah. Senator Bob Graham said about 8 trillion times that Hezbollah was the “A-Team” of international terrorism. He even introduced legislation to amend the Iraq war resolution to include military strikes against Hezbollah. Hezbollah has killed at least seven American CIA officers, by the way. Which is one reason why hawks have always considered Hezbollah a serious threat.

And for the record, I don’t think the sage’s prediction will come true. Afghanistan — not a trumped-up threat as he seems to imply — is not Lebanon. The White House is succeeding with “soft-power” in the region and few people, neocons or others, are much interested in using anything else right now — except in Iraq. His prediction is based on his bad faith reading of the past and his own biases against the “usual suspects.”