Poking holes in the Brookings Institution's "preening conceit"--"they bequeath their website with an '.edu' suffix... They are 'scholars.' Just ask them and they'll tell you"--Salon's Glenn Greenwald (5/26/09, ad-viewing required) quotes one blogger fundamentally debunking Brookings mainstay William Glaberson's May 22 New York Times contention that, as U.S. president, Barack Obama "has sworn an oath to protect the country": "Barack Obama did not swear an oath to 'protect the country.' He swore an oath to protect the principles upon which the country was founded and the document in which those principles are enshrined."

Looking more broadly at "Beltway world," in which "the Brookings Institution is a 'liberal' think tank," Greenwald explains that

when it comes to foreign policy and civil liberties, these are three of its most consequential contributions over the last several years: (1) the invasion and ongoing occupation of Iraq, in the form of Ken Pollack and Michael O'Hanlon (working in tandem, as usual, with the ultra-neoconservative American Enterprise Institute); (2) unquestioning devotion to Israel's right-wing policies, in the form of major funder Haim Saban ("I'm a one-issue guy and my issue is Israel.... On the issues of security and terrorism I am a total hawk"); and (3) indefinite, preventive detention with no charges or trial in the form of Benjamin Wittes (with his close associate, Bush OLC lawyer Jack Goldsmith), who also serves at the right-wing Hoover Institution and writes for the Weekly Standard. Only in Washington would such a group be deemed anything other than extremist.

In fact, U.S. journalists see the Brookings Institute as so far from the "extreme" that they have made it the No. 1 most-cited think every single year since FAIR started tracking such things in 1995. See our annual Think Tank Spectrum report by longtime contributor Michael Dolny.

Taking the brave position (ScholarsAndRogues.com, 4/20/09) that the National Review Online is so bad that it makes William F. Buckley's print version look "semi-respectable" by comparison, former U.S. Navy Commander Jeff Huber writes that in his April 11 NRO post, "military historian and former classics professor Victor Davis Hanson comes across like a rabid war mongrel":

Frothing over the recent Somali pirate caper involving a U.S. flagged merchant ship, Davis insists that, "To end Somali piracy, disproportionate measures against the shore should be taken--for every one pirate assault, a lethal air assault should immediately follow." It's perhaps understandable that Hanson doesn’t mention what Somalia offers in the way of suitable air strike targets; underdeveloped nations like Somalia don't have any. Hanson probably doesn't understand that, because like so many hawkish military historians, he doesn't understand anything about the military. He doesn't know much about warfare theory, either. He calls for extreme (though ineffectual) military measures in response to something he admits "may not be a matter of American national security" committed not by a peer competitor or a group of global extremists but by "two-bit pirates." When a giant purposely crushes an anthill, he's not pursuing a political objective; he's feeding his perversions. That, like waterboarding someone 183 times, is not the sort of thing a global hegemon needs to be doing, Victor.

Calling things "even wackier at the other end of the nut farm," Huber further points to one issue of the Weekly Standard in which both "Barnacle Bill Kristol" and Seth Cropsey call for U.S. troops "going ashore in Africa to destroy the pirates' safe havens"--a bellicose position lamentably popular across many right-wing media.