Re: Cheney’s Guy in the Pentagon

Eric Edelman’s background is confusing. In addition to having served Cheney, both in this administration and when Cheney was SecDef under Bush 41, Edelman for a long time worked for — get this — Bill Clinton’s old friend and former Oxford roommate Strobe Talbott, when Talbott was deputy secretary of state. (Currently the president of the Brookings Institution, Talbott had his best job in the eighties, when he was Washington bureau chief for Time.) Edelman claims — or at least he used to claim — to have been proud of the work he did with Talbott in the Clinton administration. Still, there’s no question he’s a neo-con. He once gave me a brief dissertation on Straussian philosophy over the phone when he was trying to explain the genius of Paul Wolfowitz. You get the picture.