Today Richard Perle takes

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Today Richard Perle takes his attack-Iraq-now road show to the New York Times Op-Ed page. And, regrettably, Gail Collins has let him get away with the disingenuous misidentification of himself which he’s been peddling for several months on various television broadcasts.

In the Times OpEd, Perle tags himself as “a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, [and a former] assistant secretary of defense” when in fact, as TPM readers know, he’s also the current Chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board.

Not only is the DPB an official Pentagon advisory board, which gets Perle an office in the Pentagon’s E-Ring. But he’s used the Board to lobby within the administration to move against Iraq immediately and embrace the almost comically feckless Iraqi National Congress of Ahmed Chalabi.

The logic employed in the piece is precisely the sort of weekend-warrior dilettantism you’d expect. But one would like to expect more from the Times.

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