richard perle sucks

Thoroughly unacceptable: Richard Perle, member and ex-chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and a major architect of government military policy, demands payment from foreign journalists who want to interview him. Talking to Perle carries a price tag of anywhere from $100 to $900.
This is absurd. I can’t imagine how angrily I’d react if I tried interviewing, say, a congressman or a mayor and he told me he’d only talk to me for a fee. Absolutely absurd.
You may remember Perle from when crabwalk.com hero Seymour Hersh wrote a damning piece in The New Yorker on his sketchy financial dealings, crossing between private profit and his government job. Perle blustered that Hersh’s article libeled him and said he would sue Hersh in British court over the matter. (This despite the fact that Hersh, Perle, and The New Yorker are all American. British courts are known for making it easy to sue writers — they require sued writers to prove that what they wrote is true, while U.S. courts require the aggrieved party to prove an article is false.) For good show, he also called Hersh “closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist” for writing about him — an awfully nice thing for a government official to say about one of America’s most respected journalists.
Of course, Perle was just posing; he chickened out when it became clear that no one believed him and other newspapers started pointing out more conflicts of interest.
Richard Perle: Friend of journalists everywhere!