I’m shocked, shocked I tell you:

Speaking of Iraq, the Georgetown Hoya newspaper last week quoted a student saying she was “displeased that university officials have not asked” former Pentagon undersecretary Douglas Feith”to return to teach next year.”

Asked about Feith’s status, Robert Gallucci, dean of Georgetown’s foreign service school, told us that when Feith was hired — something that caused an uproar among the faculty — it was understood he “was on a two-year appointment.” Any decision not to renew should not be seen as “a judgment on his performance,” Gallucci said, noting that Feith’s students’ “course evaluations were really good.”

Feith, author of a bestseller about his Pentagon days called “War and Decision,” said he hadn’t decided what to do next. “I’m intensely occupied with book stuff,” and there are “several things I’m thinking about,” he said.

Word is that keeping Feith on beyond the two-year term again would have infuriated a number of faculty members. Well, there are always those “dead-enders,” as former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld so eloquently noted back in June 2003.

Not that he’ll be unemployed, living on the street, likethe veterans of the war he helped start. The Wingnut Welfare State is in full-on slurp mode with regard toFeith, as evidenced by this interview with Hugh Hewitt sent to me by Scout. Hewitt, who makes like a circus seal at any neocon he gets his mitts on, is really pulling out all the stops here:

HH: Now you are widely understood to be one of the deep, dark circle of neocons. Do you wear that badge as an honor or as something that’s a misjudgment of who you are?

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HH: And I think the left today uses that term primarily to attach to people who are staunch supporters of Israel, and people who are open to the use of American military power to achieve important objectives. Do you think that’s a fairly safe assertion as to when neocon gets thrown around?

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HH: Right, right, and that’s very important. And the distortions in the public record, which we’re going to go through, are many and important. But I want to start with a more global question, that War And Decision answers in a sort of backwards way. Six and a half years after 9/11, five years after the invasion of Iraq, does the American public, Doug Feith, have a good grasp on the network of jihadists, and the threat they pose?

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HH: It doesn’t take enormously large numbers, but it does underscore for America the nature of the threat, if, in fact, there are enormously large numbers. If it takes twenty jihadists to make a jihadist picnic, how many jihadist picnics are out there?

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HH: To set up the last hour of our conversation, Doug Feith, this is the short segment, why does everybody at the CIA and State hate Chalabi, the head of the exiled Iraqi National Congress, and many people believe to be, if difficult but nevertheless the most effective operator in post-war Iraq? Why did there develop such an animus towards him?

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HH: I’m sure they will. I’m curious, did 60 Minutes ask to talk with you at length as they have those who have been eager to sort of attack the Bush administration strategy in the war? Have anyone in the book returned fire at you yet?

I won’t quote Feith’s answers, because … if you want to hear the same five talking points repeated over and over you can just scroll down to the Gaggle posts where it’s actually funny. I will advise Herr Hewitt, though, to be careful if he keeps this up. It’s a matter of physics. Sooner or later you’re gonna justsnap it right off.

A.