Tell us how you really feel.
Don’t hold back now.

Not to mention the endless typos, dreadful grammar, and “when I was at Harvard…”

I don’t cotton to moral thunder stealin’, that’s for damn sure.

Dude. He was for the war back in the day. He clearly feels guilty about it. So every time he opens his mouth he’s obligated to run a little interference for all the Tom Freidmans of the world. I don’t think that’s anything to go crazy over.

And Atrios is a giant link-monkey anyway. You can’t blame Eschalon for linking to people. You’d nuke half the site if you did.

On an aside – NPR might not be “on” our side, but they’re a few miles closer to our border than any other news organization I could name. At this point, they’re about the only people I consider worthy of listening to anymore that don’t tell me things via the intertubes.

I think it’s true that the mere fact of having been against the war isn’t necessarily indicative of brilliant judgment

Um, why not?

He’s even righter than we are (were). And you know why? Because he’s Matt Fucking Yglesias, that’s why!

I guess I don’t understand why anyone thinks he’s got some special insight into anything, frankly.

Um, why not?

Because even an idiot could see the war was a bad idea?

Oh, come on! Why can’t I post anything? You people suck.

I gotta say, my main objection is that Yglesias, with his undergrad degree in philosophy, no advanced degree and little life history, can extemporize on foreign policy and be taken seriously.

I have the same problem with Max Boot, but at least Boot’s been around for a while (and been bloodthirsty for longer).

Also, taking McNarcissism seriously. Instead of treating her like a pariah she deserves to be.

Of course he takes her seriously, as does Ezra. She’s part of their new Village.

“Not to mention the endless typos, dreadful grammar, and “when I was at Harvard…”

Ooh, and don’t forget the “When I was at Dalton…”

Gag me. And his basketball posts are ridiculous — very clearly written by a no-talent, never-played-the-game, over-intellectualized fool.

P.S. On the previous thread, I posted:

ifthethunderdontgetya™³²®© said,
August 12, 2008 at 19:24
OK, Blue Buddha, what am I thinking about Joe Klein at this time?

Link with hopes of spam filter avoidance:

http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2008/08/more_on_georgia.html

The answer is, I thought it was a decent column by Joe Klein, exposing typical neocon b.s. for what it truly is. But that’s easy now…when it counted, Joe Klein was firmly on the side of Joe Klein’s paycheck, and against the dirty fucking hippies.

So I think I’ll go ask Atrios if he will approvingly link to Jokeline as well.

I would second what Funkhauser says. With all that the internets offer by way of access to people with experience, knowledge, and good judgment, why the constant recourse to a newly minted undergraduate with no experience, little knowledge and poor judgment?

I personally, don’t know any people at all who were against the war because of knee-jerk pacifism. Every genuine pacifist I know also had a good grasp of why war in Iraq was particularly stupid by any ethical standards.

I think a lot of people (myself included) were against the war because it has become fairly obvious in the last few decades that long term occupation is no longer viable when the occupied country wants the invader gone. I think everyone firmly knew that America was not pushing for war with Iraq for altruistic means. America wanted to get something out of that war. Whether the reason was oil or political clout, it meant long term occupation. Simply doing a quick job of replacing Saddam and getting out, would not benefit America in any substantial way.

Even if people didn’t know much about the specific issues, it was very clearly a war of choice, and a war started for the sake of getting something out of it. A great many people are simply against unnecessary war, and firmly against wars started for purely selfish reasons.

It has little to do with intelligence, or knowledge. The main difference between peaceniks and chickenhawks was ethical. A lot of people just stood up and said “starting a war for political advantage is wrong” whilst some shitheels said “starting a war for poltical advantage is right”

I think it’s true that the mere fact of having been against the war isn’t necessarily indicative of brilliant judgment

Well, Matt, thank you for your opinion on a statement that no one has ever said or implied.

On the other hand, I think it is true that the mere fact of having been fooled by transparent neocon liars about the war is necessarily indicative of catastrophic judgment.

As proof, I offer this lame straw man argument being put forward by a childish nitwit who was fooled by transparent neocon liars about the war:

I think it’s true that the mere fact of having been against the war isn’t necessarily indicative of brilliant judgment

I’m sure everyone – American, Afghan, or Iraqi – who has lost a loved one to this useless debacle gets some comfort from the idea that some of the people who were against the war from the start were right for the wrong reasons, and that some of the people who supported the war from the start are recognizing the very pertinent fact that war protesters are not one hundred perfect.

(What a wanker.)

Wow. A new thread to escape to and it’s Matt bashing. Great.

I defended him before, but he didn’t step it up and spit in McArdle’s face before leaving his previous job. And shit – that indictment up there’s pretty hard to say anything against.

And yeah, the best I can come up with is that for someone that’s considered “serious” he’s pretty low on th cobag scale – but clearly he moves the needle – and using a sliding scale for people is pretty much the definition of intellectual dishonesty – so I’m giving in to peer pressure. FUMY! (but not as much as TK – so I’m intellectual dishonest – big whoop.)

How about people who were against the war because our bullshit detectors were going off so loud it was giving us a fucking migraine?

I think it’s true that the mere fact of having been against for the war isn’t necessarily indicative of brilliant goddamn motherfucking shitstain poor judgment.

I think is what he meant to say.

I personally, don’t know any people at all who were against the war because of knee-jerk pacifism.

Bingo!

Maybe if any of these twerps has ever actually talked to someone who was against the War on Islam, they might have gotten some idea about what the real objections were, and they wouldn’t have looked so much like witless corporate tools in the aftermath.

But I guess it was easier to repeat the conservative talking points as provided by political geniuses like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Thomas Friedman and Maureen Dowd.

Fuck Yglesias. He’s in the same category as Drum, the “who cares” file.

Tut-tut. Just because they’re crazy enough to think that just another six months is a good time to have soldiers who should be home saving kittens in trees (and invalids from hurricanes) doesn’t mean they can’t, you know, have a good point about something else.

I mean, I’ve read not loads, but, you sure hafta admit Friedman’s column on McCain was right on the money yesterday, right?

Oh, but you ‘of got to understand, right, that Atrios secretly knows the /real/ views Americans actually have, but are afraid to admit. And therefore Atrios has a licence to write anything, as long as it’s possible to nod silently to it and pretend it’s deep and insightful, very deep down. “Do you want me to start saying uncomfortable things you don’t want to hear, eh!? I’ll make you nod in unison to you worst nightmares!!!! Or will I, by that time, fromyourpointofview?! BWAHAAHAHAHA!!!!! (< five exclamation marks!)”.

So now it’s just a question of time before the world implodes, you know, in full Atrios (..bad show, HTML *shakes head*).

How about people who were against the war because our bullshit detectors were going off so loud it was giving us a fucking migraine?

Another bingo!

(The question of competence was another concern of mine. The same administration that 1) couldn’t keep track of 20 terrorists; 2) couldn’t protect the WTC and the Pentagon; and 3) couldn’t come up with a better argument than “You’re a traitor if you disagree”: was somehow, magically, going to bring about a democratic paradise in the Middle East.)

I mean, I’ve read not loads, but, you sure hafta admit Friedman’s column on McCain was right on the money yesterday, right?

I, also, have noticed that Friedman, like Dowd, is occasionally right about things that are painfully obvious.

No Crissa, Friedman was still off-topic.

Instead of saying McCain’s plan to drill was wrong, wrong, wrong on the facts, he ran around trumpeting what his newest CEO buddies told him about subsidies. Then he added a “pox on both their houses,” for good measure.

Matt certainly deserves a healthy dose of skepticism and should probably be ignored way more than he is but why not aim that rage at people like Max Boot who is arguing for arming Georgia immediately? Matt at least has shown a capacity for self-reflection and modification of bad decision making, whereas the entire right-wankosphere seems determined to prove that they can be more vapid and moronic on a daily basis. Matt’s full of himself. So what? Ignore him. Max Boot/ Red State/ Wankee et al. are homicidal maniacs who think the world really is a giant game of Risk. That’s some shit to get postal over.

Shorter HTML Mencken:

“…*head explodes*…”

I will now defend Matthew Yglesias.

Well, not really as I don’t read the guy except when linked to by others. So on the basis of those chosen-for-quality posts I will say that the guy’s strength is as an argument distiller, much like Atrios. Both can reduce an argument very quickly to what’s worth debating. That’s a valuable property, so valuable that it makes up for sloppy writing. Degrees do not confer that ability as far as I know.

That said there’s no reason why the world couldn’t be just as swell if Yglesias was washing dishes. I’ll keep my Atrios thanks.

Following closely on the heels of Yggie’s move to ThinkProgress, there’s this.

A coincidence, I’m sure.

I have this simple rule.

If you were for the war, you are not to be trusted.  It was obvious to me that it was a pack of lies tied up in the twine of imperialism, and I’m a fucking idiot.  If you can’t meet that bar, you’re not worth my time.

HTML : Yiggy ::
D.N. : Nader supporters

Previous Shorter Sadly, No! commenters:

“Yglesias iz teh r0xXorz!!1”

Current Shorter Sadly, No! commenters:

“Yglesias iz teh 5uxXorz!!1 HTML 4TW, LULZ!!!”

(The question of competence was another concern of mine. The same administration that 1) couldn’t keep track of 20 terrorists; 2) couldn’t protect the WTC and the Pentagon; and 3) couldn’t come up with a better argument than “You’re a traitor if you disagree”: was somehow, magically, going to bring about a democratic paradise in the Middle East.)

Hoosier X, if the Cheney Administration’s sole goal was to hike the price of oil through the roof, thus enriching all their friends and allies beginning with the Saudis, then they’ve been extraordinarily competent.

With bonus points for getting the corporate media to help catapult their argument for drilling in ANWR as a response.

So Matty voted FOR the war before he voted against it?

goober said,

Got a link for that?

but why not aim that rage at people like Max Boot who is arguing for arming Georgia immediately?

Because Max Boot and Red State do not represent ‘my side.’

Because the liberal blogosphere was supposed to be about correcting the bullshit — meaning, the low quality of the ‘liberals’ in it — of the traditional media, not emulating it.

And I rage plenty at wingnuts.

goober said

Previous Shorter Sadly, No! commenters:

“Yglesias iz teh r0xXorz!!1?

Certainly not in the two years I’ve been hanging around these parts, booger.

The thesis of his post, as demonstrated by his concluding sentence, is that Bayh being for the war is a “bug, not a feature” of his potential Vice-Presidential candidacy. I think most readers here agree with that thesis.

If you want to be more annoyed by an obnoxious parenthetical, fine. I stopped reading him for a year because of an obnoxious parenthetical about atheists. It’s a bad habit in his writing that’s like adding an ingredient to a recipe half of your dinner guest are allergic to – half of your guests enjoy or don’t mind the added spice; the other half curse your name as the deposit diarrhea all over your bathroom.

But the thesis of the post stands. He’s criticizing anyone making the argument that Bayh’s support for the war should be cited as a positive. Most of us would agree with that criticism. Chide him for an obnoxious superfluous comment if you will, but the guy made a relevant point that needs to be popularized by those who would rather see someone other than Bayh nominated.

At least I know now that I haven’t been the only one underwhelmed by Klein, Yglesias and Drum. Many times after reading them I’m left scratching my head. I like reading posts by those with whom I don’t always agree, if they’re insightful. But whenever I have an issue with something these three write, it’s usually because they seem to have missed the point.

I’m guessing it’s not a coincidence that they are considered among the serious left bloggers.

Friedman’s column on McCain is more about frustration that Johnny is running such a piss-poor campaign than it is about criticizing McCain.

I guess I could buy the jackass’s book and completely destroy it.

We could discuss it here. Set a date if you’d like.

Yeah, I don’t know–switch to decaf, maybe?

I think “goober” may be confused by the fact that some commenters here have different opinions from other commenters. That sort of thing doesn’t happen much where he comes from.

Shorter Goober:

I think shorters suck because they make fun of drooling wingnuts like me. Which is why all I’m going to do is shorters.

Friedman’s column on McCain is more about frustration that Johnny is running such a piss-poor campaign than it is about criticizing McCain.

It is obvious that McCain is running a piss-poor campaign.

It is obvious that McCain is a shitty candidate for reasons that go far beyond the quality of his campaign.

Friedman only noticed one of these obvious things.

Batting .500 may be good in baseball. But it is not so good in the game of noticing obvious things.

I wonder how much Oxford pays him to keep quiet about graduating from Oxford?

Why is everybody insulting Julio Iglesias? He used to be so popular.

I wonder how much Oxford pays him to keep quiet about graduating from Oxford?

The same amount they give David Vitter.

Maybe you should spend more time tearing down Matt and Ezra and Drum instead of the shooting-fish-in-a-barrel work S,N does regularly ragging on obvious morons like Confederate Yankee and Don Surber. Your rage is lost on me; these guys may be middle-of-the-road, but I still find them informative and value their inclusion in the center-left punditocracy. S,N just posts funny pictures.

… I still find them informative …

I think I see where you diverge from the demographic here.

I wonder how much Oxford pays him to keep quiet about graduating from Oxford?

The same amount they give David Vitter.

What, you mean they pay him in pictures from the rowing teams locker room?

Oxford, my alma mater, is no doubt absolutely delighted to boast about Tom F, even if they do consider him a little far on the leftish side.

Me, they’d not be so delighted about. If Oxford thought of me at all (and I’ve managed to get off their mailing list by cunningly emigrating and burying my parents) they would no doubt consider me a rare mistake in their admissions system. (He seemed such a nice boy at first.) That’s OK, it’s mutual. Accepting their offer was my mistake.

Julio Iglesias is foreign. I thought that was reason enough to insult him. And his son’s mole, wherever it ended up now that it’s not on his face.

Wow…lot of hatred in these comments, and this post.

Not a lot of, like, thought or serious discussion. FWIW, MY’s comments are usually much more interesting and insightful than this swill. But maybe this is just a bad thread among many good ones…?

Anyway, yeah, MY and everyone else who backed the war were wrong about a big question, to their eternal (and often self-acknowledged) discredit. I was wrong as well. Neither I, nor they, should be therefore required to forever suppress every opinion we ever have.

The fact is, at the time, for all but the knee-jerkers, this was a tough call. The right call was made by a lot of the people on this thread, and you deserve respect for that. But you will all get big foreign policy questions wrong at some point in your lives. And when you do, you will still be able to offer sound opinions on other matters.

All you’re doing right now is reducing the value of your good judgment, by making it clear that you arrived at it not by sound reasoning but by instinctive hatred of those making the arguments for war. That doesn’t reflect well on you.

And Matt, on his worst day, never wrote a post as poorly-thought-out, intellectually incoherent, and unfunny, as the one that started this thread.

But I supported the war, so everyone feel free to ignore this entire post, and flame me instead.

What’s that? You’re explaining for the twenty zillionth time why your well-meaning reasons for supporting the war were oh, so much better than my silly reasons for opposing it?

I’m still not buying it. Next time try baking it into a pretzel and shoving it up your ass.

No you moron, I’m saying you got it right and I got it wrong. Congratulations.

But you won’t be right every time. And when you’re wrong, it doesn’t mean that you have to shut up forever.

Abe. Let me lay it out for you. The ONLY way a person could have supported that war, is if they believed the words of George W Bush.

If you believe ANYTHING that drips from the mouth of that idiot neocon mouthpiece, you suffer from a serious lack of judgement. That was as true in 2003 as it is now.

But I supported the war, so everyone feel free to ignore this entire post, and flame me instead.

Abe, you are a poorly-thought-out, intellectually incoherent, unfunny, war supporting, baby eating, import buying, illegal immigrant abetting, ummm, target.

So there.

Although if you concede that the original post is correct in the assessment of the linked Yglesias piece, it couldn’t be all that bad?

The fact is, at the time, for all but the knee-jerkers, this was a tough call.

Yeah, I think I’ll feel free to flame you instead, Abe. This is exactly the kind of utter bullshit HTML is upset about. It’s simply incorrect. It’s also the typical name-calling (“knee-jerker”) that liberal imperialists resort to on a regular basis. But to make you feel better: yes, I believe it is impossible for the US (or UK, or Russia or any other advanced capitalist nation) to have a “good war”. Any positive outcome is purely accidental.

The problem with Matt (besides the unjustified arrogance, bad spelling, and McArdle associations), is that he makes sure to position himself oh so carefully as a “sensible liberal.” He’s good at this positioning, I’ll grant him. And if he existed in a vacuum, it would be amusing to notice how he never ever takes an unpopular position. But he does not exist in a vacuum, and people like him serve as boundaries for exactly how far to the left acceptable opinions can be.

Screw all those people who are somehow proud that they never agreed with the DFHs, who must be wrong, just because. Had he actually learned anything in those philosophy classes, he might have known that he needed to evaluate arguments based on evidence, rather than his dislike of tie-died t-shirts.

He enabled Bush, and he’ll enable the next stupid war than any president other than Bush wants to start. And within ten years, he’ll be on the teevee saying something just as clever, and just as bloodthirsty, as Tommy Friendman’s Suck On This. And people will say how the war must be a good idea, because even liberals like Matt say so.

Fuck them.

I was wrong about the last Alkon update being the last one. This is the last one.

I’ve given up. I’ve thrown in the towel. I even tried leaving graciously, but I overestimated the entire crew there. Seriously, try to use ironic hyperbole on wingnuts – they have no top, so it’s hard to go over it.

And by the way, abe, I agree that having been wrong once doesn’t exclude one from polite conversation.

But it’s fucking bullshit that having been wrong on a question this important (and, to be clear, this easy to judge) shouldn’t get one promoted, while those that were right still are kept out. And it should make people very careful about dissing those who were right for being “knee-jerk” or whatever.

One more thing: there is one way to have been wrong that should get you excluded from serious conversation for at least 10 years : the kind that was based on trying to avoid having to agree with ANSWER. That shows just a monumental lack of maturity.

The actions of the warmongers and their syncophant cheerleaders during war itself showed us plainly their cruel, manipulative and downright fucking evil nature. What kind of reason does one need to abhor people who seek to gain prestige and wealth through the suffering and death of their fellow human beings?

The fact is, at the time, for all but the knee-jerkers, this was a tough call.

And once again, those who refused to support the war are labeled as unserious knee-jerking DFAs.

Hokay.

Sockpuppet: This is untrue. What convinced me, and many others, was Ken Pollack’s Threatening Storm. At the time, I was a 20-year-old liberal college student. Reading a (kinda) hefty tome written by a former Clinton Iraq policy expert seemed like a pretty healthy perspective. In the years since, Pollack has revealed himself to be much less trustworthy. But I didn’t know that at the time.

It was entirely clear to me that I was agreeing with people who I despised, but I justified it by saying that people can be right for the wrong reasons. I still believe this general point to be true, even if it doesn’t apply to Iraq.

Anyway, TS was a pretty convincing and well-argued book. With the benefit of hindsight, or at least knowing what I know now about Pollack, maybe I wouldn’t find it so. But your argument that the only way I could have supported the war was to believe Bush, is absolutely untrue, and totally fails to understand how a large portion of the liberals who supported the war came to their conclusions.

Dragon-King: I don’t concede that MY’s post was particularly objectionable, because the point he was making is exACTly what you guys are arguing: being for the Iraq war should be seen as a weakness, not a strength. Taking the parenthetical out of context and inflating its importance is a very Bushian tactic, and it’s partly how we got into Iraq in the first place.

Christian: See my response to Sockpuppet. And would you argue (as some, legitimately, do) that WW2 was a “bad” war (in that we shouldn’t have entered it?)

In general, people, I think you’re failing to recognize that we’re dealing with human beings here (often relatively young ones). These experiences that we have, of supporting a war that turns out to be a disaster, are ACTUALLY THINGS THAT WE LEARN FROM. If you’re a 20-year-old supporter of a chaotic disaster, your perspective on the wisdom of going to war next time is significantly altered.

But here you all do yourselves a disservice: it was much harder for me, and many others, to admit our mistakes because we were constantly being attacked ad-hominem for them, and so felt the need to defend ourselves. Let’s by all means viciously savage those who lied us into war, but those who made a good-faith effort to understand the consequences of war, vs. no war, and came out in favor of the invasion, deserve to be treated differently. Or else they’ll learn the wrong lessons from this experience, and come away hating your side all the more.

The issue seems to be that you think it was a tough call. It wasn’t. The vast majority of the WORLD got it right, without having to spend much time hemming and hawing.

And that’s why I automatically distrust anyone that treats the Iraq decision as a tough one that they missed by JUST THIS MUCH on. Admit it as a massive error in judgment, and I’ll listen to you again. It’s huge to get something that big so wrong.

Well, not really as I don’t read the guy except when linked to by others.

So, you mean, like every third Atrios post?

He must be ecstatic now that Matt has moved to Think Progress; if only they could both become part of Media Matters, Duncan would never have to link to another page again, and could just post more of those goshdarn enthralling deep thoughts of his!

Everyone dutifully links and pats on head when MY is a good boy, but he never gets taken apart for his rampant navel-gazing idiocy. Ever. He gets ignored for not painting on the wall with his own feces, but on days when he doesn’t, he’s practicing sharp and subtle insights.

I know you didn’t read even one goddamn link, Abe. You’ve never been here before, have you? You’re the type who only reads the ‘serious’ bloggers, right?

And yes, actually, MY has written many posts worse than this one. You know, for instance, like those in which he was all, like, ‘yeah war!’ As far as funny goes, please. You’re trying to tell me he’s master of humor as well?

Christian: Thank you. And I agree with you that being wrong on the war should be an impediment if your career revolves around getting these type of calls right, and being right on the war should help you advance.

Also, at 20, I and many others like me were (and still are, frankly) quite immature. So yeah, disagreeing with a position just because of the people that hold it is immature. (And it’s exactly what those of you who argue that we should have seen the war for what it was, because GWB et al supported it, MAKE THE EXACT SAME MISTAKE).

D.N.: I’m arguing no such thing. There were people who knee-jerk supported the war, because GWB said it was a good idea, and they were just as wrong and unserious as those who knee-jerk opposed it because GWB said it was a good idea (though these people turned out to be right.)

But if you thought about the issue, weighed it in your mind, and came to your own conclusion, I don’t consider you a knee-jerking DFA or unserious or whateverthefuck. And if you considered the issue and came to the conclusion that it was a bad idea, you have my respect, and some of my envy.

The fact is, at the time, for all but the knee-jerkers, this was a tough call.

And obviously, everyone who thought about it, the people who thought it was a tough call, all ended up supporting the war. Right?

There were no “knee-jerkers” who automatically supported the war. Oh, no! Support for the war only came about through careful and reasonable discourse, and nobody shouted treason at the anti-war advocates.

Blah, blah, blah.

Isn’t it just a teensy bit possible that some of us who were against the war thought about it a little and ended up being against the war anyway?

Please come back when you have developed the self-awareness to recognize your transparent sophistry.

“What convinced me, and many others, was Ken Pollack’s Threatening Storm. At the time, I was a 20-year-old liberal college student. Reading a (kinda) hefty tome written by a former Clinton Iraq policy expert seemed like a pretty healthy perspective.”

The idea that Clinton was a liberal would be kind of cute, if it did not lead to tragic errors of judgment like backing wars of aggression where a million or so people die.

So, you mean, like every third Atrios post?

Sure. He’s a link filter, making my impression of MY better than it should be.

because GWB et al supported it, MAKE THE EXACT SAME MISTAKE

No, it’s not you fucking moron. DFHs against the war is one thing; GWB, et al were not just for the war — they *made* the motherfucker.

Jesus, people. You are absolutely insatiable.

In case it’s not clear, I’m trying to participate here in a positive way, by defending a position many of you disagree with, but by doing so while attempting to argue in a good-faith way. I’m not flaming, I’m not trolling, I’m just -disagreeing-. This is kind of sad.

I started reading Sadly, No recently, yes. And in spite of this ugly display, I’ll probably keep reading it, because I find it engaging. But you’re not helping attract new members to the cause, I hope you understand. And if you’re engaged in politics, that’s kind of what you should want to do.

Anyway, yes, most of the rest of the world got it right. But as an American, at the time I was primarily reading American news sources, which made it much harder to arrive at that conclusion. And one of the sentiments I got from reading TS was that, while perhaps a majority of world opinion believed the war was stupid, the majority of the world’s intelligence services believed Saddam had or was close to having nukes.

That was probably inaccurate, but it was a big factor in convincing me at the time. And it was part of what inoculated me against the fact that world opinion was against the war.

Abe,
I’ll try and explain some of the animosity (and remember, I’m one of the very few Yglesias fans left here – but don’t tell anyone, it’ll destroy my street cred).

Name one talking head who still gets TV time or regular editorial space who was against the war from the beginning. Now name two dozen who weren’t.

You would think that being correct about the biggest foreign policy decision so far this century would be worth something other than being called a knee-jerk pacifist. There’s a lovely post at Unqualified Offerings – in response to all the “What I got wrong about the war” pieces that everyone was writing. I think you know it so I won’t bother hunting it down.

Abe, thanks for admitting your mistake. For me, however, the attack on Iraq was never a tough call; I have been actively opposing it (in its various forms) since 1990. Also, the attack on Afghanistan was a bad idea in 2001, and remains a bad idea today. It does look as though an “exit strategy” for Iraq is emerging, which is something. Now we need to find a reasonable way out of Afghanistan, which is hard. Since, unfortunately, large majorities supported getting us into the Afghan mess, we are going to have to work with supporters of it (hello, Barack) to end it. That’ll test my patience, for one, but it’s got to be done. Meanwhile, I’d rather snark at the neo-idiots even though the liberals drive me batty. Or would if I weren’t.

Abe, I was responding to your first post, and I hadn’t seen all the backtracking and the justifications you offered up later. So I apologize for the transparent sophistry crack. Your final product isn’t nearly as transparent as your first crack at it.

The fact is, at the time, for all but the knee-jerkers, this was a tough call.

No, it really wasn’t.

Hoosier: read the post just above your own. I think I address your concern.

Malaclypse: yes, I no longer believe that Clinton was a liberal President. But I did -at the time-, and it was somewhat early in my intellectual formation (he’d been President for most of the time I could remember, after all).

20 year olds have short memories, folks. And we’ve just come out of the American educational system, so it’s not like we’ve got much to work with. Be a little kinder.

Ahhh, you know, I’m really mad (obviously), but Abe’s mega-retarded commentary is starting to pull me out of it. Matt Yglesias — a blogger who not only brings the substantive thinking and clear, leftwing insights (snicker), but who also brings the funny! Bwahahaha. Now that is comedy.

Sorry, but you are still a fecking idiot for taking such a serious stance based on ONE book. Did they teach you nothing at college?

Not to mention that it doesn’t matter how many POSSIBLE good motivations for war there are.. What matters in the execution of the war, is the ACTUAL motivations of those who are carrying it out.

Lets see. The Bush administration starting a major war for the sake of the Iraqi people. Not likely. The Bush administration had already proved it wouldn’t stick its neck out for American citizens, so the chances of that mob feeling kind enough to spend billions on helping some foreigners doesn’t wash.

It was obvious from the start that the conventional “war” portion of the whole thing would be minimal. The main American role would be peace-keeping and nation building. In that kind of thing, intentions count for a lot. It was also clear Bush had no interest in responsible altruistic nation building.

So the fact that those who agreed with you did so for the wrong reasons, was VERY important. The reasons are extremely important. The thinking behind the war makes all the difference to actions against a civilian population. Peacekeepers hold their fire. American troops on a war footing blow the shit out of anything that moves.

Did you EVER just ask yourself “This administration has proven itself to be untrustworthy. Why then, should I trust them to wage war in a responsible fashion?”

Your age is no excuse. I was a similar age. Being attacked for your views is no excuse. I am a Liberal. I get slagged off for the opinions I hold all the time. Deal with it.

Name one talking head who still gets TV time or regular editorial space who was against the war from the beginning. Now name two dozen who weren’t.

Well said.

And, Abe, I would like to apologize if we aren’t being poitically correct enough for you.

Abe, see, now you are digging up WW2 again. I simply takes monumentally bad judgment to identify the enemy du jour as the new Hitler. Germany and Japan were themselves imperialist powers, so the question a good socialist had to ask was: is revolutionary defeatism the right option, or a united front against fascism?

In 2002/03, the question was “should we demonstrate against this on the seventh or the eighth?”

Anyway, Abe, I have been wrong before myself (I supported the 1999 attack on Serbia, for example, and even the invasion of Afghanistan). But I’m not an A-list blogger regularly making snide remarks about how those that were right were so for the wring reasons, or no reasons, or missed out on the growth process that comes from having been wrong.

Abe is just upset that you’re all so gosh-darn uncivil about all this.

I hope I’m not backtracking too much, so much as clarifying. I wouldn’t like to think I’m being intimidated into conformity by blog comments. 😉

Anyway, to reiterate: I firmly believe that I GOT IT WRONG, and I don’t think I should be given props for that. And I firmly believe that those who got it right deserve props (as I’ve said like 50 times).

I’m aware that I’m addressing my arguments here to a liberal anti-war crowd, and so I sort of thought that it went without saying that I want more Rachel Maddows and fewer Chris Matthews’ on the air. I don’t spend most of my time arguing that liberals who got the war wrong deserve so much respect; I only make this argument when I sense that, because of that mistake, my liberal brothers and sisters think that I and those like me who got it wrong should shut up forever, and deserve unending scorn. (Of course, to the extent that we enabled the war and are indirectly responsible for thousands of deaths, I guess we do; but I’m not so egocentric as to think that my lone addition to the opposition would have prevented the war from occurring.)

MY was a 20-something year old choad for the war who’s only experience in policy was writing a blog while in college. This continues to be his only policy experience. He also wrote a book I guess.

GWB, et al were not just for the war — they *made* the motherfucker.

Plus, the administration was made up of many of the exact same motherfuckers who had already shown the world what they would do if given the chance, back in the 80s. I mean, jesus, Abe, did you not pay any attention to current events growing up at all? Did you ever crack open a history book?

And for fuck’s sake – Ezra got his ass handed to him day after day at Pandagon for saying the same shit about Pollack’s book (and for all his other idiotic thoughts), so it’s not like there weren’t plenty of people around, in real time, who could have told you exactly what was so wrong about this. The fact that you managed to ignore them while claiming that “only knee-jerkers” found this an easy call is what prompts me to tell you to go jam your concern trolling up your fucking ass.

You’re a good man Dragon-King Wangchuck. ::pats you:: Or dragon, as the case may be.

Abe, it was MY who was attacked in this post, not everyone who shared his opinions. As I said, having been wrong is one thing. Making it out to be some kind of batch of honor is another.

Okay, thinking back on it, it was such a winner that I did have to go dig it up:
http://www.highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2008/03/21/8027

Sockpuppet: umm…where to begin.

First of all, you kind of left out the whole “nuclear weapons” thing. Now, I know that this crowd all knew from the beginning that there were no nukes in Iraq, because you’re all so freaking smart, but the evidence laid out in TS was fairly convincing. Attacking me for supporting the war, while failing to even recognize the existence of the WMD argument, is so laughably unserious (oooh!) that I shouldn’t even be typing this out (but I am because I guess I’m an attention whore and this is pretty fun)

The inspections would have meant that the nuke argument went completely out the window, and at the time I thought we could probably afford to wait a little bit before rushing straight into war, but constant conversations like the ones I’m having now were stiffening my resolve. And TS made a powerful argument that “inspections revealing no nukes wouldn’t prove no nukes existed”, so that wasn’t enough for me.

MY was a 20-something year old choad for the war who’s only experience in policy was writing a blog while in college.

This credentialism’s a little weird here. I really don’t know much about any of the folks who write or comment at SN! but I read them because they’re sharp.

And TS made a powerful argument that “inspections revealing no nukes wouldn’t prove no nukes existed”, so that wasn’t enough for me.

Oh jesus fucking christ.

Here’s my problem with the Sensible Liberals, and I’m going to use Robert Farley, rather than Matt, as an example.

“I know that one of the hardest obstacles I had to overcome in adopting an anti-war position on Iraq was the recognition that I would be on the same side as all those dumbass hippies I knew at the University of Oregon, as well as those dumbass hippies I know in Seattle. At the time, I always strove to distance my arguments from theirs, and one of my deepest regrets about the whole affair is that hawkish liberals have really lost all credibility in the face of this war. It will be very difficult for us to convince people in the future that THIS intervention is sensible and good, as opposed to Iraq or Vietnam.” (http://lefarkins.blogspot.com/2004/09/hawk-vs-dove.html)

It bloody well SHOULD be difficult to convince people that a war (“intervention”, if you would rather use language to obscure reality) is sensible or good. The default assumption should be that engaging in an action that must inevitably lead to innocents dying is a Bad Thing To Be Avoided. And yet, during the middle of a horrible war of aggression that we started, his biggest regret is that the next war will now be harder to start? How fucked up is that?

But if you thought about the issue, weighed it in your mind, and came to your own conclusion, I don’t consider you a knee-jerking DFA or unserious or whateverthefuck.

Fine. But spare us this ridiculous red herring about unserious people not supporting the war because they disliked Bush. It’s a stupid, pointless argument to make after the fact. Additionally, know how much power must of the DFAs have? Um…none. So who cares.

All snark and nastiness aside for a moment:

I think we should give Abe credit for sticking with this as long as he has and spending so much time explaining his positions. He seems to be sincere – which I didn’t see at first – and actively trying to see where he might have gone wrong.

Abe, we are sick of this shit. Being wrong on the issue of the War on Islam means that you are partially responsible for a big pile of dead bodies that has not accomplished anything positive. (Except for Osama bin Laden.) It is a HUGE WHOPPER!

And everyone who was wrong about it hedges and justifies themselves and falls back on a while parade of logical fallacies and lame sophistry in order to make themselves less wrong, and then tries to play a tedious game where the people who were right about the Bush Administration and the conduct of the war were just as wrong because … I dunno, I guess they had bad motives and just got lucky.

It’s bullshit.

So be a little patient with us. We’re a little cranky about the big pile of bodies that acomplished nothing, the tanking economy, and the destruction of American values. And the constant refrain of “traitor” directed at us for eight years from the enlightened GOP leadership. That still rankles a bit as well.

You’re a good man Dragon-King Wangchuck. ::pats you:: Or dragon, as the case may be.

Ummm, I mean FU Yglesias! Take that you imperialistic basketball nut. I’d have stuck by you if you had just followed my one small request – and good Jesus-is-Lord.com having to have worked so close to that volume of smug arrogant stupidity – it’s something you must have wanted to do all along.

PS Or maybe I was a dragon-man – with a big beefy arm.

I was a 39 year old single parent sitting unemployed in an apartment in Kent WA when the lead-up to the war began, and I knew it was bullshit of the purest ray serene. I knew enough just from casual reading to grasp that the idea of Saddam (infidel) and Osama (religious bigot) plotting together was fucking ridiculous. I could see that the idea of Saddam being close to being able to work up some rusty nuclear exchange with the US or even much-closer Israel was nucking futs. It didn’t take much extrapolating to determine that the neocons had some other motive for wanting this illegal war of aggression, considering who they were and all. I knew enough to know that the Shiites, Kurds, and Sunnis all heartily hated each other, and that if we deposed the guy who was somehow managing to hold all that mess together, we were going to be very lucky not to wind up with some sort of theocracy. Or alternatively, I figured we’d wind up with a US-backed puppet government which would never be sustainable in the long term..

And yet, I’m supposed to believe that all these supposedly well-informed folks didn’t grok that the idea of war with Iraq was a really, really bad idea?

I will agree that when those who admit that they were wrong about the war and swear they wouldn’t do it again should be forgiven, if only in the interest of uniting the party and trying to make some progress. I’m not sure if I’d ever be up for fully trusting any of them again. This was why I was able to support John Edwards but not Hillary Clinton, and why, despite my support for Edwards, I would never have fully trusted him in the war department, despite liking his domestic policy a lot.

Supporters of the war were either naive or else they supported it it for reasons of political expediency.. Or else they were pig ignorant. And if at this late date they don’t get just how wrong they were and won’t admit it if they do – well, I don’t have much use for those folks.

Ezra got his ass handed to him day after day at Pandagon for saying the same shit about Pollack’s book (and for all his other idiotic thoughts), so it’s not like there weren’t plenty of people around, in real time, who could have told you exactly what was so wrong about this.

True, and that’s what drives me batshit angry all over again. Ezra and MY were not just wrong ; they were clueless-fucktard wrong. And what’d it get them? Promoted! Now both are made men, can promote their friends, ignore their enemies — all a nice little Village, all made in *reward* for *incompetence*. This is beyond the fucking Peter Principle here.

Jeez, Emperor. Stop being such a willfully-dense jerk.

I’m sure there was contemporaneous criticism of Pollack’s book. And if I’d seen it, that might have affected my opinion. But I didn’t see much, and the mainstream press was pretty positive about it (I wasn’t that into blogs at the time).

And as I already said, the fact that I was agreeing with GWB and co did in fact give me pause. But I believed, and believe, that taking the right action for the wrong reason is still the right action.

I sense that, because of that mistake, my liberal brothers and sisters think that I and those like me who got it wrong should shut up forever, and deserve unending scorn.

This is the kind of thing I have a problem with.

No one is saying anything remotely like this. This is a classic straw man argument. When you are wrong, you should be able to take criticism for it, don’t you think? Take it like a man, and don’t descend into the “Oh, the mean anti-war extreme far-left Michal Moore/Jon Stewart liberals think I should be locked away and never be allowed to say anything ever. Boo hoo hoo.”

Stop it, if you want some respect. It’s bullshit.

Now, I know that this crowd all knew from the beginning that there were no nukes in Iraq, because you’re all so freaking smart, but the evidence laid out in TS was fairly convincing.

But wrong. Wrong wrong, wrong wrong, wrong diddily ding dong daddily doodily heh indoozily wrong. And we were right. R to the izzight, and should be accepted as such, especially considering that this is THE foreign policy issue of this century. All additional snark about how we were right but really wrong because we were mean while being right or whatever is white noise.

I would go back to the idea that if you look closely at it, MY doesn’t have anything to contribute–he hasn’t had any life experience, his only knowledge base is Google, and he was dead wrong about a matter which was obvious to many. How this has earned him a place on my blogrolls is beyond me. It’s a sad state that the liberal blogosphere relies on his frequent though decidedly sophomoric musings.

But I believed, and believe, that taking the right action for the wrong reason is still the right action.

But you took the wrong action. Wrong wrong, wrong wrong, wrong diddily ding dong daddily doodily heh indoozily wrong. WRONG.

Um, Abe:

Here’s your first comment: MY’s comments are usually much more interesting and insightful than this swill… poorly-thought-out, intellectually incoherent, and unfunny, as the one that started this thread

And you follow up with: I’m trying to participate here in a positive way

This actually pretty resonant, if you replace “MY’s comments” with “arguments for the Iraq war” and “Abe” with “Matt Yglesias.”

Incidentally Abe – and this isprobably a really tough fucking question for a former war-supporter to answer:
Which is worse – a Middle East still with Saddam in control of Iraq, and with say three 10 megaton bombs
OR
Where we are today?

Hoosier, thanks. I appreciate that.

To the rest: Look. (I have a job, so I need to get back to that, but first:) I was wrong. I was naive. I made a judgment call that turned out badly, and many others made the right one. That’s to their credit, and it’s not to mine. And I TOTALLY GET that the right perspective, and those who held it, have been marginalized over the last several years. And that’s clearly fucked up, and I want no part in defending that.

But. I made a mistake, and every one of you who were right on the war will make one at some point in the future. And I don’t think it’s productive for a political movement to spend its time viciously attacking anyone who made a good-faith effort and got it wrong. Instead, you should make it as easy as possible for those who got it wrong to be taken into the fold and embraced, so that the numbers of people who think like you grow, not shrink from putsch after putsch.

I agree that if there’s one place in the world where you should be able to commiserate and say things that you wouldn’t say in person to someone, where you should be able to vent your anger at people like me who got it wrong, it probably is on the comment threads of a lefty blog. But don’t forget that I’m not your enemy. And if you think I am, you’re going to be on the losing side of a whole lot more arguments, even if you turn out right in the end of all of them.

See you guys around (I might come back to this thread when I get off in a few hours).

I’m sure there was contemporaneous criticism of Pollack’s book. And if I’d seen it, that might have affected my opinion. But I didn’t see much, and the mainstream press was pretty positive about it (I wasn’t that into blogs at the time).

I repeat: Plus, the administration was made up of many of the exact same motherfuckers who had already shown the world what they would do if given the chance, back in the 80s. I mean, jesus, Abe, did you not pay any attention to current events growing up at all? Did you ever crack open a history book?

Oops, am I being a jerk again? Are you gonna go support the next war just to show me what’s what?

Also:
I’m sure there was contemporaneous criticism of Pollack’s book. And if I’d seen it, that might have affected my opinion. But I didn’t see much, and the mainstream press was pretty positive about it (I wasn’t that into blogs at the time).
Maybe you should go back and read the original post again. I think you’re starting to understand it.

No you moron, I’m saying you got it right and I got it wrong. Congratulations.

That post wasn’t directed at you, Abe. I don’t read a whole thread and comment on the last post in two minutes.

But you won’t be right every time. And when you’re wrong, it doesn’t mean that you have to shut up forever.

You know, if I’m ever wrong about how a war is going to be this wonderful cakewalk, easy-breazy just-in-case we’ll-be-in-and-out-in-six-months thing, and it ends up causing the deaths of uncounted thousands of innocent people (who, by the way, are uncounted because the people running the war won’t count them because it would erode support for said war.) — THEN I hope I’d have enough of a sense of shame to shut up forever about politics.

i’ll say it again: god DAMN it do i miss Gilliard.

Instead, you should make it as easy as possible for those who got it wrong to be taken into the fold and embraced, so that the numbers of people who think like you grow, not shrink from putsch after putsch.

That’s it; I think my aneurysm just burst.

“But I believed, and believe, that taking the right action for the wrong reason is still the right action.”

Then you are a moron if you cannot see how intentions shape the actions taken after a decision is made. Even if the decision “lets invade Iraq” was correct, that question is followed by a million other questions, from “Are we going to bomb cities when there is a chance of civilian casualties?” to “What kind of government are we going to install afterwards?” or even “those men over there are carrying AK47s. Do we shoot at them?”

Come on, this is simple fucking stuff. Stop trying to justify your idiocy. This was not an easily made mistake. This was not a tiny error made in judging a difficult question. This was grade A stupidity. Dubya started pulling out cold war era paranoia, and you shit your pants instead of thinking about it seriously.

If you simply didn’t care about it enough to have a properly informed opinion? Then admit it. That would at least be honest.

And I don’t think it’s productive for a political movement to spend its time viciously attacking anyone who made a good-faith effort and got it wrong.

Over a hundred comments, and it doesn’t look like Abe is even trying to understand what the argument is.

But. I made a mistake, and every one of you who were right on the war will make one at some point in the future.

Yeah, 2008 NBA Champion Boston Celtics, you won the title. But every one of your players will not win the title at some point in the future. So there.

Instead, you should make it as easy as possible for those who got it wrong to be taken into the fold and embraced, so that the numbers of people who think like you grow, not shrink from putsch after putsch.

Know what? You’ll be accepted back in the fold when you drop the OMG DFAS WERE UNSERIOUS! routine, because it is a pointless diss of people who make up a part of this group you oh so want to join again. I’m not going to be welcomed into the cool kids club by saying how lame the cool kids are. Got it? Say you were wrong, say we were right, apologize, maybe even give reasons for why you did what you did, but leave it at that. No snark or whining at those who were right. Sit down and shut up.

But don’t forget that I’m not your enemy.

The guy who says this blog sux would generally not be a friend to said blog.

taking the right action for the wrong reason is still the right action.

But the action was wrong, Abe.

That would be wrong, the opposite of right. And a whole bunch of people died because of this. It isn’t as if the Bush administration just lost their best level 70 warrior and had to move to a different world of warcraft guild.

Millions of people are dead now who wouldn’t be dead now if not for this illegal war.

MILLIONS of people are DEAD. This is not some academic exercise.

Poor HTML Mencken. Did you know that if you’d stop being so impolite about abortion, anti-abortion liberals like Amy Sullivan would have tea with you?

The probably with left-wing looneys is they’re just so insistent on being right and not ignoring it when erstwhile allies are massively wrong about hugely important issues.

I started typing out an allusion to abolitionists, but then I stopped because that would be impolite and I’m watching myself!

I’m not a huge Yglesias fan, but I don’t get liberal hate for him–he supported the war, which was dumb, but he admits he was wrong, and he’s pretty much dead-set against additional wars. What more do you want from him?

Just a S, N! lurker, so this doesn’t count for much, but I wanted to give Abe some ups here.

But you’re not helping attract new members to the cause, I hope you understand. And if you’re engaged in politics, that’s kind of what you should want to do.

Bingo. I thought the function of this site was to fracture the right-wing coalition, not the center-left. As one who was against the war from the beginning, and spent most of the last six years trying to convince other people to oppose it as well, I don’t see how these kind of intercine battles advance the antiwar cause. I do see how they further marginalize antiwar opinion.

Yglesias just wrote a whole post arguing against the selection of a pro-war VP. Maybe instead of ripping a quote out of context to get some hate on, it’d be more effective to reinforce his actual argument.

And everyone who was wrong about it hedges and justifies themselves and falls back on a while parade of logical fallacies and lame sophistry in order to make themselves less wrong

I could be wrong on this, because frankly I don’t care enough to click through Retardo’s 3578 links to prove myself wrong, but it’s my impression that Yglesias’ reversal was swift and fairly unequivocal. He doesn’t use the “right war, wrong people” spin, or “if I knew then…” He just straight -p admits he was wrong, and the judgment that led him to support the war is not to be repeated.

That’s something to be encouraged, not mocked.

Just because you were right on this one thing doesn’t mean that you have any right to question my judgment ever on anything because you might be wrong about something some day.

Right. What Candy said. Other things you can afford to be aggressive about, maybe. Not war. For war, unless you are certain you have the right reasons, you hold back.

I could be wrong on this

You are. He’s totally passive-aggressive about it. Yes, he’s admitted he’s wrong, but he’s also slickly moving the goalposts and, as well, sometimes defends why he was wrong.

Ya know, Abe, you almost had me for a minute; and then you had to say:

But here you all do yourselves a disservice: it was much harder for me, and many others, to admit our mistakes because we were constantly being attacked ad-hominem for them, and so felt the need to defend ourselves.

Are you fucking kidding me? Did you miss the part when you were the only true Americans, being spoon-fed lies and feted to the skies for wanting to go to war? Or the part where the only conceivable way you could be against the war was to be unpatriotic, anti-American, cowardly, etc. etc.? Hint: to tell you that you made a stupid, disastrous decision based on clear misinformation is not an ad-hominem attack–it’s an opinion on you decision, and accurate at that. As a 20 year old liberal college student, I was busted for protesting another pointless waste of a war. You don’t get a break because of your childlike innocence and naivete.

Man up, Abe. It wasn’t a tough call. The world, outside of the Bush enablers, got it right. You were had, however you choose to rationalize it. And until you and Yglesias stop making excuses for your bad decision, it’s tough to trust your current decisions.

The fact is, I supported the war and was wrong, but I’m less wrong than you because you’re being mean to me. Heartland.

!!! Holy shit! Best Gary Ruppert EVAR!

>Ezra and MY were not just wrong ; they were clueless-fucktard wrong. And what’d it get them? Promoted! Now both are made men, can promote their friends, ignore their enemies — all a nice little Village, all made in *reward* for *incompetence*. This is beyond the fucking Peter Principle here.<

Bingo. It’s the Village Principle. We’re soaking in it.

I’m not a huge Yglesias fan, but I don’t get liberal hate for him …

For one thing, mockery isn’t really hatred.

For another, he’s supposed to be a liberal, but I – and many other liberals – don’t want to be represented by unqualified nitwits. Sure, he’s a lot more qualified and perceptive than Jonah Goldberg or Larry Elder or Thomas Sowell, but is that really any kind of a recommendation?

Surely, he deserves to be mocked for sophistry like this:

I think it’s true that the mere fact of having been against the war isn’t necessarily indicative of brilliant judgment

for reasons cited all over this comments section.

I expect better from people who are supposed to be on my side of the spectrum.

If I were a conservative, I would be making a fuss about the transparent gibberish of people like Jonh Goldberg and Bill O’Reilly because it makes my side look bad. (And I think it says a lot about the right-wing that they say so little about the nonsense in “Expelled” or “Liberal Fascism.”)

So that’s my problem with Yglesias and other left-wing purveyors of sophistry.

Ok, couldn’t resist.

Some of you have said that my saying “[a]nd I don’t think it’s productive for a political movement to spend its time viciously attacking anyone who made a good-faith effort and got it wrong,” is a straw man.

Before I get to the list, let me point out that I think it was a mistake to have supported the war. It DOES indicate some flaws in my judgment. And my judgment is much better now than it was several years ago, in large part because of the learning experience of having been wrong on such a big question.

But you’ll all be wrong on some pretty big questions before all is said and done. And those errors will indicate flaws in your judgment, too. And you’ll still have valid points of view to express about politics.

From Hoosier:
On the other hand, I think it is true that the mere fact of having been fooled by transparent neocon liars about the war is necessarily indicative of catastrophic judgment.

From stryx:
I think it’s true that the mere fact of having been for the war is necessarily indicative of goddamn motherfucking shitstain poor judgment.

From Hoosier again:
Maybe if any of these twerps has ever actually talked to someone who was against the War on Islam, they might have gotten some idea about what the real objections were, and they wouldn’t have looked so much like witless corporate tools in the aftermath.

From Dayv:
If you were for the war, you are not to be trusted. It was obvious to me that it was a pack of lies tied up in the twine of imperialism, and I’m a fucking idiot. If you can’t meet that bar, you’re not worth my time.

From Sockpuppet:
The ONLY way a person could have supported that war, is if they believed the words of George W Bush.

If you believe ANYTHING that drips from the mouth of that idiot neocon mouthpiece, you suffer from a serious lack of judgement. That was as true in 2003 as it is now.

From Ferox:
And that’s why I automatically distrust anyone that treats the Iraq decision as a tough one that they missed by JUST THIS MUCH on. Admit it as a massive error in judgment, and I’ll listen to you again. It’s huge to get something that big so wrong.

From Sagra (who, in my place, apparently really would shut up forever):
You know, if I’m ever wrong about how a war is going to be this wonderful cakewalk, easy-breazy just-in-case we’ll-be-in-and-out-in-six-months thing, and it ends up causing the deaths of uncounted thousands of innocent people (who, by the way, are uncounted because the people running the war won’t count them because it would erode support for said war.) — THEN I hope I’d have enough of a sense of shame to shut up forever about politics.

I don’t see how these kind of intercine battles advance the antiwar cause.

Scythia, in short: look at the Atlantic bloggers. Look at the editorial pages of almost all newspapers. We’ve spent the past seven years having to take it from people whose judgment was crippingly, horribly wrong, and from the looks of things we’re going to have to just keep taking it, because all Yglesias et al have to do is say “oops, sorry” and remain within the good graces of the Village.

How would you treat your plumber if he came to you and said, “you know, putting the septic tank above your house didn’t work, I should have read another book about it”?

No one is suggesting that Yglesias should be exiled to doing honest labor, but they are suggesting that being this wrong for stupid reasons maybe–just maybe–should be looked at the way people tend to look at immense failures of judgment in less forgiving fields.

And until you and Yglesias stop making excuses for your bad decision, it’s tough to trust your current decisions.

Another bingo.

“To initiate a war of aggression… is not only an international crime, it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

That’s from the Nuremberg Charter. We wrote that, back when we had a collective sense of decency. All anybody had to do in order to be right on Iraq is to remember that good people never initiate wars of aggression. Never. Not if Ken Pollack says it is okay, not if Tommy Friedman says people need to Suck On This, no matter what. Seriously, how hard is it to keep “don’t start wars of aggression” somewhere in your mental list of good ideas?

And I TOTALLY GET that the right perspective, and those who held it, have been marginalized over the last several years. And that’s clearly fucked up, and I want no part in defending that.

And yet, just upthread, you sneered that “only knee jerkers” found this an easy call. Translation: we’re a bunch of mindless automatons who only got lucky this time.

Yes, it’s a mystery why we’re being so frightfully uncivil.

Abe, look up “concern troll” and you’ll understand why people are being uncivil. Or just read your first comment.

Is it just me, or does the Reasonable Leftists supporting the war because any position hippies support must be wrong bear just a little resemblance to the Bushies ignoring Bin Laden because any policy the Clintonites supported must be wrong?

Based on that logic, I’m going to vote for John McCain because Tom Friedman doesn’t like him.

Sorry, there’s been some frustration over my knee-jerkers comment. I thought it was clear when writing it that I meant knee-jerkers on both sides; if not, my apologies. That is what I meant. And see my many other posts explaining that if you thought about it and came down against the war, I respect and kinda envy you for it.

But you’ll all be wrong on some pretty big questions before all is said and done. And those errors will indicate flaws in your judgment, too. And you’ll still have valid points of view to express about politics.

Thanks for the compliment.

Do note, though, that if I’m ever horribly, horribly wrong about something, I’m never going to waste words insulting people who were right. Because that’s dumb.

“I thought it was clear when writing it that I meant knee-jerkers on both sides; if not, my apologies.”

But people should be “knee-jerk” against war. How have you not learned that over the last 5 years?

Hey, Abe,

You forgot to add the point.

Could you be a little more specific and point out where anybody said this:

And I don’t think it’s productive for a political movement to spend its time viciously attacking anyone who made a good-faith effort and got it wrong.

is the straw man?

I cited this:

I sense that, because of that mistake, my liberal brothers and sisters think that I and those like me who got it wrong should shut up forever, and deserve unending scorn.

and then made fun of you for playing “Little Miss Martyr.”

Malaclypse: A fair point. I don’t have a good answer to it. As I said, I was pretty swayed by the nukes argument, so I thought that sort of made the knee-jerk opposition irresponsible (AT THE TIME, PEOPLE! I THOUGHT THAT AT THE TIME!)

But yeah, war should be opposed unless there’s really no other choice. I didn’t realize that then (might’ve thought I did, but I really didn’t.) I do now.

But people should be “knee-jerk” against war.

2 to 1 he splutters something about WW2.

Then I have my tirty-seventh haart attaack.

Abe, you quote me saying I automatically distrust war supporters who treat their decision as a tough one they were sadly on the wrong side of. I’m not saying you should never be listened to if you supported the war.

I’m saying you should never be listened to if you supported the war and treat it as anything other than a MASSIVE blunder that could have been avoided by clear thinking. The flimsy-as-fuck arguments being put forward by hawks were being dismantled at the time.

You’re allowed to be wrong. But don’t act like your wrongness was the result of a slight miscalculation. You were hugely wrong about a hugely important issue, on the level of isolationism in the thirties, one that should have been glaringly obvious. As long as you own up to *that*, and stop justifying your wrongness with qualifiers, you’re welcome to offer up your opinion on foreign affairs and I’ll listen to you.

Oh, wow.

Hoosier, the second point isn’t very far removed from the first. And there were still a few of those posts I cited where the second point was held. But sure, I suppose I exaggerated a bit for effect. I don’t believe doing that puts me in the minority on this thread, though.

Seems to me that the argument against war is that it kills people.

That alone makes it pretty stupid.

“But yeah, war should be opposed unless there’s really no other choice. I didn’t realize that then (might’ve thought I did, but I really didn’t.) I do now.”

Abe, stuck with sentiments like this. This shows the beginnings of growth. But realize that opposition to war is pretty much never unthinking or easy, and stop defending people who act like it is. Your line shows some degree of contrition, I think. I’ve never seen evidence that Matt has that.

Abe, it isn’t really about how crap your judgement was back then. It is about your judgement NOW. If your hindsight isn’t 20/20, and you can’t admit to the size and stupidity of your blunder, then your judgement right NOW is impaired.

About half of America has had to reverse their judgement on Iraq. Those people simply say “Hey, I trusted fox news and the president. Turns out the president was a lying shitbag.”

You however, had a supposedly informed and educated stance. But you did a completely half arsed job of informing yourself on the situation. The only way to keep your intellectual integrity now, is to admit you had none back then.

Can we at least agree that however we came to the conclusion, the war was wrong, and that we should all vow to never let it happen again?

But you’ll all be wrong on some pretty big questions before all is said and done.

You obviously hope this is true, since you trot it out every other comment. Don’t count on it. Issues of the magnitude of Georgie’s Best Adventure don’t come along all that often; there were massive amounts of information contradicting every excuse offered for the war, even in the msm, if you bothered to look; you didn’t and you’re culpable for it. I’m now 60, still a dfh but outside of that nothing real special. I have never made that big a mistake. The younger folk around here who opposed the war haven’t either, because Iraq was pretty much their only chance to be that wrong. You’re still just trying to avoid owning up.

You’re all forgetting a very important point: Peace is for faggots. Thank you.

You’re still doing a terrible job of undertanding what the real argument is, Abe.

You showed terrible judgment. When you show terrible judgment, you should expect people to wonder about your judgment. True? Not true?

That doesn’t mean you can’t say exactly what you want. It just means you shouldn’t expect people to just forget that and respect everything you say, unequivocally, without comment. Agree? Disagree?

When you are so catastrophically wrong, you should expect some criticism. Yes? No?

And when you make a bunch of excuses about your good intentions – which really have nothing to do with the quality of your judgment – and get all indignant that people still aren’t being properly respectful of your current opinions and your current intentions, you can see how people might see you as stubborn, as someone who had has a problem admitting error, as someone who has too many caveats to ever really learn a lesson? Can’t you?

And you’re still doing it.

You’re not as wrong as you could be because anti-war liberals were mean to you.

You read a book that you found very convincing.

People who were right just because they hate Bush weren’t really that right.

Blah blah blah.

And just because hundreds of thousands of people are dead for no good reason, you aren’t really responsible because pro-war liberals are mean.

And you’re going to play semantics and pretend that you really think liberal war supporters are being shunned and ostracized and persecuted and silenced just because they were “merely” wrong about the war.

Barf.

to les: word.

to html: motherfucking WWWWWWWWWWOOOOOOORRRDDDDDDDDD

sorry yggy, you are a careerist loser. i will make an analogy that i hope is unpleasant on multiple levels: this is akin to liberals claiming jesus as one of their own. see, he helped the poor! he was a radical!! he fought the man!! i do all those things!!! jesus is teh 1!

sure, some could argue that the right can (and does) make the same argument about jesus agreeing with them. and all of the sudden it dawns on some: it isn’t that jesus is left or right, it’s that he allows anyone to agree with his position in order to support a worldview.

see, yggy gets jobs, and he’s kind of a liberal, so that’s good, right? i mean because sure he insults us once in a while but better him than ben virginboy or whomever…

sadly, no. yggy is next year’s modofriedmancohen model. we see him now. his anecdotes about discomforture with the left at his college (did i mention it was harvard?) are tomorrow’s shitty wapo op-ed musings about why we HAD to invade papua new guinea to get at their colloidal metal or whatever 2030 commodity we need. fuck him hard in the face with some sort of painful instrument until he APOLOGIZES FOR BEING A DICK IN COLLEGE and maybe makes some sort of 10 year pilgrimage.

RB-

My point was that MY is just a pundit, a pundit with no relevant experience besides offering opinions. He will eventually be firmly ensconced in the establishment, having his entire life been nothing more exceptional than a guy with a blog in college. There are others who experience doing things other than just having a blog, and they bring the fact that they have existed outside of a bubble to the table. They also have the benefit of being a lot more right much of the time, and a lot less dense.

A lot of other random people that we just know from the blogs have a) actually done a lot more with their lives b) have much deeper experience and understanding about the nature of the world c) aren’t self-absorbed dipshits who appear to be made of balsa wood, i.e. both incredibly lightweight and wooden and d) are much more right than wrong e) when the are wrong they admit to being such, not just by saying something spectacularly stupid and puttering along to the next post.

I don’t think I was being credentialist, I was being honest that on top of being kind of a tool, MY also lacks any credentials. He can say a lot of correct things, but even when he does so, it is like he’s rediscovering sliced bread.

To me, the three most important “bloggers”/media critics that have come out of their normal lives and don’t exist in the establishment are digby, Bob Somerby, and the prescient and little heard from Billmon. These people are exceptional. Part of their exceptionality is they bring a sense of history to the same old same old. They aren’t rediscovering the usual with wide-eyed self-important naivete.

hey pinko

let’s add html to that list, shall we? i grew up in The Nation milieu, and html is a better writer than pretty much anyone over there (patricia williams?).

It seems to me that a lot of the people who now admit they were wrong about the war only see the war as wrong because it didn’t yeild the sparkle ponies and free-flowing dirt-cheap oil and freshly painted schools they were expecting to materialize the day after George gave his “Mission Accomplished” speech. They are still not grasping the vast hideousness of the effect of the war on the lives of people all over the planet.

If they’re not swayed by the deaths of thousands of Americans and well over a million Iraqis, you’d think they might understand some of the other horrors that have been wrought.

The money that has been squandered, most of it borrowed from China, which now pretty much owns our paper.

The squandering of an opportunity for the US to take the lead in the world in the battle to slow climate change and to clean up the environment.

The waste of resources that could have been used for health care, helping to improve the terrible situation in Africa, working to find cures for diseases, creating the best educational system in the world, and on and on.

And perhaps the most fearsome thing of all, the creation of a vast mercenary shadow military, something I believe we will live to rue greatly.

And, of course, my personal favorite: The destruction of our civil liberties, begun during the also-stupid drug war and pretty much achieved during the Iraq Adventure and the resultant USA PATRIOT Act and our ever-lovely department of homeland insecurity.

In short, this country is on its goddamned knees because of this war – except, of course, for the top 1% or so – and it’s because good men stood by and did nothing, and even in some cases cheered it on.

Am I pissed? Yes. Yes I am.

No, Robert, you’re too nice. I’m not that good. Digby’s better, and Billmon was the best blogger who ever lived.

Which, see, that’s the problem.

TAP and TP and The Nation — pretty much any liberal publication (I don’t count TNR) — should have offered to suck Billmon’s dick to get him to blog for them. But what do they do? They’re not interested in Billmon. And they weren’t interested in Digby, who got her paying gig at the populist Our Future site. Instead, they suck up to young, self-important, incompetent bloggers with utterly reprehensible instincts. *That’s* who they wanna hire, apparently.

Dragon-King, the pats were for your missionary work among the Alkonites.

It seems to me that a lot of the people who now admit they were wrong about the war only see the war as wrong because it didn’t yeild the sparkle ponies and free-flowing dirt-cheap oil and freshly painted schools they were expecting to materialize the day after George gave his “Mission Accomplished” speech. They are still not grasping the vast hideousness of the effect of the war on the lives of people all over the planet.

A-fucking-men.

But thank you, Robert.

And Candy is on fire.

Pinko,

It’s worth pointing out that Billmon, who I agree is the best blogger ever, was at least kind of establishment–I think he was a pretty prominent financial journalist in his past life, and now, reading between the lines, it seems he’s in a pretty successful white-collar industry job. In other words, that kind of background can give you Friedman or MoDo, or it can give you BIllmon.

I tend to think that editors are more the problem. People like Yglesias will step to whatever the beat is that will get you paid (Andrew Sullivan is actually a worse example). I don’t blame dude for taking the jobs people offer him, but I don’t know why the offers are tended in the first place.

html:

i worked there. my dad is on the editorial board. i know what i’m talking about. you are possibly unpolished, and maybe at your best when you use links so well (making your milieu very html-y) but overall the force of your writing, the incandescent rage…it’s damn good. it would improve the magazine immeasurably to have you writing a monthly column.

but no, you are not billmon–he is the best of them all so far i think.

candy:

goddamn right about the money and the opportunity. superplusdouble right with a side of right sauce, a fucking right bouillabaise. a trillion dollars could have put a fuck of a lot of solar panels up on houses, redone our grid both electric and internet, and made a ton of plug-ins. to add to your list above. that pundits pretend that war is cheap EVERY FUCKING TIME makes them suck all the more. they never say “we will have to sacrifice x to achieve our blood dream y”. ever. yggy certainly different.

sorry, yggy certainly was no different.

Bob Somerby on the media is unparalleled. You don’t have to agree with him all the time, but he is truly great. He has been 100% correct about the corrosive careerism of our “sensible liberals.” He pegged Milbank from the start, most people only realized now. He has MY pegged. He has EK pegged. He has JMM pegged. Until these people admit to the big picture and accept the reality of their system, we are lost. These people live in a world without mirrors that give true reflection. Their warped and coddled self-images drive the discourse. I have unconditional respect for very, very few people online because I saw the way the primary warped critical thinking and attempted objectivity almost across the board. This deep unprofessionalism from the unprofessional class mirrored the unprofessionalism we get every day from the professional class. I give amateurs a huge break because they aren’t doing a job. Once you are paid, then I brook no compromise, and you can eat me. This is why I have a gigantic problem with MY. And why he can eat me.

Fuck yeah, Retardo (if I can still call you that)!

I’m hoping what you wrote here equally applies to Sully-poo.

*That’s* who they wanna hire, apparently.

They’re safe. It’s damn near impossible to get fired as a journalist (laid off, that’s a different story), so you kind of make a commitment when you hire someone.

You have to jump through hoops to go to Harvard, work hard, and do consistently acceptable work over a long period of time, so employers know they can ask the same. Yglesias and Douthat will give you a safe ROI, basically–they’ll do their jobs and speak the language of their audience (note the Atlantic print ads, eg).

Billmon’s blog was one extended jeremiad. And that’s anathema to the centrist power structure (imagine, if you will, a centrist jeremiad).

i worked there. my dad is on the editorial board.

Ahh, that explains how you know so much about the neoconmen’s history.

Did you ever get to meet Izzy?

I sorta kinda know Andy Moursund, who was Izzy’s last assistant.

OMG! Candy Iz teh R0xxorZ!

Thanks HTML, Robert, Sagra. This is a subject that makes me feel like I’m literally on fire.

PP — I believe you about Somerby, I just haven’t read him in a long time (not because I disagree, I just got tired of the Al Gore Al Gore stuff).

You have to jump through hoops to go to Harvard, work hard, and do consistently acceptable work over a long period of time, so employers know they can ask the same.

I dunno about this. I’m not saying they are not dependable in the sense that they don’t squeeze out x amount of posts a day, but as far as really hard work? I’m not sure. Both were born on third base. Douthat’s from a connected Connecticut family. I’m almost certain Yggy is a trustfund baby. Their gigs — somewhere — were pretty much guaranteed all along. Which doesn’t mean people have to go along with it…

Can I just vote for balsawood becoming part of the standard lexicon. Or is it 3B! grade only?

Because Ithink that’s an excellent summary judgement of MY & Ezra

Pinko, your explanation of what you meant is clear and probably fair, you being swell and smart and me paying no more attention to MY than I ordinarily do.

HTML: maybe at your best when you use links so well

Really, honestly and truly, the demolition of Rich Lowry is a museum piece that demonstrates how to use the internet properly in your art. I think I wrote some ass-kissy thing on one of the threads involved and I really meant it. It’s a peak of brutal assault writing married to (still miraculous) technology and I often think about it. Particularly in the sports threads.

I think it’s true that the mere fact of having been against the war isn’t necessarily indicative of brilliant judgment.

People who were for the war, now, they either believed it was right to invade and occupy a sovereign nation (in which case they were evil) or they believed the administration’s rhetoric (in which case they were stupid). And I’m going to count as “we can depose Saddam and bring peace, democracy and human rights to Iraq (by force)” as mainly stupid.

Plus, heck, unthinking knee-jerk pacifism is right like 99 times out of 100. When you consider “intellectuals” like Bill Kristol, who’s actually been wrong at least that frequently, you might consider which shows
better judgement.

actually, two funny stories: html, i do indeed know the neoconmen, in the sense that my grandma hired both norman podhoretz and irving kristol to commentary mag in 1959-1960 when they were both liberals. she pretty much fucked up there.

and as for yggy, his dad is rafe yglesias, cuban jewish novelist and screenwriter (fearless, amongst others. he’s a decent enough writer in our biz). he, like my dad, was a professor at smith, and i’m 99% sure that the campus house they rented was the same one i lived in as a youth. i’m older than yggy so we probably didn’t share a room (we lived there after the yglesias’s did) but still it’s some connection.

it seems to me that sadly no + billmon + digby + mediawhores + + poorman +1/2 somerby (he is so tiringly monumentally boring about education that he is 1/2 unreadable)=a fucking great online magazine. let’s raise a few hundred grand and get this bad boy rolling, no?

RB, and others, read this nice little post about MY to just revel in his MY-ness. Also, this one I got in the e-mail from Prof. Booty, with the tagline (paraphrase):

You know I love my MY, but posts like these make me realize that HTML is probably right about him

Evan Bayh, a Sensible Liberal who may well be the next Vice President: “You just hope that we haven’t soured an entire generation on the necessity, from time to time, of using force because Iraq has been such a debacle. That would be tragic, because Iran is a grave threat. They’re everything we thought Iraq was but wasn’t. They are seeking nuclear weapons, they do support terrorists, they have threatened to destroy Israel, and they’ve threatened us, too.” (http://washingtonindependent.com/view/stop-obama-bayh-08).

As long as a Sensible Liberal starts the next war, does anybody believe Matt won’t back it?

I have only read ‘yggy’ about three times via links from the usual suspects but I do remember one in which he blamed his pro-invasion stance on trying to curry favor w/ some bad rock-n-roller. With an excuse so lame and faux naive I didn’t think he could be much of a force in the blogovoid however this thread informs me I was wrong. ‘yggy’ though, is only one of a number of bloggers that are looking for more repectable careers in the Village, kos(ugh) being the the most obvious. And, in order to make sure their place is preiminate, it is necessary to denigrate, dismiss and disrepect those who were holding the lefty fort while they were following the crowd. So down with the premature-anti facists like Kucinich and ignore or snigger at the un-chic Cindy Sheehan. And as these phonies ascend the blogoladder, nothing substansive changes in the politics of this country. No SIngle Payer, no demilitarization of the budget or the culture, no shift in tax policy, no actual liberal-progressives in leaqdership in the dem party.
If the lefty blogoworld is to actually make a difference, it must get behind people like Kucincih and Sheehan, no matter how imperfect their ‘affect’, because they are the only ones who can be trusted not to be bought out.

I’m not saying they are not dependable in the sense that they don’t squeeze out x amount of posts a day, but as far as really hard work? I’m not sure. Both were born on third base.

Unless their families are really made or deep legacies, I’m sure both were grinds. All the born-on-third types I know who went to places like that are grinds. The Ivies are actually more “merit” based than in the recent past–the sun of the GWB-style well-placed slacker has kind of set. Now it’s more that being born on third helps more with the resources and inherited knowledge needed to get in. And those grinds are safe hires.

The effect, of course, is kind of the same–the acculturation, the shared language, etc.

Their gigs — somewhere — were pretty much guaranteed all along.

I disagree–I know too many people from moderate power and/or wealth who dicked around (in high school, mostly) and didn’t get the gigs they could have. They got fine jobs and will be comfortable, but the Atlantic is a different thing–the cachet of punditry/public intellectual/whatever is still kind of a thing. Someone like Yggy can dick around and get a cushy job at a think tank, maybe, but you have to be a bit of a grind to headline at the Atlantic.*

And that’s sort of what I’m trying to say–he’s a safe bet if you’re in the business of running a centrist magazine with an upper-class audience.

*I know the Doughy Pantload is the farthest thing from a grind, but that was a miracle (for him), and he deserves at least a little credit for striking when the semen was hot.

RB, and others, read this nice little post about MY to just revel in his MY-ness.

Well.

But you won’t be right every time. And when you’re wrong, it doesn’t mean that you have to shut up forever.

I think that’s true, but not really worth pointing out. See, the thing is, rather than say “oh, yeah, I was wrong, and it was the wrong decision, and a lot of people are dead because of it, and that was bad judgement on my part to support that decision” he’s saying “but at least I was wrong for the right reason, while (many of) you were right for the wrong reason.”

And why is that obnoxious? Well, because (a) at the time, people who were correctly anti-war were explaining their reasons and the pro-war people uniformly refused to listen and called us traitors and wimps, (b) they’re still doing that even though they know they’re wrong, and ( c) Holy Dammit Christmas will you just shut up.

It’s fairly reasonable to think that Yglesias et al can be right about things in the future, but if they’re so full of themselves they have to claim that their support for a wasteful and disastrous war of choice was “for the right reasons” like that scores them fucking points then I invite them to go and fuck themselves, preferably with a fire hydrant or something.

I think we’re forgetting that some of the war supporters were more craven than stupid. During the run-up, opposition to the war was widely proclaimed as being treasonous. It was lots easier to abandon the anti-war side than stand your ground and face the bullies. After all, if things turned out badly you could always blame BushCo for lying.

It would be a shame if people learned anything from the Iraq debacle, because there’s a meat grinder over in Iran that isn’t going to throw young people into itself.

Abe, your problem is that you’re a believer. You believe the people who, for good reason or not, are more powerful than you. People who write books, people who hold high office, etc. The ‘arguments’ you cite are completely illogical, but you believe them because they are made by powerful people.

To wit: “”And TS made a powerful argument that “inspections revealing no nukes wouldn’t prove no nukes existed”, so that wasn’t enough for me.” As DKW so astutely observed, jesus running jumping fucking keeerist on a crumpet! Do you not realize that this means war is the *only* way to settle disagreements? Inspections? Fuck ’em. We find nukes, we go in. We don’t find nukes, we go in.

So, I have every confidence that you and about 30-40% of the population will go along with whatever you’re told. People who do not have power to you are DFHs, knee-jerkers – not Serious People. You’re authoritarians, and I will never trust you even when you’re on my side. And, BTW, I don’t hate you personally, and I don’t dismiss you or your views out of hand. It’s your willful ignorance and passive-aggressive brown-nosing that really bug me.

Candy is on fire and this reminds me of those days, although, in truth, I’d rather forget them:

It seems to me that a lot of the people who now admit they were wrong about the war only see the war as wrong because it didn’t yeild the sparkle ponies and free-flowing dirt-cheap oil and freshly painted schools they were expecting to materialize the day after George gave his “Mission Accomplished” speech. They are still not grasping the vast hideousness of the effect of the war on the lives of people all over the planet.

The moment CNN had a graphic labeled for the “Shock and Awe” campaign any doubts (not many but still more than I’m proud of) I had that this was a travesty of epic proportions melted. It only takes one second to realize that a bomb is falling and really doesn’t give a shit if you are Sunni, Shite, Saddam or Bill Kritsol. It just wants to explode and take whatever oxygen and body parts it can with it.

What I still can’t comprehend is how that incredible failure and affront to humanity was just the beginning of years of increasing failure and a complete rejection of the idea of humanity altogether.

Rage on, HTML. You are correct that there is plenty to go ’round.

passive-aggressive brown-nosing

The…ramifications…of this image are seriously disturbing.

Oops – it was the Emperor that caught Abe’s prove a negative booboo. Sorry, Emp.

Argonaut,

That’s pretty condescending. What makes you think I have a problem? Other than the fact that I judged a complex issue differently several years ago than you did, or than I would now.

At the time, yeah, I believed a book I read that was getting a lot of praise in news outlets to which I paid attention. In the years since, I’ve started paying attention to different news outlets.

But the fact of my having believed a book I read tells you basically nothing about me (how many books have you read that you believed? Unless the answer is none, you can’t really claim the superiority to me that you attempt to.) (And if the answer is none, you’re somewhat odd, but whatever.) You think, wrongly, this fact does tell you something; that as a result you can tell I’m a “believer”, someone who only follows people who are more powerful than I am. I’m an “authoritarian”, somehow.

I’m not, though I might have been closer to that at the time. But if you read what I actually wrote above, you’d learn that I don’t consider “people who do not have power” to be DFHs or knee-jerkers or unserious. Some are, some aren’t, but their powerlessness tells me nothing about their DFH-status, knee-jerker-status or seriousness.

I guess it’s harder to debunk the willfully ignorant charge. I don’t think I am (nor do I think I’m a passive-aggressive brown-noser.) You disagree (largely because, at one point, I disagreed with you, and now you’ve been proven right; alternatively, because I consumed different sources of information from those you chose.) You’ve never, like, actually met me. I think I’m probably more likely to be right about this than you are.

Which doesn’t mean people have to go along with it…

I should hasten to add that’s true. And from the looks of print publication profit margins, maybe people are ceasing to. It might be cold comfort, but as great as it would be if Billmon or Digby got hired at a major publication (and as far as broadcasting their opinions, it would be great), take it from one who knows: it sucks living under the ax all the time. Aside from the superstars, no one’s safe these days.

Oh, and since apparently you’ve forgotten, at the time the argument was: Saddam successfully deceived the inspectors/West about his nuclear status, and appeared to have every intention of doing so again. So if the inspectors go into Iraq and find nothing, given the history of the past decade or so, is that really proof that nothing is there? Not necessarily.

Of course nothing was there, and now I’m eating crow. But don’t pretend the argument was as stupid as your caricature. There was a legitimate reason to be skeptical of inspectors who found no evidence of WMDs.

No problem, Argonaut. I didn’t really catch it so much as hurl on it uncontrollably as soon as I read it.

There was a legitimate reason to be skeptical of inspectors who found no evidence of WMDs.

You mean the compelling countercharges that Scott Ritter (who was right about it all) had an interest in teenage girls? Yeah, that was intellectually respectable, no doubt. I knew right then we were dealing with serious people.

It’s a bit of a stretch to compare Yglesias to Anne-Marie Slaughter, since Yglesias thinks she’s insane. Furthermore calling Yglesias an ‘imperialist’ is a little crazy too since he regularly rails against those kinds of people.

Yeah, he supported the war. So did Josh Marshal. So what? He obviously came to his senses and wasn’t in any kind of a position of authority, unlike Friedman or someone.

He was a college student at the time, I don’t think judging people by the political opinions they held in campus is a good idea.

Chad — You’re silly. Yggy called Slaughter a DFH. Even Atrios busted him for that one.

but you have to be a bit of a grind to headline at the Atlantic.*

Ok, fair enough. That explains The Atlantic and his college career. But how does it explain Think Progress? Or TAP?

Robert — I looked you up as you invited. You helped make Incident at Loch Ness? If so, awesome. Love that flick; love Herzog.

“I guess it’s harder to debunk the willfully ignorant charge. I don’t think”

Heh. Sorry, too good to pass.

“You’ve never, like, actually met me.” Awesome! That’s so true. I’m buggin’ here, dude. Why you talkin’ cake?

Trying to make sense of the rest, but failing. It seems that if one could teach a Valley weathervane to talk it would sound just like Abe.

Sweet, smelly mother of satan why would I do this, but here goes…

Abe wrote, “That’s pretty condescending. What makes you think I have a problem? Other than the fact that I judged a complex issue differently several years ago than you did, or than I would now.”

You’re a fucking concern troll or a sociopath. “Differently”? Ok, let’s try this analogy, let’s replace part of what you wrote and see if the general premise holds up:

Abe wrote, “That’s pretty condescending. What makes you think I have a problem? Other than the fact that I” ate human flesh ‘several years ago” and “you did not,”

Pretty much sums it up eh? Yeah, you fucked up and still don’t grasp what you did or don’t think it’s all that big of a deal. That’s why I say you’re one of the two above (I’m leaning towards concern troll).

In general, a few points…

Duncan Black is a good guy, does an assload of good work and has been right about a shitload of things. I can cut him slack in other areas. And anyway, when it comes to link narcissism no one comes close to JMM.

Yggy is just the next generation of JoKline. Maybe he’ll be slightly better, maybe much worse. Sadly, Ezra is heading in that direction extremely quickly (maybe that should be way past tense). I do think Ezra has some good insights from time to time but I smoked the bookmark in the menu bar when I read like the third mcmegan citation in a week. I know they’re friends but that doesn’t mean I have to like her.

Anyway, like the generation before them, most of this generation of the village are self-referential, tend to fail upward and want to keep the tribe as small as possible (again, cheers to Duncan for bringing other people into his place). Would that they were different but saying that betrays a lack of understanding of history. Humans don’t innovate in general and are quite tribal, perhaps by structure as much as environment (juries still out on that one). So I don’t “hate” the new village other than how they’ve squandered their own legacy when they didn’t have to.

As for Matty in particular, he’s a bit more annoying, frequently not that readable. Hell, I don’t think I’ve had him bookmarked since he graduated (though I do run across links to him all too often). He’s an average writer with average insight failing upward.

I frequently hear the phrase “circular firing squad” and I think all too often it’s deployed to stop criticism that is well deserved. Yes, there’s no virtue in eating your own but there’s also no virtue in quietly acquiescing to mediocrity nor vice in demanding more than animal behavior from other humans.

Jesus, I’ve never even been to southern Cali. Use the word “like” once (as the kids do these days, gramps, even outside the Valley) and trash your cred forever.

Anyway, you notably failed to respond to any of my points of substance. Which is fine, mockery’s cool. I’ll just note that, if you could teach an ocelot to type, it’d be more astute than Argonaut.

I’m not saying I don’t like Atrios. He got things right, after all.

But since I’ve been bitching about Yggie and Klein, I don’t think he likes me much anymore.

Ice weasel, how about a third option? Say, “person who just started reading this site and disagrees with some of the commenters”? Or is that not welcome here? If so, that’s fine, but be upfront about it.

“Abe said,
August 14, 2008 at 1:02

Oh, and since apparently you’ve forgotten, at the time the argument was: Saddam successfully deceived the inspectors/West about his nuclear status, and appeared to have every intention of doing so again. So if the inspectors go into Iraq and find nothing, given the history of the past decade or so, is that really proof that nothing is there? Not necessarily.

Of course nothing was there, and now I’m eating crow. But don’t pretend the argument was as stupid as your caricature. There was a legitimate reason to be skeptical of inspectors who found no evidence of WMDs.”

I dub thee, Uber-Concern Troll. How may I serve thee oh load of the unserious and tedious?

Asshat, do you remember colin powell shaking his groove thing (of “anthrax”) at the UN? Yeah, you had to be a real fucking genius not to see through all that horseshit. And Scott Ritter was fucking babies or whatever they accused him of. Sure.

The argument was at least as stupid as anyone here has portrayed it. And if you don’t think so it’s only further proof you’re a dimwit, not some middle of the road intellectual.

Oh, and I don’t give a flying fuck if you feel welcomed into the left side of the aisle with all of this. My goal isn’t recruit people, it’s to make sure that everyone over here at least a modicum of good sense. I have no desire to be on the majority side of any issue, I want to be on the right side of it.

HTML, I’d drop him a line. I truly believe he’s a solid guy. And I base that only on the exchange of some emails over the last five years or so. I don’t know him or hang out with him. I don’t know, I just don’t see him tossing you because you, correctly, criticize Matty. Now Klein, holy shit, Atrios has been all over Klein. I don’t think I would characterize as Atrios’ support of Klein when Atrios acknowledges Klein did something right. I think Duncan is just hoping that he might come around. Until then, I think he’s held klein’s feet to the fire.

So if the inspectors go into Iraq and find nothing, given the history of the past decade or so, is that really proof that nothing is there?

Yes, it is proof that nothing is there. Not complete proof perhaps, or unassailable proof, or the proof you want, but if you’re looking for proof, that is some proof right there.

A trick used by the wily is the use of the word “proof” as opposed to the word “evidence” although the words can be synonymous, “proof” slipping towards the definition of “logical proof” and thus steering the rube to door number 2.

I dunno. We used to exchange emails. He even commented here in the Retardo vs. Tic-Tack era. But then I started bashing the Sensible Liberals. He quit answering my mail. And remember that time last year when I wrote the Lowry thing and was begging for donations cuz my electricity was going to be cut off in 100 degree weather? It was the only time I asked him for a link. I told him what was up, how desperate I was. No reply.

Damn, I hate that I’m so late to this thread. First off, HTML, kudos. The only thing you left out is that Atrios is a massive douche, so it’s hardly surprising that he doesn’t link to you. You hit the online village thing square on the head, however. Any of you who recall “blogger amnesty day”, which was really a weasely way for Atrios et al to de-link a large number of smaller (and in many cases, better) bloggers (amnesty?) and pulling up the ladder behind themselves to protect their positions as the online village insiders…what more need be said?

And Abe, FWIW, I’m really not interested in hearing excuses from anyone as to why they were wrong, not when I was able to easily discern (without reading any books!) that the “case for war” was essentially a big stinking pile of bullshit just by keeping my eyes and ears open, all the while being roundly scolded by “leaders”, “experts”, “pundits”, “reporters”, and various and sundry types both online and off that instead of pointing out that smoke was being blown up our collective ass, I needed to STFU and be thankful for the fact that the smoke was such a fucking pretty shade of purple. You know, fuck that noise. Unless you had slept through the year previous – the one in which George W. Bush had campaigned as a “moderate” and then governed hard right after stealing an election, the one in which we had been told for 6 months after 9/11 that the administration had “absolutely no warning” of the attacks before learning about the August 6 PDB, the one in which we had already witnessed rapacious corruption and disregard for law – there was never a reason to give the Bush administration benefit of the doubt on much of anything, much less on something as monumental as a war of aggression, a war with a country that we knew from day one they were itching to start. Son, that’s just the background on it, not the meat of the flimsy “case” they presented for starting this clusterfuck. So, no excuses, please. They’re insulting. They assume that it was easy to be misled when in fact, it was not – not for anyone who was thinking for themselves.

I have to ask you, did you seriously believe them when they trotted out the Balsa Planes of Death? Did you really believe it was possible that Saddam Hussein, in a turn worthy of Dr. Evil, was going to pilot remote-controlled model planes over your house to spray you with anthrax? You didn’t, did you? If you did, then I’m fully within my rights to never take your opinion on anything seriously ever again. But if you didn’t, if even a part of you said to youself, “wait…that sounds pretty far-fetched” and that thought wasn’t followed with the realization that no one would make such a ridiculous claim unless they had no more substantive evidence to offer…then I still reserve the right to disregard your opinion on pretty much everything else. Because you haven’t exhibited good sense and you have a lot to make up for – and you still don’t understand how easy it was for thinking people to see through the bullshit. That’s the key here, I think, and why so many have piled on – it’s because of the assumption that those of us who were right were right by accident. Fuck that noise, too.

While many of us were motivated in some part by our concern over needless loss of innocent life – a concern that we should note was mostly lacking even from the liberal hawks’ arguments – many of us were also rightly outraged at the thought that anyone would cause this loss of life and put our own troops in harms’ way based on nothing but a shockingly obvious web of lies.

Name for me one – even one – of the prewar justifications for why we had to go into Iraq that was not thoroughly debunked before the invasion even occured. You can’t do it, because there isn’t a single one that exists. Those of us who were paying attention, using our brains rather than brain stems, knew that by the time the cluster got underway the justifications had boiled down to because we want to.

Being a knee-jerk Bush hater or pacifist has exactly zero to do with opposing this war. All that was needed to make the right decision was the determination not to automatically believe everything that was said by a pack of known liars and then pay attention to see everything they said be proven as lies.

Lies for which a million people have died so far. Who could have forseen that a war undertaken for nebulous purposes could have turned out so badly?

Knee-jerk? Fuck you.

From here on out, any addendum to the “I was wrong about the war” should have these words and these words only: “….because I didn’t think for myself.” Then, maybe I’ll set store to some of your opinions.

I think Matt is OK, for the record. I’m not as quick to judge motive as you are, and people fuck up. Better late than never, I think.

But you’re right, HTML, on this one. I’m done with them, too, and am reaching the point of chronic indifference, scorn, lack of self-worth, and no boners a bit more quickly than my 49 year old brain expected of my 49 year old body.

I am ready to die. Gonna happen anyway.

We’re a hierarchal species. As it is, so it has been, and always will be.

Beware The Man.

J

HTML only because I like, respect and enjoy work from both of you I’ll say this. I agree. It’s been harder and harder to get a response from Duncan in the last year or so (I’m old and while I recall the tic-tack thing it might be a year ago or three years ago, shit, I need put this thing down…). Duncan certainly doesn’t or probably want me to stand for him so I guess I’ll leave it where it is other than say, again, I think you’re both good people.

Jennifer, any of us can link to anyone we want. I don’t get the entitlement deal with linking. Hey, I would fucking love it if Duncan tossed me a link or two to one of my sites but I don’t deserve it. Even if, in an academic sense, Duncan could be the great link-father to all smaller blogs, I don’t see where he is an asshole for not doing it. And with that said, cheers for a great closing line in your last post. I wish I had said that so concisely.

“if you could teach an ocelot to type, it’d be more astute than Argonaut.” Absolutely. And more lovable too:

Do you like ocelot?
[Yes, I like ocelot.]
Ocelot, ocelot.
[You gotta like ocelot.]
Really like ocelot.
[You gotta like ocelot.]
Ocelot, ocelot.
[You gotta like ocelot.]
–
They’re big and round,
They’re all around.
They’re big and round,
They’re all around.
–
Do you wear your ocelot?
[Yes, I wear my ocelot.]
Got to wear your ocelot.
[Got to wear your ocelot.]
Ocelot, ocelot.
[You gotta wear your ocelot.]
Got to wear your ocelot.
[You gotta wear your ocelot.]
–
‘Cause, down on the football,
Football field,
You never can tell
What a heel can wield,
–
So you gotta wear your ocelot.
[You gotta wear your ocelot.]
Ocelot, ocelot.
[You gotta wear your ocelot.]
–
http://www.themadmusicarchive.com/song_details.aspx?SongID=333

Jennifer, for once I’m not in love with your post, and you by extension.

I don’t think people should decry “purity trolls” at the same time they expect some purity, and I don’t think Duncan is wrong or misguided anywhere near as much as he has it right, concisely.

How about we all agree that none of us agree with anyone 100% of the time?

Jeez.

“Oh, and since apparently you’ve forgotten, at the time the argument was: Saddam successfully deceived the inspectors/West about his nuclear status, and appeared to have every intention of doing so again. So if the inspectors go into Iraq and find nothing, given the history of the past decade or so, is that really proof that nothing is there? Not necessarily.”

Abe, that argument was made by people with a well-known history of lying about fucking everything. Okay, you were a stupid kid, you admitted it. Stop expecting people who were not as stupid to congratulate you on maybe being slightly less stupid than you were five years ago. Seeing Iraq as a mistake now just makes you marginally more intelligent than Jonah.

If it will help, I will give you all the credit that deserves. Now, apply the lesson you claim you have learned. You are in a hole. Stop digging.

ice weasel – with all due respect, when I say that Duncan is a massive douche, I’m speaking from my own personal experience which has nothing to do with having a blog that was de-linked, because I’ve never had one. He has been a douche to me, personally. Enough said.

John O – sorry to disappoint you, but I don’t retract. Eh, it happens.

Argonaut, well played.

Malaclypse (can I call you Mal? No? Ok. Malaclypse:) I’m not asking for congratulations, just reserving the right to disagree on these here boards without being called a troll.

LOL, Jennifer, OK, you’re back in my good graces.

Duncan has only been dismissive of me once out of about 3 tries. Hey, who am I to complain? For one thing, the one time I deserved it, when I told the bouncers keeping him out to “Let him in! He’s a celebrity!”

All tongue-in-cheek, of course, but that wasn’t for Duncan to determine.

For another, like it or not, he IS a “celebrity,” at least in Blogoshereoland, and that’s due to his more often than not being OK on most issues. He’s an academic who gets a lot of stuff right, so give him a break. That’s no small feat.

Cannibalism is weird. Yeah, so-called liberals can’t help it–we’re independent thinkers to your point–but savaging your own is for morons when it comes to national policy and the future of the country.

IMHO.

But Abe, you do have the right to disagree – not a single post was deleted. But we have the right to express our opinion of your arguments. When you make foolish arguments, you don’t have any right to demand to not be called a fool.

But in a gesture of good faith, yes, you can call me Mal.

Jennifer, my FSM, “retract?”

I would never, ever expect anyone to retract a blog comment. Never. Ever.

That’s Nazi shit.

You have a right to your feelings about politics, spirituality, emotion, intellect, and physicality just like everyone else.

I just think it is unrealistic to expect other people to conform to your ideals. I wish they would to mine, too, but I laugh about the idea that anyone will.

And nobody, NOBODY, not even you my dear Jennifer, is exempt from disagreement on a given idea. National politics is about getting the masses to think your way, and I think Dr. B. does a much better job than most. Sorry.

Amen, HTML. I despise “liberal” bloggers who are basically softer-hearted rightists. I hate the worship of Yglesias, who is just breathtakingly *wrong* so often that you wonder whether he has no sense of shame. If he did, he would shut the fuck up and scuttle off into banking or stockbroking, where he belongs.

Well, he’s just a kid, that’s all.
You can’t deny, though, that he is sharp and intellectually honest, he just has more to learn.
Also, the NBA posts are kind of endearing…

Cannibalism is weird. Yeah, so-called liberals can’t help it–we’re independent thinkers to your point–but savaging your own is for morons when it comes to national policy and the future of the country.

IMHO.

I fully see your point. But I did read the whole thread. And when people are wrong about such a huge issue, it’s important that they understand how it was that they were able to be so horribly wrong, which is the one thing I haven’t gotten out of any of Abe’s posts. Which is of course part of the larger pattern we’ve seen from just about everyone who was wrong. “Eh, it could’ve happened to anyone!” is the typical excuse. When people give themselves such an easy out without really doing the soul-searching and coming clean with both themselves and others as to exactly why it didn’t happen to everyone…or when the rest of us allow that easy out with a “no harm no foul” attitude without seeing them through that understanding…well then that just makes it all the more likely to happen again. Not to mention that there was very big harm and very big foul done as a result of the error.

“You can’t deny, though, that he is sharp and intellectually honest,”

Yes. Yes I can.

Right on, Krassen, he IS just a kid.

There isn’t much doubt Matt is also a very smart kid. He’ll learn, and to me, he’s proven he can.

As I maintain, “teenagers are morons.” Young academics of the Elite class aren’t much different. But you should still have hope for them. Judge not, lest you be judged, which is smart stuff of life rules from someone who doesn’t have an official deity.

Evan Bayh, a Sensible Liberal who may well be the next Vice President: “You just hope that we haven’t soured an entire generation on the necessity, from time to time, of using force because Iraq has been such a debacle. That would be tragic, because Iran is a grave threat. They’re everything we thought Iraq was but wasn’t. They are seeking nuclear weapons, they do support terrorists, they have threatened to destroy Israel, and they’ve threatened us, too.”

Fool me once, etc.

That wanker had better not be the VP nominee.

Aren’t we all missing the point? Aren’t Matt Yglesias and Abe here the real victims of this tragic war?

I don’t think Abe is a troll.. Just a glutton for punishment, or possibly looking for moral justification to consider himself above both the neocons AND the DFHs.

Bottom line Abe. To support the war, you had to avoid all foreign news sources. (come on, how hard is it to find the BBC’s website?) and you had to trust the word of some very dodgy people.

If you really didn’t spend any time specifically looking FOR anti-war arguments (of which there were many, and extremely compelling ones too) then you were guilty of some mixture of laziness and intellectual dishonesty.

Don’t tell me you were too young to know how to use Google.

So far, your talk amounts to “Yeah, it WAS me that pissed in your mothers urn, but bob told me it was a good idea see, so im not really to blame. I’m sorry of course, but it was a mistake anyone could have made”

“krassen said,
August 14, 2008 at 2:05

Well, he’s just a kid, that’s all.
You can’t deny, though, that he is sharp and intellectually honest, he just has more to learn.”

Sharp? Intellectually honest? Those aren’t the first things that come to mind when I think of Matty.

And Jennifer, hey, you have the right to talk here as much as anyone else. We can disagree on people’s personalities and whatnot. I wasn’t trying to shut down any talk about Duncan, just adding in my experience. As they used to say, YMMV.

I agree wholeheartedly, Jennifer. But how smart were you about world politics when you were Matt’s age?

I’m just not in to the ad hom thing. Repeating now: Everyone gets something wrong from time to time, even big stuff.

Especially when you’re young and idealistic and have no fear of war yourself. To that extent, Matt can go blow himself for adulation.

Glad I haven’t read any of Abe.

Sounds like a moron from the last 15 posts or so.

Not. Going. Back. This is the internets, after all.

And opposing the war was not a “tough call”.

I have more respect for someone like Hillary Clinton (knew it was wrong and supported it for entirely cynical reasons) than for someone like Yglesias or Abe (too dumb to know it was wrong, and changed views only when even the dunces at the back of the room couldn’t keep denying it).

As someone who protested against the war, always thought Matt Y was overrated and gradually stopped reading Eschaton on anything more than a weekly basis when the content started dwindling away, I still have to say this:

There are elements of this post/thread that make me wonder if I’m not actually reading some sort of indie music bulletin board where people are bitching about how so-and-so’s a sellout for listening to such-and-such a band because the rumour is that they signed a deal with Record Label X who are Well Known For Turning A Profit.

I know, I know, the issues are several magnitutes of scale different, and there are real moral problems here, but that’s my gut reaction to the delivery.

(That probably just means I’m a bad liberal though.)

J Neo Marvin, await the “it should be Bayh” posts from Yglesias.

Really, Jennifer? You haven’t gotten any sense of my understanding for how I went astray on Iraq? Maybe I didn’t write this above:

“What convinced me, and many others, was Ken Pollack’s Threatening Storm. At the time, I was a 20-year-old liberal college student. Reading a (kinda) hefty tome written by a former Clinton Iraq policy expert seemed like a pretty healthy perspective. In the years since, Pollack has revealed himself to be much less trustworthy. But I didn’t know that at the time.

It was entirely clear to me that I was agreeing with people who I despised, but I justified it by saying that people can be right for the wrong reasons. I still believe this general point to be true, even if it doesn’t apply to Iraq.

Anyway, TS was a pretty convincing and well-argued book. With the benefit of hindsight, or at least knowing what I know now about Pollack, maybe I wouldn’t find it so.”

In addition to TS, I was reading a lot of Slate at the time, and enjoying Hitchens. He’s since gone totally off the deep end, but at the time he was just beginning to, and I kind of got a thrill from being a contrarian lefty (so I imagined myself to be), so his writing appealed to me as well. Say what you will about him (and I can only imagine the flames that are coming my way for admitting I was influenced by Hitchens), but as a 20-year-old reading the dude who at the time was still writing for The Nation, until he broke it off with them over Iraq, he was a powerful influence.

I’ve already mentioned the appeal the nukes argument had. But there was also my belief that the sanctions had broken down, and were badly harming the Iraqi people while enabling Saddam. If I knew then that the war would be this much worse than the sanctions, that would probably not have been an argument that appealed to me. But it did, at the time.

There was probably a lot of other stuff going on as well. Not least of which was the fun that resulted from being the contrarian among my group (I was in college, after all, where such motivations are more meaningful than they are once you grow up) who were largely anti-war.

And, frankly, getting in debates like these often has an opinion-hardening effect (at least, it does for me, since I’m competitive and don’t enjoy admitting that I’m wrong.) So constantly debating the wisdom of the invasion just made me even more invested in it as a position, and did blind me to some of the stuff that could have convinced me otherwise, had I not been arguing about it so often.

Anyway, that’s how I came to the pro-war position. Not a lot of the above reflects especially well on me, and of course there were others who were right, and who came to their positions for purely intellectual reasons. But I’m pretty far from perfect, and make bad decisions for bad reasons more often than I’d like.

But how smart were you about world politics when you were Matt’s age?

That’s my point. Politics aside, I was definitely smart enough by that age to recognize proven liars by looking at their past behavoir, and to carefully examine everything they said. I would have been against it on that basis alone. I was never OK with being punk’d – and that goes way earlier than when I was in college.

And that’s without even getting into the part that anything that kills people, unless you are absolutely back to the wall fighting to protect yourself, is not a good thing.

“J Neo Marvin, await the “it should be Bayh” posts from Yglesias.”

That happened earlier today:

http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2008/08/being_wrong_isnt_strong.php

“I can think of some reasons to think that Evan Bayh would be a good Vice Presidential candidate.”

Cooincidentally enough, it was that very post (Quakers don’t actually think, after all) that got this thread going.

“… at the time the argument was: Saddam successfully deceived the inspectors/West about his nuclear status, and appeared to have every intention of doing so again. So if the inspectors go into Iraq and find nothing, given the history of the past decade or so, is that really proof that nothing is there? Not necessarily.”

The guy hanged in Iraq was actually one of Saddam’s many doubles (you can tell because he didn’t have a scar on his forehead) and the real Saddam is living undetectably in, let’s say, Syria, or just for fun, let’s assume he’s living in Hilton Head, SC. Or possibly that’s a cover story for the real truth: Saddam also used sorcery to become an invisible lich (a type of undead wizard, for those of you unfamiliar with the term) after his death.
Why hasn’t anyone found him? UNDETECTABLE. Possibly invisible. And undead. And scrying attempts don’t work because he’s cast Soul Jar.

Ridiculous? Sure. Implausible? Possibly. Provably wrong? nope.

This thread brings up memories of 2002-04 when I kept thinking, “How come no one else gets this? What is WRONG with you people?”

It didn’t take a genius to see what was going on . The fact that millions of people actually trusted Bush astounds me to this day. And the ones who bought the whole lie and disseminated it are not going to get anything but scorn from here. Sorry, I AM FUCKING BITTER. And saying “I told you so” doesn’t make me feel better.

That Bayh quote is not helping my mood. Is this a nation of suckers or what? Time will tell.

I take it back.

Abe is just a kid, too, who still apparently believes what he reads, as opposed to what his eyeballs and historical perspective tell him.

Abe, you’ll be OK. You’re hanging out here, for one thing.

But when you’re older, you’ll realize that hardening a position out of intellectual spite is kid-stuff, too.

One of my hallmarks of adult thinking is an easy ability to admit you were an idiot. Most everyone I know crosses this bar at some pre-30 age.

There are elements of this post/thread that make me wonder if I’m not actually reading some sort of indie music bulletin board

Dude, you weren’t there at the beginning.

But but but Jennifer, you OBVIOUSLY don’t have an Ivy League education!

LOL.

You’re right, of course. For me this is an easy one. I don’t trust ANY authority, period, ever. Unless they’ve earned it.

It is hard-wired into my very being.

“And, frankly, getting in debates like these often has an opinion-hardening effect (at least, it does for me, since I’m competitive and don’t enjoy admitting that I’m wrong.) So constantly debating the wisdom of the invasion just made me even more invested in it as a position, and did blind me to some of the stuff that could have convinced me otherwise, had I not been arguing about it so often.”

But you *were* wrong. The fact that you became more “invested” in your wrongness when you were exposed to DFHs does not make it better. You listened to idiots and liars, and got made at those who were correct.

You need to remember that most of us spent 2003 being called traitors by people like you. The price you pay for being in that crowd then is being called a fool now. That price is a bit better than what the Iraqis are paying, now isn’t it?

Once again, if you had learned any lesson, it should have been to stop digging.

Mal, I’m not saying that fact makes it better. But Jennifer argued that I didn’t understand how I’d gotten Iraq wrong, and I offered that up as part of the explanation (which doesn’t = justification, and I don’t argue that it does.)

Also, I never for a second believed (or believe) that dissent was anything other than extremely patriotic (which is partly why I’m still posting to this thread, though I won’t pretend to be so morally righteous as all that). So I was never the one calling people who disagreed with me traitors or anything of the kind, but I did love spirited debates about the issue.

I just have to add this… Hitchens has *always* been insane. He just wasn’t insane about invading Iraq until after 9/11. He’s been a contrarian nutjob for ever and ever.

(And no, I’m not saying that I’m “dissenting” here, trying to claim some aggrieved status for the pro-war contingent. I don’t think the pro-war folks need any more coddling than we’ve/they’ve already received. But I do think that a vigorous debate among friends is healthy in the long run, and good for the party/movement/side/cause/whatever.)

Ferox,

Hitch is an eccentric genius, and those types have never given a shit about what anyone else thinks. Plus, he writes awfully good and stuff.

I think Hitchens is a moron all the time, but I think he would like me as much as I “like” him (to the extent I can “know” him).

I like contrarians, in general, in my own defense. It’s seems a little ridiculous of me to presume a born contrarian will agree with me all the time.

I suspect Hitch’s memoir will be very interesting. And I know it will be fun to read.

I do somewhat resent all the “stupid child” type comments. After all, I am much the same age as Abe. Like many people, my political awakening came in the september of 2001, when I realised I would be living through “interesting times”.

Even before then I knew I was a liberal. Not out of any very concious choice, just observation of what liberal and conservative policies had done to my own quality of life, and applications of basic ethics. I had not taken any time to investigate further.

I managed to make the right call on Iraq. And Afghanistan. Both were decisions taken with the help of a strong ethical compass, and a high school standard knowledge of history. I do not think that there is any age limit on having a strong sense of right, wrong, and the muddle in between.

I see old people with the same vanity and stubbornness often attributed to teenagers. The only difference I can see is young people often change later. Older people tend to have always been like that, and always will be.

Abe’s kind of stupidity isn’t kid stuff. It is just stuff that we are more forgiving of when children do it. This is probably why Abe is attempting to use youth as an excuse.

Abe, it’s good to see that last comment of yours — I think that a lot of people who were initially sort-of pro-war for rather dodgy reasons and were then asked “are you fucking stupid?” became more militant out of spite. Seems to me that’s exactly the wrong reason (“ooh, this’ll piss off those DFHs with their holier-than-thou attitude”) to support something. But that’s fine, really. You weren’t in charge of Decidering, you were not the Commander Guy or a big opinion-shaper. Plus you had other reasons, like the sanctions (which were pretty fucking horrible, to be sure, but you know, so’s being blown up and invaded). So, you know, it was a pretty complex issue where there are good and bad aspects to the probable outcomes but still the pro-war argument was not sufficient and this is not just apparent in retrospect.

It’s perfectly reasonable to take all that and say “okay, well, I was wrong but I was motivated at least partly by some worthwhile concerns” but where Yglesias goes wrong is in saying “… and this makes me better than the dirty fucking hippies”.

Generalization is the only way to describe the “wad,” Sockpuppet.

No offense intended. Most of the young people I know had Iraq and Afghanistan right.

It doesn’t take an old person to understand that war will likely have some adverse consequences.

There is no doubt, however, that experience counts about these things.

Abe said,
August 14, 2008 at 2:19
Anyway, that’s how I came to the pro-war position.

So what have you done since, that should make us think better of you?

P.S. Attacking the people who were right just makes you like Joe Klein, Ezra, etc. AKA even less useful than tits on a bull.

Oh, I like the way Hitch writes, but he’s just plain crazy. When he’s right about something, he writes about it in a way that makes people who agree with him scratch their heads and wonder how he even got to the same position.

When he’s wrong, it’s like staring into the sun.

He takes roughly the same position on the respect due to religion as Dawkins, and the same as I do for that matter. But Hitchens just has kind of gleeful contrarian zeal that infects everything he takes a liking to, but definitely distinguishes him from those he agrees with.

I don’t know John. The great thing about experience, is history books allow you to draw from other peoples experience. A pre-emptive war like this doesn’t come along every day. Maybe once a generation. Being older doesn’t necessarily give a person more direct experience with these things.

If you are talking about experience in decision making, and the maturity to keep it intellectual and not argue your side for the sake of arguing, then yes, I suppose experience does count.

I imagine for some, going off to college is their first exposure to lively debate. It seems strange to me, having had a circle of intelligent and argumentative friends and family. Learning to debate is definitely a skill, but I can’t quite understand how any mentally active person could reach their 20s without acquiring it.

Awww, jeez, Ezra too?

Can’t we agree that among the “intellectual climbing class” of young guns it was just the sensible thing to do?

Everyone has to earn a living.

Ezra’s beat is health care. Morons like me can have a blog.

It’s a veritable purity-troll festivus for the restofyou.

Sockpuppet, if you assume, as I do given the evidence at hand, that the war in Iraq was waged for fundamentally imperial purposes, well, those are a dime a dozen historically speaking.

You have to get it out of your head that this war was waged on anything you may have heard in the Corporate Media. The facts are pretty much in on this point.

It was waged, as famed neocon T. Friedman said, to tell the Middle East to “suck on this.”

And that’s all there is to it.

“Hitch is an eccentric genius,”

No. Hitchens is proof that cleverness and intelligence are two separate faculties.

It’s a veritable purity-troll festivus for the restofyou.

You are determined to miss the point, John-O?

Go out in the real world. Real world equals money, for my purposes.

Look at who’s being paid to opinionate at the Washington Post.

Then come back and report on purity troll-dom.

But I’m pretty far from perfect, and make bad decisions for bad reasons more often than I’d like.

Don’t we all. It’s part of the human condition. That’s not my problem with what you’ve said. This is:

It was entirely clear to me that I was agreeing with people who I despised, but I justified it by saying that people can be right for the wrong reasons. I still believe this general point to be true, even if it doesn’t apply to Iraq.

Why does “people can be right for the wrong reasons” strike me as an oxymoron? Possibly because it indicates that you’ve bought into an action or idea even though the people presenting the argument in favor of it did a shitty job of representing why it’s a good idea. And you still believe it’s a general point that’s true? It isn’t, and I’ll give you an example:

The right are staunch supporters of the death penalty. I happen to be a supporter of the death penalty though only in such constrained circumstances as to make it unlikely that it would ever be carried out. So in a limited way you could say that I think they are right on the death penalty but for the wrong reasons. Except that I don’t think they are right on the death penalty at all. They support it for all sorts of reasons – mostly because they get off on violence and vengeance, I believe, but they often throw out the “deterrant to crime” excuse which is thoroughly debunked, or the “save the taxpayer’s money” excuse which is similarly lame…and in many cases have openly stated that accidently putting innocents to death is a necessary evil that we have to countenance so that we can make sure the guilty pay. Me? I would support a death penalty that was imposed on those whose actions make clear that they are a threat to society for as long as they are alive; they cannot be contained. Like Ted Bundy, who broke out of jail and went on and killed some more. I do believe that society has a right to protect itself against those who have demonstrated that they are a danger for as long as they’re alive. More like a two strikes policy, where habit can be shown and pattern traced and the possibility of innocence dwindles to nothing.

So, what’s the difference, since we both end up at the point of saying, “the death penalty is justified”? Well, their reasons for supporting it pretty much guarantee that there will be more executions, the death penalty will be applied unequally and innocent people are likely to continue being executed.

So they’re not “right for the wrong reasons”, they’re just wrong. Because their motives are demonstrably impure: revenge and cost savings vs. protection of society. And because those are the values they hold nearest and dearest, those are the ones that will be served, ultimately, by whatever position they take. Motives matter…often more than than the putative issue. Anything undertaken with impure or self-serving motives will yield the same type of fruit. Poison fruit of the poison vine and all. If you start a war to steal oil, enrich your friends, and consolidate political power, you can’t expect said war to yield candy and flowers. So the first order of business when you find yourself agreeing with people you find despicable because they are “right for the wrong reasons” is to question your agreement deeply.

My apologies to you and all other readers for being such a dick about all of this, but it’s because it matters. FWIW, kudos for being willing to step up and say “I was wrong”. But be aware that it’s an incomplete answer and that it matters for your own sake to understand why and how it happened. I don’t think you’re a troll, but I don’t think you’ve looked deeply enough yet at how you got to your position on the war and perhaps some of your underlying assumptions, so I just want to encourage you to do that, now that I’m not so fired up. And I hope you will continue to visit and comment at SadlyNo.

It was waged, as famed neocon T. Friedman said, to tell the Middle East to “suck on this.”

So should we ignore the fact that the people who lied us into the war are the same ones who got even richer off it? (In stark contrast to the majority of the planet?)

.

ITDGY,

I have completely given up on the 5-Conglomerate Corporate Media.

I work in a giant corporation, and I painfully understand the meta of groupthink. The WaPo editorial page is a wasteland of stupidity.

I live in the real world. Just because WaPo is inhabited with purity-troll intellectual morons doesn’t imply, and this is formal logic stuff, that purity troll-ism can’t be displayed elsewhere.

Cannibalism is weird when the stakes are so high, is all I’m sayin’.

Cannibalism is weird when the stakes are so high, is all I’m sayin’.

We don’t go into a disastrous war (for all but the privleged few) because of what folks on the Sadly, No! board say, is what I’m sayin’.

And that is the point. Ezra and Joe Klein didn’t miss it, they took off on every zig. For great paychecks.

LOL, Jennifer. You’re just too smart for me.

Shorter? I support the death penalty if I’m (personally) in complete control of who gets it.

Outside of that rather unlikely scenario, I have big problems with the death penalty, given how many innocents have been executed for crimes they didn’t commit.

All I have to do is put myself in their shoes.

ITTDGY,

True enough. But I can say without reservation I’ve made compromises for my paycheck. Got to, it’s Corporate America. Again in my own defense, I’m known Corporate-wide as a serious and fierce gadfly. I’m so good at it I’ve been there forever.

I’m glad there are the pure among us. Sincerely. Kudos to you.

John O – didn’t say that I would ever be willing to personally pull the handle, and openly acknowledge my hypocrisy on that point. Though I do believe that society has the right and the responsibility to protect itself from predators, whether in human or corporate form. That doesn’t include guys who shot their best friend in a drunken poker argument, but yes, for the Bundys who have demonstrated that predation is the default setting, I think the death penalty can be justified.

And with respect to Ezra and even Joke Line at this point, learning is better than not.

How wonderful it must be to be right every time. I have been right about everything w/r/t foreign policy over the last 8 years, but I think that’s just a matter of luck, and sooner or later I’ll be wrong, because I’m not a genius like all the rest of you.

I’m just a little taken aback by the lack of forgiveness and empathy who made a bad call, because it strikes me as if none of the critics have ever made one.

I know I have. I thought Rove would be indicted.

🙂

Jennifer, if I had all the evidence at hand, assuming I thought it was all valid, I wouldn’t hesitate to pull the lever. I lived about 5 miles from Gacy during his spree.

If I didn’t think it was all valid, no death on my watch. And I mean lock-solid valid.

I’m glad there are the pure among us. Sincerely. Kudos to you.

I didn’t mean to make you defensive. I’m not pure, I work for a corporation myself.

But I’m not gonna defend what Joe Klein and Ezra have done. When it was convenient, they whored for the war. Particularly pernicious, from their position as “serious liberals”. Low rent Richie Cohens, I’d say.

And now that it’s convenient, hey, they’re against the war!

But in a serious way, not like those stupid DFHs. Never let those losers get jobs.

Soon, there will be a Democratic Administration, which will reap the whirlwind of shit that the shrub’ites have sown. And Ezra and Joke will happily hop on that rightwing bandwagon, blaming the dirty hippies for the entire mess.

“I’m just a little taken aback by the lack of forgiveness and empathy who made a bad call,”

I realized where I had heard this line before: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Aliens

Burke: Okay, look- what if that ship didn’t even exist? Did you ever think about that? I didn’t know! So now, if I went and made a major security situation out of it, everybody steps in. Administration steps in, and there’s no exclusive rights for anybody, nobody wins! So I made a decision and it was wrong. It was a bad call, Ripley. It was a bad call.
Ripley: Bad call? These people are DEAD, Burke! Don’t you have any idea what you’ve done here? Well, I’m going to make sure they nail you right to the wall for this! You’re not going to sleaze your way out of this one! Right to the wall.
Burke: Ripley… you know, I expected more from you. I thought you’d be smarter than this.

Unlike the movie, the people who made the bad call did, in fact, sleaze their ways out. They just don’t make movies like that nowadays..

Abe, that argument was made by people with a well-known history of lying about fucking everything. Okay, you were a stupid kid, you admitted it. Stop expecting people who were not as stupid to congratulate you on maybe being slightly less stupid than you were five years ago. Seeing Iraq as a mistake now just makes you marginally more intelligent than Jonah.

Malaclypse, I think we’re on the wrong track here. I think we should congratulate Abe and his kind for being slightly less stupid than they were five years ago.

Abe, it is totally awesome that you are slightly less stupid than you were five years ago! You’re back in the club and your opinions are just as good as anybody else’s even though you couldn’t see how obvious it was that the Bush Iraq plan would fail … until it failed.

Be nice, everybody. Little things mean a lot. Give Abe some credit for having more intellectual honesty than Troof.

credit for having more intellectual honesty than Troof.

Now that’s damning with faint praise! 😉

Regarding the Death Penalty, It isn’t just about whether it can be sometimes justified, the more important point is if the courts can be trusted with the power, and whether government in general should have the power of life and death.

The same applies to war. Even if it could be sometimes justified, the issue then immediately moves on to the question of whether we can trust those in charge of doing so, to actually use that tentative mandate in a responsible manner.

If we manage to justify ONE pre-emptive imperialistic war, then the precedent is set. Without a consistent and concrete division between ethical and unethical wars, every incident is open to special case pleading.

Bottom line is.. We need these boundaries because governments need to be given limits. We can force them to obey the letter of the law, (or we should be able to) but only an election can stop them violating the spirit of the law. That is why the letter of the law has to be absolute. Loopholes are there to be abused.

Intellectual exercise for you: If the Iraq war was justified, how many other states could be invaded on the same rationale? You may need some extra paper.

Be nice, everybody. Little things mean a lot. Give Abe some credit for having more intellectual honesty than Troof.

OK I think Hoosier X is on the right track here.

*golf clap*

Now what do we do when they start pooping their diapers supporting a war on Iran, because only those stupid knee-jerk DFH’s are against it?

Well, they had better not, ITTDGY. If they do, they’ll be crucified, and I think they’re smart enough to know it.

Except Joe. He’s a Villager. (Sorry for the horrid Atrios reference!)

I don’t consider younguns’ changes in position to be “convenient.” I consider it to be the acquisition of intelligence and experience.

I don’t know how else to put it. Most of the people I’ve ever met, no matter how much I may have disagreed with them about this or that, I found to be decent people.

And I am in wholehearted agreement that the DFH’s have not received their just due when it comes to Big Media time or attention. I just don’t blame that on Ezra or Joke.

Life is fairly complicated, especially internally, where a billion thoughts a second can cross our minds. I do my best to forgive those who let the stupid ones out amongst all that noise, which we all experience.

I’m sorry. I just think most of the people on our team are OK, even if I violently disagree with them from issue to issue. I just consider it an inevitable part of the human condition, and hold it against no one.

And I am in wholehearted agreement that the DFH’s have not received their just due when it comes to Big Media time or attention. I just don’t blame that on Ezra or Joke.

That’s what I’d like to hear more about. Why don’t you blame it on Ezra and Joke? Because like Mongo, they’re just pawns in game of life?

Aliens. One of my favorite movies ever.

And yep, people died for this mistake. But some of them, like Matt and Ezra and maybe even to a lesser extent Joke, have figured out the insanity of it all. And, IMHO, they should be encouraged and not ripped.

Ripley had it right. But it was too late by then for most of her mates, too.

And I’m done comparing monster movies to real life, just for the sake of going to bed.

Good night, John O.

But some of them, like Matt and Ezra and maybe even to a lesser extent Joke, have figured out the insanity of it all.

That calls for a conclusion that has insufficient supporting evidence, at this point.

Their paychecks calling for a change in tack is also an explanation, and with a longer track record to boot.

“I’m just a little taken aback by the lack of forgiveness and empathy who made a bad call, because it strikes me as if none of the critics have ever made one.”

I think that you forgive people who ask for forgiveness, not people who say “Yeah, I was wrong about the outcome but at least I’m not a dirty fucking hippie like you.” Those people can go fuck themselves.

No, ITTDGY, it’s is because neither Joke, nor Ezra even more, control what Media Man chooses to feed us.

Joke less so, but he’s tenured.

All of us but prominent Republicans are pawns in the game of life, my friend. It is our punishment for the second Bush the Lesser election.

Just for myself, I only control the very closest circle of influence anyone has. I’m no power-broker. Joke is a little; Ezra less so. It’s a big world we live in, and it’s a big world Joke and Ezra are operating in. They’re relative gnats like the rest of us.

Joke can (and recently has) used his tiny power to good ends. But if 1% of this country reads what he says, I’d be surprised. It’s more or less up to us, and I for one can handle confrontation about politics among my social circle.

So there.

Nobody could have predicted that those pedestrians would be so hard to notice. My motives were good, and the guy who tried to call me a cab just likes to show off his fancy little phone.

ITTDGY, both Joke and Ezra have argued sensibly for a while. Joke not so long. Ezra longer.

What do you want them to do? They can’t undo their own misjudgment, they can only correct it moving forward.

I suppose I’m glad I’m not open to half the country hating me. Even if half would. It would be tough work.

Abe, look at it this way, you formed an opinion on the war from professional opinion makers whose views on imperialism ranged from “doing it right” to “just do it.” Maybe it was counterintuitive (Bush couldn’t even find a goddamn reason after all), but these guys are serious thinkers. A trillion bucks and an ocean of (other people’s) blood is a horrific lesson, but you were 20, and I was certainly no wiser at that age (and not much wiser now). It’s not like your immature opinion mattered all that much.

Fast forward, and Preznit John McCain is winding down his second term, amid cabinet scandals. Some other country with no obviously singular strategic value needs action, now, for some unclear reason other than mutual dislike. Maybe it’s Iran. Now some new gang of pundits, formerly bloggers, bats it out on the funny pages and their opinions vary somewhere between cautious intervention and intervention with guns blazing. Will people look at you funny when you shout at the screen? Will you be pissed when someone calls your anti-war opinion a reflex, and that this time it’s really different? That’s why these guys are angry.

As for Yglesias, I just don’t read enough of the dude to form an opinion. Tried for a while, but just didn’t find his writing very engaging. So, whatever.

“But some of them, like Matt and Ezra and maybe even to a lesser extent Joke, have figured out the insanity of it all.”

I’d argue that they, ironically enough, are now right for the wrong reason – none of the three tend to take up unpopular opinions. Don’t think that counts as figuring out the insanity of their first position, particularly as they are all still proud to not be DFHs.

Matt wrote, *earlier today*, “Quakers and such who just oppose all war as a matter of principle aren’t really showing judgment in particular cases.” That is not a good indication he has really learned anything. He’ll cheer the first war Obama starts, and write about how dismayed he is that all “those people” protesting don’t realize that this time, it is nothing like Iraq.

Doctorb,

No. I’m not THAT forgiving. I just read the words, as written currently, for what they are.

I don’t recall Ezra asking for forgiveness recently, and I read him virtually every day. As I mentioned earlier, Ezra’s beat is health care, not foreign policy.

Joke is a bit different. He’s still trying to have his cake and eat it, too, but he’s come a long way in the past two years. He’s even calling McCain out for being a dick.

“I’m just a little taken aback by the lack of forgiveness and empathy who made a bad call, because it strikes me as if none of the critics have ever made one.”

I think that you forgive people who ask for forgiveness, not people who say “Yeah, I was wrong about the outcome but at least I’m not a dirty fucking hippie like you.”

Amen.

Thank you, doctorb. I was trying to phrase a response to John O’s red herring, and it looks like you did it for me.

Malaclypse,

You may be right. We’ll see. But how about we don’t assume that’s the case?

Jesus, I feel like Jesus out here all of the sudden, and I don’t believe for a second that Jesus is deity.

But He had some things right, nevertheless.

best blog post of the summer

because of his support for the stupid from the first discussion iraq war, i think yglesias needs to serve 3 months in a penal battalion clearing lands with his hands in angola – this will also give him such some much needed real-world foreign policy experience

btw, how does one become a foreign policy expert – do they just announce one day, ‘hey listen to me, i went to harvard and i am not qualified to do much else, so i am your new foreign policy guy, magazines give me money’

is that how it works?

Aww, man, a “straw man?”

Brass tacks. Give me a link where either asks for forgiveness, even implied, over the last year, dammit.

I love this place, and the last thing I want to do is alienate myself. This is suddenly depressing and horrifying.

I’m going to bed. Try to forgive us our morons. Even if only those without any real power.

John O said,

August 14, 2008 at 3:55

ITTDGY, both Joke and Ezra have argued sensibly for a while. Joke not so long. Ezra longer.

What do you want them to do? They can’t undo their own misjudgment, they can only correct it moving forward.
==============================================
How about if they apologize for sliming the people who were right, and also stop doing so going forward?

This would do a whole lot for me with regards to accepting their convenient road to Damascus conversions.

I’ll be gracious to Big Media Matt as soon as Amy Goodman starts anchoring at CNN.

Goddamit, every time I try to get out…

One thing Americans need to do is educate themselves on foreign and domestic policy. Sadly, Media Man isn’t going to do it for us.

I’ll take my chances with an educated and informed public. Even though I know I’ll never see it.

Yeah, you become a foreign policy “expert” largely by being declared one. But that isn’t the “foreign policy experts” fault, it is ours.

G’night all. Sorry to be so contrarian and forgiving and all. 🙂

ITTDGY,

I have written Joke in particular on the very point of admitting he vilified people who dared contradict him in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary. And told him he could clean the proverbial slate by doing so.

Poor Andrew Sullivan. I’ve been especially tough on him, and he’s responded, to his credit, in mostly sane ways.

I’m doing my part.

J

I’ll take my chances with an educated and informed public. Even though I know I’ll never see it.

OK, good night.

I’m perfectly willing to forgive anyone who can apologize for enabling all the people who thought it was useful to call me traitor from 2001 to 2005.

Sorry, John O. I just don’t think that’s unreasonable.

I’ve read this thread with fascination all afternoon and only have one point I want to make:

It’s a good thing, yes, that pundits come around to the obvious eventually, but in the cases we’re citing here (the Kleins, Yg, etc.), they seem to do it only when it no longer takes courage to do so… when they have sufficient cover from how their publics’ views have changed for them to shift gears without sacrificing market share or whatever. (Hitchens got a whole lot richer from his Orwell-lust, for instance.) In other words, they act as pundits instead of intellectuals. And I have no fucking idea what good a pundit is.

Wait, sorry, one more point:

I started reading John Cole when he realized he’d been a complete fucking moron when it counted the most and he deeply regretted a lot of the shit he threw at people (like Juan Cole) who were right when he was wrong. He’s on my bookmark bar now.

Neither do I, Hoosier, which is why I have been so personally militant about Joke and everyone else doing so. “Just apologize!,” I screamed at them, if in lower case, repeatedly.

I get it. Nobody resented being called a traitor more than I did.

Trust me on this. I have good anger and a keen sense of the offensive. Which is why I wrote as many of these people as I could find personally.

In my world, all you have to do is admit you were wrong, and all is forgiven. Ezra, in particular, has done so. Joke a little more subtly so.

(I would like to add that forgiveness does not include any kind of blanket amnesty for any stupid remarks that such people say in the present.)

:-: Still have half a drink left.

Nobody links John Cole, especially to his wingnut friends, more than I do.

I always include the link of John’s conversion, just for yucks, and a certain degree of trying to humiliate the wingnuts among me.

“A sensible conservative,” I say to those people still drinking the kool-aid.

I don’t think there is much more noble than NOT preaching to the proverbial choir. I’m trying to perform conversions. Not easy, believe me, but I’ve made some inroads.

So, after establishing these rules, John O, you must agree that Ygleisias’ column in question was fair game for a little mockery.

Which makes me wonder exactly what this whole discussion was really about.

Yep, Matt deserved it.

I just think that it is better that he is late to the game of sanity, rather than never there at all.

I’m not trying to “establish any rules,” btw. I’m just saying that when I was in my 20’s, I wasn’t as smart as I am now. Matt, IMHO, gets his mistake. Would that our actual leaders have Matt’s ability to look in the proverbial mirror.

I grew up in rural Indiana, and the most vocal political voices of my formative years were Republicans. I really hated Jimmy Carter (for reasons I now know were bullshit and sophistry). (I turned 16 in 1980, by the way.)

What caused my conversion? A lot of it was Watergate. I tried to figure what was going on in Watergate, and the Republican defense of Nixon just made no sense. I grew deeply suspicious of conservatism because I didn’t really think that the Republican version of events really made any sense.

What really pushed me over the edge was how lame Ronald Reagan was. I remember 1980 really well. I asked people what was so great about this guy and the answers were not very convincing. And then I watched the press fawn over him and give him a pass on everything he said for four years. By 1984, I was DONE with the GOP. I happily voted for Mondale in 1984.

The big difference between Republicans and Democrats is that the Democrats at least seem to be trying to attract honest decent smart people. The Republicans going after their voting base seem all too often like a crooked lawyer trying to fill his jury with rubes and nitwits because he has a weak case.

Thanks for the link.

I would so fork over serious cash to be at the netroots nation panel on who is a street credible DFH and who is a latte sipping elitist douchebag featuring HTML, Brad and Matt with, as moderator, a moderate, reasonable, pacifist new global latte sipping H-bomb.

The real deal is, a lot of the people who wanted Nixon impeached really didn’t care about a bunch of second-rate burglars and the rule of law and all that fancy-sounding stuff. They just plain didn’t like him, for reasons that probably nobody can explain. Maybe it was the stubble, maybe it was the Cambodia stuff, but what it comes down to is that they, dirty fucking hippies that they were, opposed him for the wrong reason. Which makes them wrong. Which, interestingly enough, makes Nixon right. It’s simple.

Somebody is stealing my schtick.

Parody trolls. Hmf.

Hmm, just browsing S,N! and found this delightful little Maoist groupthink confessional thread. Lo and behold, liberals are mentioning my name even when I’m not posting!. Glad to see I’m under your skin on your minds.

I know you liberals enjoyed reading about how McCain is leading likely voters by four percentage votes (a positive swing of ten points over the last thirty days), so here is some good news that, for a liberal, will be bad news. Enjoy, Maoists!

I haven’t read the whole thread, but something that people rarely mention is that it’s not only self-serving to rail against “knee-jerk pacifism,” it’s also just plain ridiculous.

Imagine the following conversation:

Matthew Yglesias: Did you hear? Some guy just shot up the church down the street!

You: Oh my god! That’s horrible!

Matthew Yglesias: Oh, jeez, more of your knee-jerk anti-church-shooting attitude. Look, shouldn’t you wait for all the facts before you just assume it was a bad thing that this church was shot up?

Now, does that make any damn sense at all?

If somebody is against all wars, it’s not something they just decided at random. A person is anti-war because they think all wars have some sort of negative quality in common. For example, maybe you’re against war because all wars kill innocent people and the benefits never justify that cost.

If you’re against all wars for that reason, that’s also the reason you’re against the Iraq war: You think the Iraq war, specifically, will kill a lot of innocent people and have negligible benefits for them and us.

Now, is that an irrational belief?

It’s just like the church shooting scenario above; you assume that all church shootings have certain negative features in common, based on your knowledge of past church shootings. You are just going to assume that a church shooting is bad unless some very unusual evidence comes up to prove that a given shooting was not bad.

There’s nothing wrong with this at all; it’s a very sane approach to the world.

To say that “knee-jerk pacifism” was a bad reason to be against the war is to argue one of two things: Either war turns out to be really kickass awesome just as often as it turns out bad, or, there was very good reason to believe that the Iraq war was anomalous and wouldn’t turn out like most wars.

Neither of these positions strikes me as the least bit credible.

Oh, I caught something skimming the thread:

Doctorb: Plus, heck, unthinking knee-jerk pacifism is right like 99 times out of 100.

If it’s right 99% of the time, it’s not really “unthinking”, is it? “I’m going to adopt as my default position the one that is pretty much always right” is an eminently logical thing to do.

Which I’m not saying is something the good Doctorb would disagree with, just to be clear. But Matt thinks it’s unserious to adapt the position that is usually correct. And for that, he is a dope.

I’m just tired of Matt trying some new food or hearing a new song and acting like it was invented or written specifically for him, or in fact none of us exist until we happen to bruise his fragile consciousness. I find him to be profoundly lacking in empathy. I think he simply doesn’t understand other humans. It is offputting. He is Kevin Drum’s younger more milquetoasty brother-in-training. I’m counting the days until he posts about In and Out’s secret menu. It will be painful.

Christopher, thanks for what you said.

I think that if war isn’t the last resort for you, than you don’t know what war is. In every war, people just like you and me die for shit they had nothing to do with. I’m not saying there aren’t times when that simply has to happen because the conditions demand it, but we’re talking about the biggest question you can possibly ask, and if you don’t treat it with the serious skepticism it deserves, then you’re putting yourself above humanity… And you’re probably going to be wrong.

Forgive me, but first of all

(1) HTML rocks for this post alone, even if he has an inexplicable and bizarre chip on his shoulder about “identity” politics. I can forgive, yes I can.

(2) Forgive me for linking to my little read blog, but I said what I wanted to say about this sort of thing and don’t have it in me to improveon it. Yes, it’s about Canada’s very own overrated philosopher-king whom we call “Iggy” up there, but it’s the same thing. You see, to be truly right, you need to have experienced internal suffering. I mean, if you were right in the real world, it means nothing.

Basically, the Medium Lobster exists and has always ruled the world.

The problem with people like Abe is that despite all their sound and fury about learning from their mistakes they clearly haven’t learned anything.

They are still intellectually lazy. Abe, just like McArdle, prattles on about how he was “wrong for the right reasons” while the people who opposed the war were “right for the wrong reasons.” In his mind the people who opposed the war were unserious knee-jerk reactionaries, while the people who supported the war were deeply thoughtful.

They still routinely dismiss those who were right, and they essentially refuse to acknowledge that many people were right for the RIGHT fucking reasons while people like himself were wrong for the WRONG reasons.

It’s all ego preservation. Clearly they were wrong, but their fragile egos just can’t take the fact that some people have better judgement, so they hide behind meaningless platitudes about how they were really right on some theoretical level. Or they find someone else to blame for their poor judgement — the hippies who were opposed to the war smelled bad, so that forced them to be for the war!

They are essentially admitting that instead of approaching problems based on logic they side with whoever wears a nicer suit, but they phrase it in a way that makes it looks like their hands were tied.

They haven’t learned anything.

They still employ the exact same logic, the exact same vernacular, the exact same thought patterns. They chalk up the fact that there were wrong to random luck – they were wrong this time but their reasons were right (lol), so no need to examine *why* they were wrong. No need to re-examine their view that the US is and should be a global hegemony that rules by force. No need to re-examine the “1% doctorine” that serves as cover for any and all aggressive actions.

Being wrong? Yeah, that happens. But learning from mistakes doesn’t automatically happen, you have to put real effort into it. And what these clowns spend their effort on is not learning but in justifying how they were totally right on some philisophical level. That they were somehow superior even in failure.

I wote a blog post on this subject, regarding Slate’s series of “What we got wrong on Iraq.”

http://margalis.blogspot.com/2008/03/what-we-learned-from-iraq-absolutely.html

It’s basically a direct rebuttal to people like Abe, MY and McArdle.

Look at John Cole by comparison. He doesn’t claim to be “wrong for the right reasons” and he doesn’t deride those who were right as lucky hippies and Quakers. He fully admits that he was just a dope.

That takes real balls and courage.

None of this shit about how he was forced into being wrong by Noam Chomsky, or about how he was right according to Plato.

Wow, great post, great comments. The DFHs-were-right-*this-time*-but-so-is-a-clock-twice-a-day-so-there arguments are tired and disingenuous.

First, it’s easy to put the powerless in society on blast. As a matter of fact, this is a hallmark trait of the wingnuts when you go right down every position they take on any given issue, from civil rights to labor laws. So when the Serious Liberals do it to DFHs, who have *no* influence in the daily media-driven narratives, let alone in the corridors of power in DC, it just proves they are having their cake and eating it too: playing the “champions of the center” while enabling the warmongers, respected and on the payroll. Not a bad gig.

Second, these people (and when I say “these people” I guess I have in mind pretty much everybody who supported the invasion in ’03) can never have a conversation about war and the necessity of/lack thereof without invoking World War II. Yeah, right, I get it, there’s a Hitler born every second, so don’t go around appeasing people or you might end up with another holocaust on your hands. Or something.

As for Yglesias, I just like reading him for his commentors, half of whom clown on him pretty regularly. It is El. Oh. El. good stuff.

And I don’t understand this derision of Quakers. I’m definitely not a Quaker, but to me, Quakers are one of this worlds more admirable and worthwhile phenomena. There’s nothing “knee-jerk” about them—they have a reasonably long and illustrious history, much of which would be the moral envy of many other peoples. In this matter, I’d be honoured to be mentioned in the same breath as them, in opposition to the war. It’s a well-considered philosophy that I may not necessarily always agree with, but have a certain amount of difficulty in coming up with an instance where I wouldn’t on these matters.

And I don’t understand this derision of Quakers. […] There’s nothing “knee-jerk” about them

A relative of mine grew up with Quaker schooling and very much appreciated the time set aside each day to be quiet and think. You know, time to be thoughtful and not knee-jerky.

Many of the abolitionists and early feminists were Quakers. (Lucretia Mott for example)

They were probably opposed to slavery for the wrong reasons though, basic human dignity or some shit…

They were probably opposed to slavery for the wrong reasons though, basic human dignity or some shit …

They were very insensitive to the needs of the slavowners, who were used to the system, and had a lot invested in the slaves. Saying that black men and women had rights made it look like the slaveowners were doing something wrong.

They were very insensitive to the needs of the slavowners, who were used to the system, and had a lot invested in the slaves. Saying that black men and women had rights made it look like the slaveowners were doing something wrong.

Heh, indeed.

Threads like this always leave me feeling somewhat shameful, because back in 2003 I was pro-war.

I think there were a lot of reasons for it. Being 17 was one. Living in the countryside, having parents who didn’t buy papers, only really using the internet while at school, for making the IT department freak out (I rarely ever connected at home, since my father often needed a free phone and internet line for his job). But in a way, those were just excuses. I was a dumb kid who was caught up more in the excitement of someone sticking it to a piece of scum like Saddam than thinking about the motives of the people promoting it.

I should point out I was (and still am) in the UK, and not the USA, and while I had a generally low opinion of Bush, I really had no clue about the sort of people around him or many of his more insane policies back then. My thinking was a typically stupid, moralistic “Bush is bad, but Saddam is worse”. I also had some sort of vague idea that there might be something approaching a post-war plan.

I soon came around though, and I realized how badly I had fucked up. Probably the moment Bremner was installed as Colonial Ruler, or just after, when he disbanded the army and the insurgency started to rage. That was when I realized these idiots didn’t have a clue what they were doing, and everything was going to go to hell. And so I started to question how the war was being waged, but that inevitably led back to the question of had the war been justified in the first place?

So I stopped tormenting the IT technicians and used my internet time more effectively. Hell, when I went to University in 2004, I enrolled in an International Relations course (which I eventually went on to study as my main degree) so I could hopefully understand how such a cock-up could happen. And also, with my online connection at the University, I could spend plenty of time, when I wasn’t drinking…uh, studying, to persauade, torment or otherwise mock the pro-war supporters who, in the fall of 2004 were still more than plentiful. Not only online but in meatspace too, at my own University, which has a large American contingent of students, including a fair few Republicans (though they seem to be quite outnumbered by progressives – not just Sensible Liberals but actual progressives).

So yeah, I admit, I screwed up. I screwed up on one of the most important foreign policy questions of the decade, which is almost ironic since I now have a Masters in International Relations. No matter how young I was, I was still wrong, and not much can excuse that. I can only hope my conduct since then, which has been stridently anti-war, anti-Bush, anti-Blair (and Brown, to a lesser extent) and has involved electronically smacking as many of these idiots and fuckwits as possible somehow makes up for my original, almost unforgivable error, in some small way.

But, but, but, didn’t you hear?

Hippies are anti-war!

So it was OK to be for the war because everybody hates hippies!

Snark off:

Thanks for sharing, Cain. I wonder if Abe and MY can see any difference between your response and the ones we were skewering.

Can you?

Can you see the difference?

Give it a try, fellas.

RandomObserver, thanks for being a jerk above. Let’s unpack.

“They are still intellectually lazy. Abe, just like McArdle, prattles on about how he was “wrong for the right reasons” while the people who opposed the war were “right for the wrong reasons.” In his mind the people who opposed the war were unserious knee-jerk reactionaries, while the people who supported the war were deeply thoughtful.”

So I’ve said a ridiculous number of times in these posts that I don’t find people who opposed the war to be uniformly “unserious knee-jerk reactionaries”; I’ve specifically said, multiple times, that those who thought about the subject and got it right deserve my respect and envy.

Nor do I argue that I was “wrong for the right reasons”, AT ALL. What I do say is that, at the time, I found myself agreeing with people I despised, and chalked that up to believing it possible to be “right for the wrong reasons”. The common argument that people in my position make, of being “wrong for the right reasons” in the end, is not one I make. But you’re clearly too lazy (stupid? hard to tell) to actually check that out, so you just assume I said it.

“They still routinely dismiss those who were right, and they essentially refuse to acknowledge that many people were right for the RIGHT fucking reasons while people like himself were wrong for the WRONG reasons.”

Nope. I really don’t do that. And I do the opposite, repeatedly, in my comments.

“It’s all ego preservation. Clearly they were wrong, but their fragile egos just can’t take the fact that some people have better judgement, so they hide behind meaningless platitudes about how they were really right on some theoretical level. Or they find someone else to blame for their poor judgement — the hippies who were opposed to the war smelled bad, so that forced them to be for the war!”

Yeesh. This is just pathetic.

“They are essentially admitting that instead of approaching problems based on logic they side with whoever wears a nicer suit, but they phrase it in a way that makes it looks like their hands were tied.”

Wow. Even more so.

“They still employ the exact same logic, the exact same vernacular, the exact same thought patterns. They chalk up the fact that there were wrong to random luck – they were wrong this time but their reasons were right (lol), so no need to examine *why* they were wrong. No need to re-examine their view that the US is and should be a global hegemony that rules by force. No need to re-examine the “1% doctorine” that serves as cover for any and all aggressive actions.”

So….um, you’re clearly talking about someone else here, so I’ll let this go as well.

“Being wrong? Yeah, that happens. But learning from mistakes doesn’t automatically happen, you have to put real effort into it. And what these clowns spend their effort on is not learning but in justifying how they were totally right on some philisophical level. That they were somehow superior even in failure.”

Obviously grappling with one’s errors takes work. I’ve tried to do some of that since it became clear to me that I was wrong. I’m sure not all of it is apparent in this thread, but I really have spent a lot of time thinking about how I could have been so wrong. And haven’t come to any great conclusions.

“I wote a blog post on this subject, regarding Slate’s series of “What we got wrong on Iraq.”

http://margalis.blogspot.com/2008/03/what-we-learned-from-iraq-absolutely.html

It’s basically a direct rebuttal to people like Abe, MY and McArdle.”

Yeah, I think the Slate series which you reference in that post did lack a certain level of reflection and self-awareness that one would hope to find in such an endeavor. No argument here.

Cain, that’s a cool, honest post. Good for you for being able to write it.

Hoosier, yeah, it is clearly different from my own. Everyone’s journey is different.

Ok, fair enough. That explains The Atlantic and his college career. But how does it explain Think Progress? Or TAP?

It totally makes sense. Here, let me… what’s that over there? It’s a flying saucer!

[ducks into room to bang head against wall]

Um, yeah, Cain’s journey was different. Yup. That’s the lesson. Uh-huh. Yupper. That’s what Abe takes away from that exchange.

Us hippies should just SHUT THE FUCK UP! We make honest decent simple folk make wrong choices because we make them nervous … or something.

Yupper. Abe’s got that one down pat.

Rather ignorant of this Yglesias guy, so I checked out the YouTube link waaaaaaaay up yonder. Just struck me as a typical yuppie douche, whining about how even after his recent promotion, he’s not getting invites to the COOL parties with the free hooch … then he smirks & points out that he changed his mind on Iraq in “that sweet spot” a few weeks in. As you can guess, I didn’t smash my laptop – but it was touch-&-go there for a second or two.

Noone with an adult IQ could’ve failed to see the justifications for “Operation Enduring Payola” were utter tripe from the start. By “from the start” I mean MONTHS before the fist televised flashes of the “Shock & Awe” blood-orgy marathon. Back when Powell was fobbing off fuzzy spy-sat photos (FAR less detailed than everyone knew they should’ve been) & waving around his anthrax jar to put the bug-willies in everyone’s ginch … everyone who WANTED to be convinced, that is.

A brutal war of attrition with a much stronger Iran, a shorter but devastating attack from the US & UK, & an entire decade of harsh sanctions … how does that possibly produce the preconditions for nukes or large-scale WMDs of ANY kind? Osama had a bounty on Hussein’s head, for fuck’s sake, so THAT angle was pure guano from Square One. Leaving one with, yes, you guessed it – sweet bugger-all.

Yet it took this “intellectual” a few WEEKS of mindless bloodshed & anarchy to wake up & smell the toast burning? Way to go, kid – your craven sense of timing has earned you a ticket to the Big Leagues! You can pick up your press-pass & nose-ring at the door: the check is in the mail.

Lo and behold, liberals are mentioning my name even when I’m not posting!

Ah, the irony of the idiotic. You’re a synonym for “brain-dead bipedal maggot” around here, but hey, any press is good press, right, The Trout? Would you like me to pwn your pasty ass on this “McCain is leading among likely voters” shit some more? No? Awwww, too bad, bitch. Oh, & congratulations on your “victory” in Mesopotamia … the next of kin will all be delighted at the news, I’m sure. Golly, why can’t MY home-town be a labyrinth of 15-foot-high blast-walls like that, with 60-70% unemployment & intermittent electricity & sewage, where every trip to the store is a gamble with death? I bet being “liberated” & having “elections” where you can only vote for pre-approved candidates must kick some major ass, huh? Those lucky Iraqis!

WTF -“fist”?!? Damn encroaching senility.

Um, & Abe? Pack it in already.

There’s “sorry, honey, I got 2% when you wanted partly-skimmed” .. then there’s “I helped to enable the needless deaths of a BIG shitload of innocent civilians in an illegal war” … you can stop making it seem like you’re the “partly-skimmed” guy any time now. No, really, stop.
Now.

Maybe the reason some folks ain’t too thrilled with your little confession – with LOTS of defensiveness & ‘tude for sprinkles – is that some of them have friends, loved ones & family who got killed or scarred for life by getting mixed up in the ongoing clusterfuck – or they’re living on a bed of nails waiting for same to come home, & hoping they can stay intact long enough to do so. Your previous POV is why those people are where they are, so don’t get in a huff if they opt to chew you a new one – you’ve earned it. PROTIP: it’s not all about you, dude.

You’ve seen the error of your ways. Yay. We’re all very VERY proud of you. Here’s your cookie.

Abe you came into this thread with a bunch of lame putdowns towards not just the post but the site and all the commenters. In that post you claimed that this was tough for all non-kneejerkers, which of course implies that anyone who didn’t find it tough WAS a kneejerker — effectively dismissing anyone with excellent judgement *because* of their excellent judgement. You deride people for not being as muddled and gullible as yourself.

You then let loose this gem:

All you’re doing right now is reducing the value of your good judgment, by making it clear that you arrived at it not by sound reasoning but by instinctive hatred of those making the arguments for war.

This is a simple restatement of the tired argument that the people here were “right for the wrong reasons.” And that while we were right MY is much more thoughtful and intellectual. Which seems to imply that although he was wrong he still employed superior reasoning that failed due to random happenstance, while those of us suffering from Bush Derangement Syndrome got lucky.

Although you’ve made noise about showing respect for people who nailed it you curiously haven’t shown respect for anyone here, nor have you named any names of the people you do respect. Other than the entirely abstract “I have a lot of respect for people who were right and thoughtful” you haven’t demonstrated any respect whatsoever to anyone. Instead you’ve whined about how people who were wrong aren’t allowed to speak any more, which is quite precious given how the main complaint made in the original post is not only do they still speak they still dominate the discussion.

I’m sure not all of it is apparent in this thread, but I really have spent a lot of time thinking about how I could have been so wrong. And haven’t come to any great conclusions.

What a fucking surprise.

Navel-gazing and writing long screeds about how you’re really trying to learn from your mistakes is not the same as actually learning — it’s theater.

You want to learn? Find some people who were right and thoughtful and compare and contrast their thought process to yours.

Some of them may even be in this thread.

How is it a “journey” when by his own admission he’s in the same place he started? (Abe I mean)

Reminds me of when Megan tried to write a piece about what she learned and she included a joke about how the French are always wrong. It illustrated perfectly that her mindset had not changed a bit.

I hope Abe is noting the different reaction to Cain. People screw up. By itself that’s not a major offense. What gets you in trouble is going after the people who were right for being right.

Very few of the people who were wrong have shown any evidence that some fundamental shift in thinking will prevent them from being wrong again. I’d like to see something like:

1. I now realize that to invade a good country and kill hundreds of thousands you need a really good fucking reason, and the burden is on the warmongers to make their case for a compelling and immediate national interest.

2. I now realize that government officials will exploit and stoke terror in order to justify unrelated activities. (Remember the ads that said smoking pot helps the terrorists?) I vow to be particularly careful when we are in exploitable states.

3. I now realize that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”, while true to some degree, is a meaningless statement that can justify anything. (I don’t see any evidence that Abe fucks goats – could still be a goatfucker though.)

Blah blah blah…I could go on all day. Anything that demonstrates genuine learning.

I don’t see how Abe substantially “helped to enable” any actual war — I mean, it’s not like they put it to a referendum or something.

Abe sez: The fact is, at the time, for all but the knee-jerkers, this was a tough call.

And this is why you piss everybody off, and why Matthew pisses everybody off. “Bush is a fucking liar and a moron and everything he touches turns to shit” was an excellent reason for being against the war. Filthy hippy style knee-jerk pacifism was an excellent reason for being against the war.

I’m sure there’s SOMEBODY out there who was against the war for stupid reasons, but it wasn’t the hippies or the Bush Derangement Syndrome sufferers, as I explained above.

That’s the big problem; it’s not that you, Yglesias et al got it wrong (although that is a problem), it’s that the lot of you can’t stop taking potshots at easy targets, as though the fact that you don’t wear tie-dye shirts or play hacky-sack is some sort of huge personal accomplishment.

Kudos to HTLM & all the commenters, it’s threads like this that are IMHO, the very best of Sadly No. I would have got a shit lot more work done this afternoon, but this is so much better.

Most of the points have already been covered, but I still don’t understand the argument of; “I was 20 when I made a bad call, and iI still can’t admit I was wrong..”. What age is acceptable? Where I was brought up, you had to be able to defend you argument, no matter what age you were. And if you were wrong, you admitted to it, and perhaps learned something. Abe, that’s when your getting your arse handed to you here.

Bu-, bu-, bu –

Hippies!

There were hippies!

I saw the hippes they were in the closet making more hippies and there were lots of hippies and and and one of the hippies smiled at me.

I bent my hippy.

Oh boy, sleep! That’s when I’m a viking.

Er, a hippy. Maybe I should actually sleep.

Uh, by the way, what the heck is a DFH?

Uh, by the way, what the heck is a DFH?

Huh? My ears are burning. It’s freaking me out, man!

“Bush is a fucking liar and a moron and everything he touches turns to shit” was an excellent reason for being against the war.

Even if someone was totally sold on the reasons for war and the general theory they’d still have to square that with the fact that geniuses like Bush and Rumsfeld would be running it.

It wasn’t a good idea, but even a good idea isn’t very good when it’s being implemented by Dumb and Dumber.

I love when the pro-war people complain that they didn’t think Bush and Rumsfeld would screw up so badly. Huh? It’s somehow surprising that guy unfit to run a Dairy Queen can’t plan and execute an invasion and postwar occupation?

I’d also note that it was absolutely clear that there was no real postwar plan and as far as I could tell none of the “sensible liberals” were at all bothered by that. I’m not sure how believing that magical fairies would clean up the mess qualifies as sober and serious.

Holy shit, what a blockbuster of a carnival of a tsunami of a freakin’ juggernaut! What a conversation! Mad props, HTML Mencken, Candy, Righteous Bubba, Sockpuppet #47, and all! I’m kinda pissed to have missed it.

One thought. A lot of people here have long, complex, well-argued reasons that Abe’s statements piss them off. As far as I am concerned, the whole discussion comes down to something very simple.

Abe admits he was wrong about Iraq, but still finds it necessary to point out the smelly, unserious hippies who were against the war just because they are against war on an emotional, un-thinking level. Abe considers these hippies to be the counter point to emotional, knee-jerk pro-war people.

Now, that’s fine by me Abe. You can totally feel like that, and think that. And I suppose it makes sense, from your point of view.

What you should realize, though, Abe, if you are still reading, is that this joint is basically dirty fucking smelly-ass hippy central. Scratch almost any of us commenting here and you will find an emotionally anti-war, anti-Imperialist hippy or anarchist or punk or slacker or nigger of some shape, color or kind.

Whatever we are called, we are basicaly that cohort, the cohort that seems so unreasonable to you. So when communicating with us, assurances that you are more reasonable than the DFH’s will just sound like you telling us you’re more reasonable than us. It doesn’t mean we can’t communicate, or have to hate each other, or whatever, it’s just that there’s a chasm we’re communicating across whether you can see it or not.

Kevin Drum’s younger more milquetoasty

How can “more milquetoasty than Drum” even exist? The mind boggles.

Haven’t read all of the comments yet, but this from Abe jumped out at me:
But as an American, at the time I was primarily reading American news sources, which made it much harder to arrive at that conclusion. And one of the sentiments I got from reading TS was that, while perhaps a majority of world opinion believed the war was stupid, the majority of the world’s intelligence services believed Saddam had or was close to having nukes.

They were trying to link Saddam to Al-Queda, which was a false statement, as any cursory research would have told you. That’s what they started with. Then they moved on to “Saddam has nukes”, which again was wrong, since there wasn’t any evidence that he had any, at least that the UN weapons inspectors could find. And in there, every so often, they would throw out “humanitarian reasons”, hoping that hawkish liberals would take the bait.

What should have tipped off everyone that this was a scam was the fact that to avoid war and prove that he didn’t have nukes, Saddam was going to let the weapons inspectors in to facilities with unrestricted access, so as to avoid war. Instead, the Bush administration yelled “TOO LATE, MOTHERFUCKA!” and “WE CAN’T WAIT FOR THE MUSHROOM CLOUDS!” and invaded anyway, without letting the inspectors complete their review, which is what they wanted to do – if they had let the inspectors do their job, they would have come to the same post-war conclusion, except without that war part.

Saddam was an asshole dictator, but he wasn’t stupid.

Also, during this time, I was reading American news sources, but mostly watching TV in the bar. Maybe your time was limited, and you didn’t have nearly enough time nor beer in the day to read or watch TV.

Fast forward, and Preznit John McCain is winding down his second term, amid cabinet scandals. Some other country with no obviously singular strategic value needs action, now, for some unclear reason other than mutual dislike. Maybe it’s Iran. Now some new gang of pundits, formerly bloggers, bats it out on the funny pages and their opinions vary somewhere between cautious intervention and intervention with guns blazing. Will people look at you funny when you shout at the screen? Will you be pissed when someone calls your anti-war opinion a reflex, and that this time it’s really different? That’s why these guys are angry.

Pfft. He’ll fall off the peace wagon on the first bump.

I’m with you, atheist. Can’t believe I missed this one in real time, and can’t remember the last time I read an entire thread after the fact simply because I couldn’t stop reading.

If I might add one tiny little point . . .

Abe considers these hippies to be the counter point to emotional, knee-jerk pro-war people [. . .] What you should realize, though, Abe, if you are still reading, is that this joint is basically dirty fucking smelly-ass hippy central.

And you should also realize, Abe, that this equivalence you’ve asserted between knee-jerk warheads and knee-jerk hippies has a problem beyond the logical and rhetorical ones articulated by others here: the default position of the knee-jerk warheads gets a whole lot of people dead while the default position of the knee-jerk hippies does its level best to avoid that. That’s gotta be worth at least a moment’s reflection, doesn’t it?

Let’s see — I aspired to hippiedom in the 60s, I pretty much achieved it in the 70s, I had to confess that I was no longer one in the 80s, I kinda forgot about it in the 90s, and now I aspire to being one all over again? Dude, if that ain’t a karmic circle …

In his mind the people who opposed the war were unserious knee-jerk reactionaries, while the people who supported the war were deeply thoughtful.

Sometimes it takes a great deal of deep thought to reach a good delusion.

Sorry RandomObserver, I blew the blockquote.

I don’t give a fuck about Abe and his “journey” other than I think he sucks for making this otherwise great post and thread all about himself and ensuring that it would contain about 150 comments too many. As for Yglesias and others like him, I’ll consider them redeemed and trustworthy if in say 2017 we have a new Republican president marketing a new war to us and they stand up and say “NFW, look at my mistakes in 2002-3 and learn from them. Don’t be a dumbass like I was.” In such a scenario they’d be pretty useful but I’m not much more optimistic than HTML Mencken probably is that it would play out that way. As for the talk of forgiveness for pundits like him, WTF? Forgiveness is for friends and family members who fuck up. Not for dime a dozen bloggers few of us are ever going to have any kind of relationship with.

I’m sure this is way too late, but the “I was suckered by the American press” (implying non-Americans just can’t get it right) has to ignore the fact that McClatchy (nee Knight Ridder) basically had it right the entire time. They were like publishing good info in like, American newspapers and everything. And they weren’t alone, even if most of the faux journalists had it bass ackwards.

All you’re doing right now is reducing the value of your good judgment, by making it clear that you arrived at it not by sound reasoning but by instinctive hatred of those making the arguments for war.

This is a simple restatement of the tired argument that the people here were “right for the wrong reasons.”

It’s also, you know, A HORRIBLE ARGUMENT. It ignores the possibility that whatever “instinctive hatred” we may feel came into being not because we just like hating people who disagree with us, but because we were horrified at what we saw happening as the war unfolded.

In other words, when the buildup was going on, I had a bad feeling that it was going to turn out badly. Not hate, just worry. Even though I now hate the warmongers with a white-hot hated of 1,000 suns, that hate still isn’t passionate enough to go back in time and affect the way I “arrived at” “my good judgement.”

delightful little Maoist groupthink confessional thread

It takes a special brand of delusional thinking to call a heated argument “Maoist groupthink”. You are one odd bird.

Right reasons? Wrong reasons?

You know, in the real world beyond physics class where you get partial credit for showing your work, out here in the real world, the primary thing is arriving at correct solutions. some sort of functional way of dealing with problems.

As has been pointed out, it did NOT take a hell of a lot of work to figure out reasons that a war in Iraq was a bad, bad solution.
For me, it only took two points:

1. Bush. Molly Ivins had spent the better part of decade documenting just how much of a shallow, ignorant greedy fuckup he is. When somebody wholly untrustworthy tries to sell you something, face value is NOT where you want to be. And that’s not BDS, that’s frickin HISTORY.

2. War is a crappy solution that has NEVER, by itself, made things better. Primarily through the wholesale destruction and murder inherent. Yes, that’s a knee-jerk pacifist attitude, but as pointed out well above, it’s an attitude that’s RIGHT. due to the costs inherent in war, it is entirely the responsibility of the people pushing it that they provide, in clear, detailed terms, just why it is necessary and how it will accomplish something positive.

WWII counts too; the war itself didn’t really accomplish anything productive by itself; it decimated half the world. It was the liberal style reconstruction that made the world peaceful and profitable. Until, that is Dick Cheney showed up.

That’s really all it takes to come down on the right side. And the reasons WHY just don’t matter. In the long run, of course, they do because being consistently right becomes a valuable commodity.

And THAT is ultimately the problem with the established punditry. They are consistently NOT right, and being replaced with somebody who is right more often is never even in the cards. In the holy market place the Right venerates, somebody who is catastrophically wrong a couple times, or wrong about a lot of little things, gets booted before irreparable harm is done (Carly Fiorina, anybody).

Abe was wrong about the Iraq war. I was right. Underlying reasons are bullshit; next time war comes up as a solution, I will oppose it until someone conclusively demonstrates that it accomplishes something; I don’t know what someone like Abe will do, but I would bet that given his arguments above, he will get all excited and swept up in the imperialist grandeur again, and rationalize it afterward. Again.

Speaking of which, how does he fall on the Georgia-Russia thing?

Forgiveness is for friends and family members who fuck up. Not for dime a dozen bloggers few of us are ever going to have any kind of relationship with.

Exactly.

Abe said,

Jesus, I’ve never even been to southern Cali. Use the word “like” once (as the kids do these days, gramps, even outside the Valley) and trash your cred forever.

A rich conservative is on his death bed, and is talking to his lawyer abuot his obituary.

“Look, I gave millions to the hospital to open a wing for kidney disease, but will they call me a philathropist? No.

I owned companies worth in excess of a billion dollars, but will they call me a tycoon? No.

But suck just ONE COCK…..”

Hoosier X said:

“Thanks for sharing, Cain. I wonder if Abe and MY can see any difference between your response and the ones we were skewering.”

Not a problem, and I hope so. It doesn’t seem too likely right now, but I’ll reiterate my point. The point is to realize that you, the pro-war supporter, despite any good intentions you had, were wrong. Furthermore, the idea is to not try and justify yourself by claiming that everyone who was originally against the war was doing so simply out of some knee-jerk reaction against Bush or war in general, and that you, the ‘deep thinker’ who took time to mull over the pros and cons, are the better person.

When I actually saw the amount of information that had been collected by various sites, undermining the rationale for the war, that had been published before the war had even started, I was originally quite shocked. Furthermore, when I read about the backgrounds of the Bush administration, their ideological convictions and their experience under President’s like Nixon…anyone who knew that stuff beforehand should have had alarm bells going off in their head.

And then we can into the problems of preventative war as a major plank of foreign policy (and indeed one calculated to make the world more unstable), the issues of those who would benefit from the aftermath of such a war, that failed states, which are sometimes an outcome of destructive wars, are the perfect bases for international terrorism, the bullshit WMD scare, the Bin Laden links etc etc… You get the point. This war could be and was challenged on factual, moral, strategic and legal grounds. Of course, the press did not help whatsoever in getting those arguments across, but if you looked, you could find them.

Random Observer said:

People screw up. By itself that’s not a major offense. What gets you in trouble is going after the people who were right for being right.

Nail on the head there. Most people had good reasons for being against the war. Taking the time to listen to them, as individuals and not as DFH’s, or peaceniks, or Trot scum or whatever label was being given in your area, to listen through their reasoning instead of just dismissing them on the basis of that label might have been a good idea. I wish I had done it more often, though I was not vehemently pro-war in the way some people were. Listening to them might show they had arguments which were valid from the outset.

I find myself imagining a Peanuts cartoon in which Charlie Brown’s friends reassure him that Yes, the DFHs might have been correct with their predictions that Lucy would pull the ball away, but they get no credit for it since they were right for the wrong reasons — being motivated by knee-jerk anti-Lucyism.

Gav, there are those of us who wanted to send Afghanistan a message (in the form of 50,000 US soldiers) in 1999, yet who opposed the Iraq war entirely.

We are called DFH’s. We are ignored due to insufficient fealty.

Sorry, the above was addressed to HTML, not Gav.

Wow, I see I missed out on a good dustup. That’s what I get for not checking here every day.

For the record, I agree with Abe.

For myself, I’ll say this: HTML, Liberal != DFH.

the “I was suckered by the American press” (implying non-Americans just can’t get it right) has to ignore the fact that McClatchy (nee Knight Ridder) basically had it right the entire time.

There were many people (myself for instance) who never heard of Knight-Ridder or McClatchy until 2005 or so. How the fuck is that supposed to help us make a decision in 2003?

Great, Molly Ivins had been editorializing for decades that GWB was an asshat. Who the hell was Molly Ivins in 2003? I lived in frickin’ Texas from 1996 to now; I didn’t need Ivins to tell me what I already knew. Call me a low-information voter; but guess what- I (and we) still get a vote. And I and others simply could not conceive that even a definitive asshat like GWB would lie the country into war; if nothing else, we expected his advisors to restrain him. We trusted that our government would not commit American lives to such a venture without adequate information. We were wrong about that.

You guys are all quick to jump out there with “well I had the poop and you didn’t so nyah and STFU .” That’s great. Who’s fault is it that 80% of the American people supported GWB after 9/11, if all this info about what a prick he is was out there and had been for decades? How do you explain that? Yeah, it’s all a conspiracy and Karl Rove and Nixonland. Awesome. So what do you intend to do about it? Ripping the heads off of everyone who comes in and admits they were wrong or misled and now support your position seems to me to be a somewhat lacking strategy for advancing your cause.

Now as far as Yglesias, let me say it again: Who the fuck is Matt Yglesias? He doesn’t get a vote in Congress. He doesn’t set policy. He’s a pundit. Yeah, it might be annoying to you that he doesn’t trash McArdle who he worked beside for years and probably knows personally. It’s aggravating that the Village is a reality and that these people control our “national discourse.” But guess what- bitching about it on Sadly, No is going to have exactly ZERO effect in regard to changing that circumstance. Direct your ire towards something useful; otherwise you’re just contributing to global warming.

I think it was pretty clear in the thread—it’s not being wrong about the war that’s the issue, it’s being wrong, and, regardless of whether you’ve come around or not, attacking those who were right or passive-aggressively defending your wrongness as MY sometimes does.

If you can’t flat-out admit you were wrong, you are probably going to support the next war that is sold on the American public the way the Iraq war was. It calls your judgment into question. And to attack those who were right like MY does speaks volumes about him.

Nerve Pylon!

Hey, guys, it turns out In N’ Our recently added a secret menu. Let me tell you about the ins and outs. Ready for some hep lingo? So, if you order something “animal style”…frankly, I prefer Bartley’s where I went when I was attending Harvard.

Can’t Yglesias get any points for having grown up a bit? When he was gung-ho pro Iraq he was -what- maybe 22 years old? Smart kids going through Harvard cannot be expected to have any moral compass.