But whatever. I’ll stop now.

But why? It was just getting good…

I’ll stop now.
Not a moment too soon. Y’know what the wingnuts love even more than having moderate liberals in charge on the left? Having folks like you doing their damndest to alienate the majority of the Democratic party. Nader ’08, baby!

Blarg. I should probably put in there somewhere that a minority of progressive bloggers got the war wrong, because real progressive bloggers are just going to be right, usually, on such a subject.

Simply *partisan* bloggers, on the other hand, can fall for any stupid wingnut thing. And they do.

Should we call the Swedes “Democratic Socialists”?

Brad DeLong

Sniff Professor Booty was pro-war! But I alienate! All in all, I’d rather alienate.

And I’m not a Ralph voter, so a happy fuck ya very much to that avenue of argument, thanks.

Dr. DeLong has me there.

Damn, he’s good.

The thing is, who gives a shit about what a 12 year old Ezra Klein thought and a whatever year old Matty Y, thought? I mean I give a shit that they are still doing the same shooting their mouth off in the pundit-for-life pipeline, while probably learning nothing from any of it. They were certainly qualified to have opinions previously as ordinary citizens, but those opinions are not those who are expert in anything, just emanations from some chumps who read a lot and chew some food for us little babies. I actually get more pissed about those guys all the time, even though they remain affable, but soon-to-be media elite.

Oh the Booty- he doesn’t like it when Matt Y. gets ripped on. Booty has skeletons in the bathroom reading pile, I can assure you.

Still, Dr. DeLong, social democrats in Sweden are several shades bluer, if you take my meaning, than Kevin Drum could ever be even if he put on patchouli and moved to a commune. Which was my point. But you did get me good there, I admit. Touche.

I would ask if Prof. Booty would prefer 8 years of, say, Rudy Giuliani as just punishment for feeling alienated. Let’s all hug. I love how shitting on the constitution isn’t alienating, but calling careerist Matt Yglesias a chump once in awhile is?

im in ur blog jokin about ur endangered species

PP — it’s cuz I don’t think they’ve substantively changed how they think. The values that made them choose what they did then are values they still hold. They’ll be idiots again, I’m sure of it. They only look like they’ve changed now because Bush has driven them to such despair.

Some caveats. Marshall does original reporting. He’s awesome and can be a conservative for all I care. Also, he’s always been honest about his ideology. Stoller does great organizing work and is mostly into domestic politics; also I think he has changed his assumptions. Yglesias’ only value is as a pundit. There’s a billion progressive pundits, and 90 percent of them have been better on the issues than he or Drum.

I wonder if the entire notion of a Punditocracy must be annihilated. Actually I don’t wonder. It must.

Here’s the problem. A whole buncha the goddam world went insane on 9/11. All of a sudden, it was ok to aggressively invade and occupy nations we were at peace with. It was ok to torture. It was ok to take people and hold them without due process. It was ok to wiretap without a warrant.

Where these people are guilty, and why I am inclined to forgive them, is even though I always knew it was wrong, it was obvious that the world would come to it’s senses.

Hell, I WANT the world to come to its senses.

It’s time for the world to come to it’s senses.

Can we accept that comming to your fucking senses is better than the alternative?

mikey

Yeah, it is, mikey, but what if your senses aren’t that good even when you come back to them?

I don’t think Yglesias’ are.

i had the opportunity to meet david cameron, the head of the conservative party in the UK, at a hollywood do a few months ago. his positions on a host of issues (health care, the environment, various regulations and general governance strategy) placed him to the left of any of the bloggers above. he’s a european conservative. i know that in our world only america exists or has ever existed, but you can look at a host of euro conservative from the now dead pim fortuyn to the danish right to realize just how recidivist our alleged blogosleftosphere really is.

fuck man, the righties all up in here are for realz, and we just don’t bring it. yglesias and drum and delong are all very smart people angling for (and finding) work–and you get that work from the establishment, however to the right of the left of center they are. digby (cuz he doesn’t care), kos (because he built his own machine), atrios (cuz he doesn’t seem to be careering, or if he is he’s hooked up with the true progressives) and a host of other mainstream lefties are the truth because they aren’t chasing the sinecure.

it’s not complicated. i dream of making “Chinatown” and getting my oscar, but i will do whatever i have to in order to keep the lifestyle going (imdb me and you will see i’m not kidding). i’m careering. that’s that. it’s ok to me because all i do is make movies–who cares really?

these guys are trying to influence public policy. they want our traffic without having our moral bearing.

I’m still waiting for definitive proof that the “world” (i.e., a big chunk of the US) will come to its senses — or that they ever had any senses to come to.

Yglesias, who has railed against Left populism, who is if anything to the right of Brad DeLong on Free Trade, who gave his blessing for a stupid fucking war, actually thinks he’s some kind of flaming Lefty.

Well, to be fair, he did grow up in a world where CNN is “liberally biased”, Hillary Clinton is a “radical left-wing feminazi”, and Fox News is “fair and balanced.” I imagine that would really mess with your mind.

Old folks like me who got acquainted with the media BRL*, we remember the Fairness Doctrine and got to comment on FCC license renewals, and…sigh. The good old days.

But if they ever allowed anyone left of Joe Lieberman on TV, how ever would John McCain be able to pass himself off as a “moderate”?

*Before Rush Limbaugh.

Here’s what Shrum said on the Daily Show last night:
“…it wasn’t just the consultants; every national security expert in the Democratic Party was for the war. The blogosphere was alot more right about Iraq than all the experts in the Democratic Party.”

Clear as bells he is referring to the blogs that said NO to the invasion.

Drum actually touches the economy in his “oh by the way” way. It is fine for whomever to give random thoughts on daily events, but once you get paid for it, you better treat it like a Gift from God, that means due diligence assholes. God, Digby’s posts (and Greenwald) (and Billmon’s did) make it actually seem like they’ve read up on their stuff and they have a sense of history beyond three fucking years ago. It might sound like ageism, but it is more lazy-ism.

JMM rocks because he actually cares to do the job of the media he criticises. He offers actual analysis based on actual reporting, he’s not a pleasing, rosy-cheeked “progressive” magic fucking 8 ball.

And I don’t know if I even mind Matt and Ezra that much, but I sure hate the idea of them filling a market niche for Bush-league Broders. They can’t even be real nerd-burgers.

here’s the video of Shrum

Oh, don’t stop now. While catching up on the blogs tonight I read this about Obama and how he has put up a disclaimer about his aide saying Libby shouldn’t go to jail, blah, blah, blah. Here’s a link, http://electioncentral.tpmcafe.com/blog/electioncentral/2007/jun/13/obama_opposes_libby_pardon. What just floored me was that Obama said he hadn’t paid close enough attention to the trial to really comment but…. Didn’t pay close enough attention to the trial? He wants to lead the country but was just really too busy to get the scoop on this trial? I”m working two jobs and I know what went down at the trial for fucks sake. That’s all I needed to read in regards to Obama for president. Next.

Robert, I don’t think Yglesias is a hack, really. He is a careerist, it’s true. But I really do think he believes in the mostly mealy-mouthed centrist crap-positions he takes. He is capable of burning a bridge — with Marty Peretz, for example (MY’s finest hour).

But what you said about Cameron and Euro politics? Yup.

I got to repeat it, I don’t get many of these:

“pleasing, rosy-cheeked “progressiveâ€? magic fucking 8 ball.”

digby (cuz he doesn’t care)

Isn’t Digby a she?

I actually agree. But here’s where I gotta get off the boat. What’s the alternative? What are we really saying here?

“You rooted for war, now you get it? Well fuck you, go root for war some more”. I mean, we don’t fucking well need anybody else rooting for war. We need pundits speaking out to end the occupation, close gitmo, stop torturing people, stop renditioning (if that’s a word I’m a rabbit) people, we need powerful voices on our side. And sorry, you don’t get to pick. Whether you like it or not, these are powerful voices. The idea here is to end the killing, end the horror, end the bleeding, end the madness, stop the creeping authoritarianism, and if I have to sign a deal with rush limbaugh to do that I’m going to, because it’s not my pride that matters, it’s that kid that’s going out in Baghdad tomorrow who’s coming home in a bag.

Now stop it. Every voice that contributes, everything we can do to end it just one, just ten, just a hundred bodybags fewer is GOOD. Everything else is just posturing…

mikey

It’s all really very simple.

In the blogosphere, “left” and “progressive” are used as synonyms for “Democratic.”

The problem is that, while there are certainly left and progressive (in the sense of “a little to the left of liberal”) in the Democratic Party, most Democrats are neither left, nor progressive, and neither the leading Democratic presidential candidates nor the Democratic Congressional leadership deserves either of these labels. As Shrum correctly noted (there’s a phrase I don’t write often) “every national security expert in the Democratic Party was for the war.” This is not a progressive, let alone a left, party.

Isn’t Digby a she?

To the best of my knowledge, digby’s gender is unknown. Different bloggers deal with this fact by guessing digby’s gender, or by using a conventional “he” (or counterconventional “she”) to refer to digby.

For my part, I just avoid using pronouns in reference to digby.

digby is a digby.

In all fairness there was a progressiove case for the war on Human rights grounds especially in light of the human toll of continued economic sanctions, Iddn’t agree with it in pratical grounds but still the case had its merits.

I wanna be a digby too..

mikey

Interesting. If a significant portion of the wackier portion of the left blogosphere really does start attacking solid progressives like Yglesias and Drum, then I guess you guys really are stupid dirty fucking hippies who have to be marginalized and ignored. Funny, I never would have thought it could be true. I assume you regard DKos as a fascist, given his even greater willingness to support pro-gun centrist Dems.

And I am unclear what it is you think goes on in Sweden that would so blow Matthew Yglesias’s mind. I can’t think of a single element of the Swedish social welfare system or its regulated capitalist economy that Yglesias wouldn’t support. Do you think it’s laughable for, say, Gerhard Schroeder to call himself a “social democrat”, too?

I assume you regard DKos as a fascist, given his even greater willingness to support pro-gun centrist Dems.

Uh, no.

Actually, having read through the thread more carefully, I rescind the tone of what I said above. There is a regression to sanity evident here.

I think part of what’s going on in several internecine blog fights, though, over the past few weeks, is that an increasing leftward and anti-war shift in general public opinion is creating some pressure on those who want to be at the leading edge of the discourse to strike out at those standing just to the center of them. It’s no longer interesting to have a blog railing at Bush and the war now that 70% of the public agrees. This is making it a little more challenging to find something funny and cutting to say. I would just plead with people not to look for their zingers at the expense of people who are basically solid mainstream leftists.

Oh, also, I realize I was completely wrong about Yglesias not having any beef with the Swedish model — he has a libertarian streak that would definitely not work there.

Oh for cryin out loud- much of this thread is about pundits, with a little bit about Yglesias not being really all that much left. The worst part of his statement was this: “After all, lots of progressive bloggers (your truly, Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum, Matt Stoller, Ezra Klein, I’m sure there are more) got this wrong.” What were they basing their opinions on? Deep background intel? They were just the usual chumps reading other chumps like the rest of us. That statement has no meaning. UCSC (or wherever) College Junior Ezra Klein was wrong about the war, perhaps he should have read more Doonesbury, this statement has Meaning. Then he would have gotten in right.

I’m donezoes. Back to the fantasy utopia of the bullz0rs.

no pinko, they aren’t “the usual chumps”. they want to be, or are, or have been, opinion shapers of both kinds: insider DC and general populace. their wrongness is not an accident, not some slight slip, when it came to iraq. it was the consequence of a world that they have chosen to live in because it pays well . this world subsumes radical positions by allowing both left and right extremes to come to the “Center” where you can feel righteous by having a few ideas in which you actually believe while only have to whore yourself on alternate tuesdays.

you’re still a fucking whore. and that “center”, as you know, has moved considerably rightward in this country, with both our major parties a party to that shift. these guys who are smart (like everyone on html’s list) were wrong for a structural reason.

not to get all marxist, but fuck this “internecine blog war” defeatist talk. this is the real fucking world, real people actually making real decisions and real people dying as a result. this is the vanguard, this is where it happens.

it may sound blog triumphalist, but this shit matters. we can drag this motherfuckers kicking and screaming over to the side of goodness or not. and for all the fun we make of wingnutbasementcheetoorckilling, it all matters.

What were they basing their opinions on? Deep background intel? They were just the usual chumps reading other chumps like the rest of us. That statement has no meaning.

I don’t understand what you’re trying to say here. One of the main themes of the progressive blogosphere’s critique over the past 4 years has been precisely that you didn’t need any deep intel to see that the case for war was bogus; you just need to have the right kind of world-constellation, and your bullshit detectors on max. Kevin Drum and MY have overall worldviews which are probably more congruent to mine than are yours; but you and I made the right call on Iraq, and they made the wrong one. What’s so wrong about MY pointing out that there was a liberal-internationalist component of the left blogosphere that didn’t oppose the war? I mean, obviously he’s partly motivated by personal defensiveness, but who among us isn’t?

Should we call the Swedes “Democratic Socialists�?

Or “People’s Republic of IKEA”? “A bunch of smelly moose-lovers”?

Actually Sweden is not lead by the actual social democratic party at the moment, but by what is literally translated as the “Bourgeois alliance”. Heh!

Somewhat worryingly, the new prime minister Reinfeldt considers Bush a man of “enormous presence and wide knowledge”…

this is the vanguard, this is where it happens.

I’ve said this before: I keep feeling like I was cryogenically frozen in 1968 and just woke up. Here’s the thing: the place where people are calling themselves “the vanguard”? That’s generally actually NOT where “it” happens. Or rather, the “it” that happens there usually ends up being a wacky historical footnote, not the main event.

an increasing leftward and anti-war shift in general public opinion is creating some pressure on those who want to be at the leading edge of the discourse to strike out at those standing just to the center of them.

Ding ding ding. Opposition and minority status is like being an expat or living in an unfamiliar city: you’ll make bonds with people who you’d probably either dislike or never encounter in a home environment. When the American community in Ouagadougou could fit in a small room, that you’re Ohio State and the other guy is Michigan doesn’t matter.

And perhaps, just perhaps, you’ll come back home and still shout ‘Michigan suck’ on game day, but be less loathe to spit in the face of the people in maize and blue.

I feel like I would be middle of the road, if the middle of the road hadn’t swerved so far right. I was living that cognitive dissonance. I would pick up Booty’s New Republic and Economist and constantly say to myself “why doesn’t this make sense?” “how is this liberal?” and then I would read the New York Times thinking why is MoDo saying these things? Did she watch the debates between Gore and Bush? Gore is getting shit for sighing? I was giving Gore credit for not stabbing Bush in the fucking throat! On Iraq, you know Colin Powell, that FUCK, convinced a lot of people because that made it seem like “whoa, they have nukes” but even with that entire thing, all I could tell people was “aren’t we committed to Afghanistan? How are we going to make that work? What the helll are we doing? You have an extra 150,000 troops lying around, send them to Afghanistan, where we have everyone in the world’s backing.” We are living in a nightmare here and I think it is fine for Matt Y to get some smack talk- he’s just some guy who had a blog, but now he writes for the Atlantic, home of Andrew Sullivan- what the hell??? Matt Y is some guy bogarding the karaoke mic, maybe he says some good stuff, I’m not gonna give him a gold star. If he wants my respect he can wear his Iraq stance like a fucking albatross, so I can be convinced that he’ll never let that happen again. I want penitence, and I want to know who I can trust again.

Look at me with my potty mouth.

an increasing leftward and anti-war shift in general public opinion is creating some pressure on those who want to be at the leading edge of the discourse to strike out at those standing just to the center of them.

I can only speak for myself: NO.

I’ve always bashed these people, always thought they were fakey-Left de facto Centrist, always thought they were idiots on foriegn policy. It’s just that my politics are now being vindicated in the public’s opinion..

I ain’t no bandwagon jumper. But there are plenty of them out there.

Matt Y is some guy bogarding the karaoke mic, maybe he says some good stuff, I’m not gonna give him a gold star. If he wants my respect he can wear his Iraq stance like a fucking albatross, so I can be convinced that he’ll never let that happen again. I want penitence, and I want to know who I can trust again.

Now that’s the PP I know and love!

I…just…feel…so….lied…to*SOB*

Okay, I take it back: actually Pinko Punko’s worldview and mine seem to congrue pretty closely. I just couldn’t figure that out reading 3bulls! because the language there is this incredibly inventive creole composed of Low Middle Klingon, lolcats and old Janeane Garofalo routines or something, and I’m too hopelessly unhip to parse it…

an increasing leftward and anti-war shift in general public opinion is creating some pressure on those who want to be at the leading edge of the discourse to strike out at those standing just to the center of them.

… Ahem:

When the American community in Ouagadougou could fit in a small room, that you’re Ohio State and the other guy is Michigan doesn’t matter.

But this is not the point. Buckeyes-Wolverines, as epic and important as it is, simply isn’t much more than a football rivalry when compared to the epic and important question of our time, which occurred in 2002, and which was, to wit:

“Should we defy long-standing international agreements by invading and occupying another country for no other reason than we have been frightened by easily punctured vested-interest rhetoric describing what that country might possibly do in some vague future, if this and this and that and some other counter-intuitive circumstance arises?”

The answer to that was emphatically, “No, you cretin.”

The question, again, was THE question of our time, and having got it wrong is emphatically more damning than making an error on some wonkish aspect of the tax code, for example. It was not something that could be got wrong both honestly and intelligently … thus anyone who did get it wrong continues to deserve having one or the other scrutinized.

So Yglesias attempts to re-write history, saying the “progressive blogosphere” got it wrong, when that is patently untrue.

I blogged for the old No War Blog back in 2002, which was an alliance of left and right voices against an invasion of Iraq. It was made up of some of the best anti-war bloggers of the time, the majority of whom were progressive. And that was just a small sampling of the progressive (and other) voices against the war speaking out against it in the then-nascent blogosphere.

So all of this is not really about going Nader on the middle a la 2000, but rather calling out Yglesias for his bullshit.

When the American community in Ouagadougou could fit in a small room, that you’re Ohio State and the other guy is Michigan doesn’t matter.

I’m with Ahem on this one. In fact, I was living in West Africa in 2002 — visiting Ouagadougou, among other places — and some of my American friends there were GOP-voting military and ex-military types. I had never had a friend who’d been in the US military in my life before I lived over there, and precious few who voted GOP. I considered their support for the Iraq war, at the time, an upsetting mistake, but in the context of living in, you know, Ouagadougou and environs, we could still talk about our profound disagreements in ways I might have found hard to, back in the US.

What’s the alternative? What are we really saying here?

We’re saying, mikey, that this guy doesn’t speak for us, and never has. He isn’t one of us.

We’re also saying, shun him. He shouldn’t have such a readership. People who bought that war deserve *no readership* — or, actually, they deserve wingnut readership.

See? Wingnuts will always be for stupid wars. Such things give them purpose in life. So all we can do make damn sure people with wingnutty positions stay on the wingnut side. And those who don’t, stay on our side. Then there will always be a choice for when things go crazy. There will be a brake mechanism in the discourse. With people on both sides guaranteed to buy new wars, that choice won’t exist, there will be no brake.

— All this refers to the internet punditry. We can’t afford to be so choosy about politicians, and we don’t have the power yet to be so choosy about the MSM.

Being civil to someone in front of you, who is wrong (regardless of whether you are in Ouagadougou or Orlando) is obviously a good thing. And their civility right back at you is also a good thing.

But it doesn’t make them less wrong. And it doesn’t give them the right, as per Yglesias, to later contend that you too were wrong way back when, because, you know, you argued about it or something.

Wingnuts will always be for stupid wars. Such things give them purpose in life. So all we can do make damn sure people with wingnutty positions stay on the wingnut side. And those who don’t, stay on our side.

Uh huh. Today in the NY Times, Nick Kristof calls for a greater readiness on the part of the G8 to fund military interventions to provide security in third-world failed states. He does so from the Rwanda-Tanzania border, where he’s just interviewed a woman who has lost numerous children to warlordism in the past few years.

I disagree often with Nick Kristof, but it makes no sense to call him a “wingnut”, and the cause of intervention in Darfur, of which he is the number one opinion-journalism champion, is not a wingnut position. It may arguably be a “stupid war”, but not because those who back it are “wingnuts”. It may even be arguably true that such a war would be part of what gives Nick Kristof a sense of purpose in his life; but that’s because Nick Kristof gets a sense of purpose in his life from trying to focus the world’s attention on the world’s poor, vulnerable, and abused.

The tension on the left between liberal internationalism and anti-militarism is not going to disappear, and it is going to lead some people to back military interventions you disagree with. Your line is not draw-able. George Packer is not a “wingnut”. Neither is MY.

Yeah, I’m not really “over” the Fall of 2002. I doubt I ever will be.

What was scary was how crazy it all was. I mean, the Iraq war made no sense from any perspective. Even if you bought the ideology, which was weird, there was no way the whole thing was ever going to work.

I want to know how the Liberal Hawks managed to talk themselves into the position that it was Perfectly Reasonable to drunkenly participate in the geopolitical policy equivalent of a lager-fueled English football riot.

Because this was no minor boo boo. It was an intellectual and moral fuckup of the highest order.

C’mon, brooksfoe – promoting international cooperation to prevent or cut short genocide is waaaaay different than backing unilateral “pre-emptive” aggression.

Which is what Yglesias did and now falsely claims the “progressive blogosphere” – which is egotistically comprised of him, Kevin Drum, Ezra Klein, Josh Marshall, Matt Stoller and “I’m sure there are more” – also did.

That’s the point of all this – MY rewriting history after making a terrible mistake in judgement.

Well, this thread is a bit worrying.

They were wrong on Iraq. They admiitted it (most, if not all, rather quickly, some even before the invasion).

They have blogospheric important positions, and they have been arguing on “our side” for quite a while.

They are not idiots. Ezra’s health care commentary is good. Matt’s analysis is often right on. Josh is, as mentioned, a rather industrious and notable journalist. Kevin Drum is, uh, Kevin Drum. Infuriating at times, but also a thought-provoker at others. Just like folks here.

This idea that they are hacks is stupid. Made mistakes, sure. Dumb..uh, no.

I was right about Iraq. A good lot of nothing that means now. People are now agreeing with my original position…whee. They are all irredeemable idiots according to this thread, so never mind.

In short, they are not. They are important speakers, and they are all on the same side of us who have always been here on the anti-Iraq side. What more do we want? Casting them as past, current, and future morons is not only inaccurate, but is a patent “look at me, I was right!” type of ego trip that serves no purpose.

Get a gig, write a blog, and crank out a health care series like Ezra and then bitch. As far as being careerist, I went to college, got a job, went to law school, and am now a lawyer. What did you (you meaning HTML and all commentors) do that wasn’t careerist? Matt wrote a personal blog, got hired at Prospect, and is now at the Atlantic. Ezra wrote a personal blog, got to Pandagon, the Prospect, where he remains (and goes on TeeVee and radio shows). Somehow media types are careerist, while the rest of us who have jobs we worked towards aren’t. Funny that.

The underlying message here is “I was right!” Fair enough. So was I. And what, exactly, do we expect to get in return if not converts and allies. You want a check from the global community recognizing your wisdom in the amount of how many dollars?

Being right is important, but at this point, now that a lot of the rest of the world has caught up to your original and fundamentally correct insight, this sounds a lot like trying to prove that you bought REMs “Murmur” album way, way before Matt, Ezra, Josh, or Kevin did. And dammit, no one is giving you credit for it.

Who cares? The I Was Right Before They Figured It Out is all about you, not about what they are currently writing, doing, and trying to do. It is silly. You are criticizing past mistakes that those involved have tried to rectify, repeatedly and passionately.

But, if you think the fact they were wrong originally is some kind of sacred stain, so be it. I just don’t see the point.

The only way Iraq could have made even the slightest sense was Saddam having nukes, period. I don’t think Matty Y should get shunned but even if he says lots of good stuff, you should really accord his saying that the same weight as your buddy from the checkout line at Safeway that happened to go to Harvard. That’s about it. You and some random dude agree- great, he’s not insane! Don’t want to keep jumping on the Digby bandwagon, but you know, if he said something, I might go for it. Frankly, there are very few people in the blogoshpere I would stake my non-existent immortal soul’s well-being on (pretend that symbolizes something super important), and off the top of my head I can only think of Berube right now. Oh, and Gavin, if it the devil declared a photoshop challenge.

Humanitarian military intervention is one thing, but another fallout of our Iraq misadventure is that we’re not likely to have that anytime soon. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature, Cheney would say.

Liberal Hawkishness hasn’t been popular to the Left masses since Vietnam. Yet isn’t it funny, even after Iraq, how all the cushy pulpits in “Leftwing” punditry are taken by Liberal Hawks — or “former” Liberal Hawks?

Kristof’s an idiot. I’m not against agitation for intervention in Darfur per se, but let someone with a decent fucking track record make the case, not some nimrod who signs onto every crusade that is humanitarian or painted as humanitarian.

Also, like Elton Beard (someone whose name should be better known than MY’s) says, there’s really no such thing as a Liberal Hawk.

abject funk – I think the main point here is that Yglesias is rewriting history today re: the progressive blogosphere’s rightness/wrongness on Iraq … not back in 2002 and then atoning for it in yeoman-like fashion ever since.

D.A.:

Your point is well-taken. His (MY’s) comment does seem to (intentionally or unintentionally) erase a lot of the saner are more correct positions that were being voiced at the time.

I will agree that anyone with even a mild understanding of how things were operating at the time would have been against the war for any number of reasons. It was always going to be a mess and a mistake, no matter how “well” things went. I knew that, and I’m not all that bright. I just know that war is a bad idea in almost all cases.

MY has commented on this (that is, being sucked into supporting the war), particularly in his “Incompetence Dodge” articles. That said, his conversion to our opinion of this tragic undertaking does not remove his initial support for the war. However, his forceful writings since then mark him as an important and influential supporter of our position. He ain’t no dummy, and in fact he is a real strong ally in my opinion.

That said, smelly hippies like Atrios, HTML and others are justified in their insistence that the whole situation wan’t that hard to figure out even back in 2001, 2002 and 2003. With that in mind, I am all about letting the late-bloomers into our camp, especially those who have done a full 180 and are now (for better or worse) the largest voices on the intertubes advocating for a path that us treasonous anti-war heathens have advocated from the get-go.

The unfortunately accurate point of MY’s post is that no one who was against the war was allowed to have a voice that was widely shared. Even on the internet. It is a scary and accurate recognition.

The president of the Auto Club would like to advise all drivers & internet bloviators to stay the hell out of the middle of the road, because YOU’LL GET YOUR SORRY COMPROMISING ASS RUN OVER!!!
And don’t most or all of these clowns (“your [sic] truly, Josh Marshall, Kevin Drum, Matt Stoller, Ezra Klein, I’m sure there are more”) live in Washington DeCeit? I’m guessing there’s plenty of swamp gas still there, rising from under all the concrete, and it’s having a seriously deleterious effect on all the residents, resulting in group-think of the worst kind.

Liberal Hawkishness hasn’t been popular to the Left masses since Vietnam.

Were you, like, in the United States during the Bosnian civil war? Rwanda? Kosovo? And “popular to the Left masses”…a. I thought we were talking about liberal opinion journalists and bloggers, not “Left masses”; and b. what Left masses?

This is a complicated world. There are going to be situations where people you agree with on a lot of other things have a different opinion than you do about whether the US should intervene militarily in some situation or other.

Nobody said those guys were hacks, but Ezra BLEW his one big shot this year on health care- Bush proposed a plan and Ezra air-balled it, which is fine, but it showed he was being an Instapundit and not a policy wonk. I just don’t give any special consideration for that. Ezra’s a nice guy. He’s just part of a new Beltway, not as stupid as the old one, but we’ll see where these guys go when next they are tested. Will they bother to ask questions and say “I can’t have an opinion until I know the answers to these important questions” or will they just perform Andrew Sullivan style thought experiments and shit out opinions because it is their job?

You know, seriously, I remember when people were kind of like blah blah Bob Somerby, same old same old, OK get over it whatever. Who is the true genius, now? Who is the prophet, 100% right, showing us everything all over again?

I don’t see how using a track record of success as a qualification for taking a journalist or pundit seriously is a mistake.
The case for war was an obvious test of very basic journalistic capacities. And the problem with being a careerist is that it’s a legitimate question whether a pundit concerned with their career is saying what they believe or what most helpful to pleasing their editor and publisher and reading public.
It isn’t a purity test but a competency test.

I prefer the mantra “Forgive, yes — forget, never.”

Yglesias and Drum and a lot of other “Left” bloggers were wrong, wrong, heinously stupid & dangerously wrong about Iraq. For being that wrong, they are required to make a full apology, plus amends wherever possible, like people in the Catholic church and various nine-step programs are abjured to do as evidence of honest penitence. In the future, I may vote for the same people as Y&D (although possibly not for the same reasons). I may find myself on the same side of any given issue as Y or D, and that might cause me to re-examine my position for pinhole flaws, but I wouldn’t consider it an immediate reason to switch sides. I might even recommend their blogs to others, although that’s pretty unlikely, since even when I agree with their positions I find reading Y or D like eating a five-gallon drum of oatmeal — cardiovascularly correct, but deeply tedious and ultimately unrewarding.

I fully understand your anger, HTML, but while I was arguing against the war back in 2002, I didn’t spend my meagre resources of time & money & energy running a blog like you guys, so I don’t have the credentials to hate Yglesias & the rest of the Sensible Centrists as much as you do. Heck, if *Bob Shrum* is saying something I agree with, it’s possible that even Garry Ruppert or Tony Snow might one day complete an entire sentence that doesn’t include either a lie or a grammatical error or multiple instances of both. Probably Yglesias & His Ilk don’t deserve entry to our political tent, but that’s the problem with big tents — they’re hard to patrol and easy to infiltrate…

Maybe it would help if we thought about Y & D as the political equivalent of recovering alcoholics? They have demonstrated a serious weakness in their intellectual metabolisms, and their actions while under the influence of “Nine Eleven Changed Everything!!!1!!”(tm) have caused harm to other people. Now they’re hit political bottom, and they’re (sort of) asking for forgiveness, and promising they’ll never sup from the Jingoism/Paranoia well again. Which is all very nice, but even if we accept their apologies (and if I understand what I’ve heard about AA correctly, they’re required to apologize but you’re not required to accept) and nod when we spot them across the room at the reunions, we don’t have to take their late-night phone calls, agree with their latest opinions, or loan them the keys to our cars.

[…] amongst the snark, sometimes Sadly, No makes a serious political point that cuts right to heart of current ‘progressive’ discourse: today it’s HTML Mencken (best blogonym evar) that’s taking on soft liberals, […]

Wow, that’s some good stuff right there. Top-notch, HTML.

Although I am not on the boat free-trade wise. Protectionism is not going to save the American worker if he or she has no skills.

Also, what mikey said.

One of the first commenters there NAILED it:

It should be noted that almost every blogger mentioned as getting it wrong was indeed privy to democratic insiders. People who were able to think for themselves, and didn’t automatically defer to authority, got it right. The real lesson in this is that the elite don’t know what they’re talking about, and mutaly reinforce each-other’s bizarre beliefs. I doubt they’re right about trade, economics, or business policy either. Not when those views are clearly coming from the same mutual reinforcement.

It’s amazing that people sitting at home, who are not experts, got this right by virtue of using their brains and having functioning bullshit detectors, while “experts” got it almost universally wrong.

That is amazing, it’s true. But it’s also important to keep in mind that there were (at least) TWO categories of people who tended to see that invading Iraq was crazy: 1. complete outsiders, and 2. real experts — long-time professional foreign service officers, intelligence officers, and academic area experts. Because what was happening was that the machinery of authoritative governmental institutions had been taken over by unqualified ideological hacks, who were bypassing (“stovepiping”) the people and procedures that gave those institutions the authority they were supposed to have.

I think what happened to a lot of liberal hawks with some access to “Beltway insiders” was that they were exposed to a steady stream of propaganda from people and institutions that were supposed to have some authority, and it was just hard for them to believe that all these people were really talking out their asses. They didn’t understand until afterwards that these institutions had been hijacked. But one shouldn’t let the failure of those expert institutions, having been eviscerated by the Bushian nomenklatura, turn into an argument against expertise or institutions in general — an argument that the elites are full of shit and regular joes know better than they do. Indeed, it was exactly that kind of anti-expert argument that the PNAC and OSP were using to brush aside professional objections to their idiotic analyses. We need to rebuild our institutions with qualified experts following proper, reasoned procedures — make them institutions that are worthy of trust.

It’s not hard to see how folks like this can consider themselves “Progressives” when you stop to consider that Woodrow Wilson (on my short list for Worst Preznit Evar) was also a Progressive.

I think the term “Progressive”, whatever it originally meant (Helen Keller considered herself a Progressive, and she was a Socialist) eventually came to mean (and still means) “activist liberal”, instead of “laissez-faire liberal”. Considering my generally low opinion of liberals, I’d consider Progressive an insult, but obviously YMMV.

Progressive is also a cheap (albeit probably unconscious) rhetorical trick to elide the substantive difference between liberals and the Left. Liberals want to be able to inflate their numbers by claiming the Left as part of their grand coalition, and that’s been effective since the days of FDR. Heck, were this still the days of FDR, I probably wouldn’t even mind so much, because at least those of us on the Left got a nice dinner and a movie out of you liberals fucking us back in that day. Back then you gave us Social Security and the CCC and federal funding for the arts – nowadays you just treat us like a booty call; you call us up when you want to get some, but act like you’re ashamed to be seen in public with us.

Ultimately, I think liberals want to be seen as on the Left for the same reason that Republicans want to be seen as good, God-fearing Christians. And the “base” of both groups is apparently too stupid to figure out how they’re being used.

Sorry for the harsh-sounding tone of this….tried to think of ways to soften it up, out of respect for the lotsa online liberal buddies I have, but I just can’t at six in the morning. here’s some cute puppies and kitties to show what I wish I could’ve done better rhetorically.

Maybe it would help if we thought about Y & D as the political equivalent of recovering alcoholics? They have demonstrated a serious weakness in their intellectual metabolisms, and their actions while under the influence of “Nine Eleven Changed Everything!!!1!!�(tm) have caused harm to other people. Now they’re hit political bottom, and they’re (sort of) asking for forgiveness,

Yes, but they aren’t really asking for forgiveness. They are stating that they were wrong, but were all the other lefty bloggers. And, that’s not true. They are not asking for forgiveness so much as attempting to re-write history to make themselves look better. And HTML is right, we should try to keep them from doing it.

Jillian, you are right about the way that ‘liberals’ (if liberals=the Democratic Party) consider ‘the Left’ a reliable bunch of chumps to be used for votes and then ignored.

However, I think you are missing what I consider the main reason that the word ‘progressive’ has become popular. As far as I am concerned, the reason for that is that the word ‘liberal’ has become poisoned by the media (specifically by people like Limbaugh, O’Reilly, et. al.). So all the people who were calling themselves ‘liberals’ are now afraid to.

You are right about the difference between ‘the left’ and ‘liberals’. But you should realize that a huge percentage of the people in the USA can’t tell a ‘leftist’ from a ‘liberal’, and think it’s all the same thing. And that a really large amount of them have a sort of unreasoning tribalist hatred of ‘liberals’, not because they are ‘the left’ but because they are ‘conseravtives’ who don’t like ‘treasonous liberals’.

Why should anybody any time anywhere pay attention to “pundits?” Jonah Goldberg is a “pundit.” ‘Nuff said.

One of the problems right now, I think, is that it’s hard to identify exactly what is required of a liberal blog-pundit who was wrong on Iraq to be forgiven, short of seppuku.

Yglesias is just showing how narrow his perspective was. But I also think there’s a tiny bit of revisionism from his critics: in late 2002, the left blogosphere was much sparser and less structured. DKos and Atrios had been around for a few months, and though there were group sites like MWO, the anti-war movement was carried through sites like Indymedia that were (and are) easy to dismiss as pure DFH.

[One of the problems of the web is that it keeps archives but isn’t good at leaving behind the stuff of synchronic analysis, in the way that a collection of a day’s newspapers or TV broadcasts can permit. So one relies on memory, and my admittedly-hazy memory is of an anti-war online presence that was large but largely undifferentiated.]

My preferred approach for librulhawks would be ‘now sit the next one out’. If you fucked up on Iraq, then leave Iran to those who didn’t. But that’s not going to happen, is it?

I disagree often with Nick Kristof, but it makes no sense to call him a “wingnut�,

Agreed, brooksfoe.

And for the same reason it makes no sense to call Yglesias or Drum (or for that matter Clinton, Obama or Edwards) “leftists.” They aren’t. All these folks are (slightly different varieties of) centrists, even in the rather attenuated spectrum of contemporary U.S. political culture.

Whenever anyone says anything left of where you are, you have flashbacks to the Days of Rage. That, however, is your problem.

The actual existing left as it manifests itself on S,N! is not some Maoist faction with apocalyptic revolutionary fantasies. It’s a bunch of folks who want this war to end ASAP, who want to make sure that we never get involved in another one like it, and would like to see our country pursue a more peaceful foreign policy and a more egalitarian domestic policy.

Doesn’t Yglesias’s success (as well as that of the others) illustrate how those who were wrong about this idiotic war have been punished?

One of the problems right now, I think, is that it’s hard to identify exactly what is required of a liberal blog-pundit who was wrong on Iraq to be forgiven, short of seppuku.

Allow me to make some suggestions….

First, a general repudiation of hawkishness. I am anti-war, not merely anti-Iraq War. I’m not going to be sympathetic with the views of someone who was for this war, now sees that it is a total clusterfuck, but imagines that it could have been done right (say with a different president or more international support), or that there are other countries that we ought to do this to, even if we ought not to have done it to Iraq. It is entirely possible for a hawk to become a dove. But it’s a lot more likely for a hawk to come up with some relatively local explanations for the Iraq mistake while remaining a hawk.

Second, I would want the repentant liberal blog-pundit to address his or her relationship to beltway conventional wisdom. A lot of the rush to war was built on the feeling that “serious” people were all for invading Iraq. And this whole notion of seriousness needs to be rejected. Blog-pundits who bought it into then need to show that now they no longer do. Saying “we were all wrong” is doing precisely the opposite of this.

I think both these things are entirely possible and relatively easy to do. They are far short of seppuku. But, in practice, they’re vanishingly rare.

One of the problems right now, I think, is that it’s hard to identify exactly what is required of a liberal blog-pundit who was wrong on Iraq to be forgiven, short of seppuku.

Well, not implicating the rest of us as having been wrong is a good step. The fact is that Yglesies got it completely wrong and is his own mistake; and it should therefore be a mistake he holds up his own, not as a mistake the larger progressive/left-wing internet presence made.

Otherwise, I agree with I.B. on this.

Now, I perhaps differ from most in that I think seppuku should remain on the table as options to redeem left-wing honor, but I’m a vindictive asshole.

I’d also be willing to go with chopping off of a finger, Yakuza-style.

I am anti-war, not merely anti-Iraq War.

What does that mean, “anti-war”? Anti-which wars? I’m anti-war, too; I think there should never be any more wars. But I don’t get to tell the universe how to behave; all I get to do is offer limited input into how the US government should behave. So the meaningful question is, “under what circumstances should the US use military force?” Do you think the US should not have used military force in Afghanistan against Al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies in the aftermath of 9/11, would be one salient question. (We’ll leave Kosovo out of it for now.)

Because to delineate the spectrum of “the Left” such that it only includes people who opposed the Afghan war would be an arbitrary and personal choice; plenty of people who would be happy if the US economy and social system looked like Sweden’s also supported the Afghanistan war. (As did most Swedes, for that matter.) And if you ARE saying that “the Left” should not include anyone who supported military action in Afghanistan, because “the Left” should be “anti-war”, then you are talking about a Left which will be a permanently marginalized and irrelevant sliver of the American body politic. And that is not a road which those of us who want the US to look more like Sweden ought to follow you down.

In any case, I think you’re leaving the actual criteria which you use for considering someone “leftist” irritatingly vague. What are they?

jcasey:

exactly.

of course they have received new and better gigs. they got wrong what they got wrong because that is what you have to do to be a member of polite washington society. you don’t hired otherwise.

the wrongness didn’t come out of principle, it came out of a desire to belong to a groupthink that was obviously wrong to anyone not connected to it. and that means that if these guys are still connected to it you can trust them to keep being wrong.

What does that mean, “anti-war�? Anti-which wars? I’m anti-war, too; I think there should never be any more wars. But I don’t get to tell the universe how to behave; all I get to do is offer limited input into how the US government should behave. So the meaningful question is, “under what circumstances should the US use military force?� Do you think the US should not have used military force in Afghanistan against Al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies in the aftermath of 9/11, would be one salient question. (We’ll leave Kosovo out of it for now.)

I actually think these are the wrong questions.

The first question should be: how should the U.S., as the world’s only superpower, behave so as to reduce international conflict. Dramatically reducing the size of our military while increasing our commitment to international institutions would seem like good first steps to me. Moving away from a reliance on fossil fuels seems like another good idea. Marginalizing the now all-too-powerful premillenialist Christianist forces in this country that have apocalyptic fantasies about the Middle East might be another.

Although you and I as individual voters have relatively little input in the way our country behaves, since our country is the world’s only superpower, how it behaves has an enormous impact on the amount of violent conflict around the world. Framing questions of war and peace as merely matters involving the U.S.’s reacting to external crises ignores the extent to which the general patterns of American policy, at home and abroad, go a long way towards making the world more or less peaceful.

Secondly, when circumstances do arrive in which the U.S. considers military force, the question is not simply whether or not to do so, but how to do so. And our decisions as citizens to support or oppose particular uses of military force need to take into account how particular American governments are actually likely to use that force.

The Afghanistan War has been a nearly complete failure, despite the fact that it’s frequently declared to be a success. The primary goal of the mission was to capture Bin Laden and put Al Qaeda out of business. That goal utterly failed. The secondary goal was to depose the Taliban and set up a functioning democracy in Afghanistan. The Taliban have been deposed but, nearly six years later, Afghanistan has nothing approaching a functioning democracy and the Taliban are still operating, if not in power.

All of this does not necessarily mean that no military action was called for in Afghanistan. It does suggest very strongly, however, that the actual military action taken by the U.S. in 2001 was mistaken. The fact that this is still a fringe position says a lot about the quality and realism of our political discourse today.

For the record, I don’t think that in order to be “left” one needed to oppose the invasion of Afghanistan. I guess I do think that in order to be left one ought to have had a presumption against such a military action, especially given the regime in power in Washington, DC in the fall of 2001. To support the invasion, such a presumption would have had to be overcome by a pretty powerful and concrete argument for the necessity and likely efficacy of the particular military action the U.S. was likely to undertake. The actual political question we faced as American citizens in the fall of 2001 was not, in the abstract, “is military action in Afghanistan justified?,” but rather something more narrow and concrete: “should we support an invasion of Afghanistan as imagined by the Bush administration?” You go to war (or not) with the administration you have, not one you might like to have.

Yglesias […] actually thinks he’s some kind of flaming lefty.

Of course he does. Remember, he’s “big media Matt” (unless I’m getting Atriosonyms confused). And people in the media do tend to define themselves (believing the “liberal media” spin) as the left edge of acceptible discourse. In fact, getting journalists to think of themselves as leftists (and thus to find people to the left of them as being outrageous moonbats; and also thus to figure that they provided the “left wing spin” — which even if they were leftists, they are not spin-meisters and hence cannot be expected to do so well at that — so that they need only get right wing voices in their reportage, because they themselves would provide the “balance” as liberals and indeed that if they quoted liberals, they would appear to be playing favorites) it’s called “working the refs”, nu? — was one of the key triumphs of the modern right.

That MY actually is generally a sensible person who has a mighty fine blog (I read it regularly and comment there) and who has got the problems with Bush & CO more than other media types have (probably due to the perceptiveness of youth) doesn’t change the fact that he still may have, not surprisingly, tasted a bit of that big media kool-aid.

Indeed, thanks to so many in the media and in the GOP defining media-centrism (i.e. high Broderism, Faux News Liberals, etc.) as the left edge of acceptible discourse, it ain’t just MY who would consider MY a liberal. To many people (even if, when actually made to think through to the consequences and conclusions of their own positions, end up coming out to the left of MY), if they would casually read MY, they would take him to be a moonbat lefty. Such is the degree to which the right in this country has framed the debate. We could go on and on about how they did this, what all the consequences are, why the reframing stuck, etc. … but it is what it is.

Anyway, I think you may have misinterpreted this a bit — MY is essentially saying that not all the blogosphere are moonbats as is the CW on left blogostan. If anything, breaking this CW (the blogosphere is more diverse than the pundits claim, etc.) is necessary to undoing all the GOP working of the refs that lumps in MY with moonbats like myself and defines Faux News Liberals as the left edge of acceptible debate. So I think MY is getting at something important, actually and perhaps we shouldn’t shoot him down so quickly — at least he admits he was wrong about Iraq and that’s a good start, nu? It’s more than some people, whom the vast unwashed in America still consider to be lefties, have done …

Re: “Still, Dr. DeLong, social democrats in Sweden are several shades bluer, if you take my meaning, than Kevin Drum could ever be even if he put on patchouli and moved to a commune. Which was my point. But you did get me good there, I admit. Touche.”

Agreed…

The Iraq Invasion and subsequent War was a bad idea unto itself. It didn’t require the Worst [technical] President Ever, Prince Bunnypants, being in charge (er, “in charge”) to oppose this war.

To the extent that pundits have power, can make an activist contribution to the large-scale public dialog, and the extent that they actually influence political behavior, then they need to be seen as tools, weapons if you will, in trying to drive the actions of any governmental entity or administration. Obviously in the context of this thread, they are accepted as having that power or HTML and all wouldn’t be so angry at them. There is an assumption, although I’m not certain to what extent it’s accurate, that these pundits bear some measure of responsibility for the invasion and occupation of iraq. OK.

On that basis, what would you have them say now? I think there
is pretty solid agreement that “Iraq is bad” ™, and as part of trying to undo the damage of a hostile, authoritarian, militarized foreign policy we need to withdraw all our troops and try to create institutions within iraq that will help mitigate the horrendous damage we are responsible for.

If you had the power, what would you do? Would you fire them, try to stilfe their voices? If they had enough power to make a real contribution to starting this war, then doesn’t it follow that they have enough power to make a real contribution to ending it? Even if more, and more prominent voices speaking out for ending this horror don’t have a direct impact, I think it is true that they can increase the pressure and isolation of the bush/cheney cabal. So I want them to speak. Every one, even if you question his honesty or sincerity, is a voice offsetting the more and more strident, hateful voices on the right.

Fine. Don’t “forgive”. Don’t “forget”. Don’t read the fuckers. Don’t buy products advertised in their host publications. Whatever makes you feel like you are punishing them for being wrong. But I do not see what practical course this leads to. If it’s just venting anger, then please say so. If you believe they should take some action, like apologize, resign, kill themselves, say so, as some of the commenters here have done.

To me, it reads a little like the photoshopped smoke or the damaged mosque. Say it’s true. What’s the point? Where does it lead us? What have you accomplished?

Seems to me a pundit that was wrong about iraq has three choices today.

1. Continue to agitate for more bloodshed.

2. Agitate for an end to the occupation.

or 3. Quit writing about foreign policy.

I’m for the second option, because that’s the goal I want to see reached. And to me, working towards that goal is good, even if the person making the contribution is otherwise stupid, calculating, careerist or just plain evil…

mikey

Actually, DeLong is talking crap again. Being a democratic socialist means, you know, being an actual socialist, not having just a nicer version of bog standard capitalism with some safeguards build in by the state.

The Swedish system is at best, social democrat.

Words have meanings. Learn them.

Thing is, people like Matt Y. would be the first to see the merits of a war with Iran, despite what happened last time, because in their hearts they believe that the US is a good country, that its leaders are honourable and that wars of aggression are good things when waged by Americans.

You can never trust them.

Hmmm. What’s the difference between “We need to invade iraq because some day they MIGHT try to harm the US” and “We need to marginalize this particular pundit’s cries for an end to the iraq occupation because someday he might call for war with iran”?

mikey

There aren’t a good number of dead people in the ground because of the altter choice?

Er, that is, latter.

And here’s the thing, mikey. He’s still wrong. He’s trying to push his bullshit wrongness off on us like we were *all* bamboozled. That’s evidence that he’ll just continue lying to protect his own shit.

I don’t agree that we need all the help we can get, because frankly, there are a lot of people who’ll just scuttle us from the inside-out. They put us at more of a risk of losing should we let bygones be bygones.

Common goals are important, but it’s also important to know just where and when those common goals began and where they’re going to end. With guys like Yglesies, our goals coincided the minute the Iraq adventure went south for certain, and they’ll cease coinciding the minute we’re out of Iraq and they become convinced we need to fuck with Iran or Syria.

At which point they’ll turn right back around, kick us in the balls, wipe their asses with our faces and go hopping and skipping down the road of good intentions with the same *exact* fuckers we’re fighting now without breaking stride.

Mikey: I think one of the reasons I for one am so angry is that even if the combined liberal hawk punditry got down on their well-worn knees and asked each surviving Iraqi’s individual pardon – even if they underwent a Damascene conversion, and used their privileged pulpits to preach armed citizen revolution, it wouldn’t change a bloody thing.. It’s too late for any of that. We’re fucked and I mean that globally. If the wars don’t get us, the climate will.

‘Liberal’ punditry’s payed a supporting role in that: by enabling the blatantly economically motivated massacre of a sovereign nation and the collapse of any hope for peace in the Middle East Iraq War they bolstered Bush’s power and we know what he’s done with it since..

It doesn’t matter what they do now, the genie can’t be put back in the bottle. They’ll have to carry it on their own newly-discovered consciences: we’re just telling them that. And I for one will say it again and again, even if it’s bleating in the wilderness: there must be consequences, if it’s only making someone scared to google their own name forever.

Let’s not forget too that these are the same people who when Clinton was in power were advocating neoliberal economic policy and world trade liberalisation. That’s not progressive. This isn’t just about the war. They have misjudged everything.

Speaking as a Briton I totally agree with the point viz David Cameron – t the Cameronian Tories are more moderate than any liberal pundit. What they are is soft Reaganoid Thatcherites, and therefore heirs to the failed Clinton/Blair Third Way project, just like Nick Cohen’s risible Euston Group who also have the temerity to call themselves progressives.

When it really mattered, when this almighty fuckup still theoretically, possibly might’ve been stopped, they were all of them too busy making themselves important in the new shiny globalised marketised online political world to listen to what they were being told.. Instead tey sucked up to the party structure and supported the status quo, using the moral heft of the left blogosphere as their leverage.Thatv pissed me off then and it pisses me off now.

In short fuck ’em, and fuck the publications they work for too. Over and over and over again.

*Sigh*

I suppose. I’m not suggesting anyone should love them. Or even read them. But if you invest in them the power to start a war, and hold them responsible for starting that war, then the very least they can do at this point is use whatever power they have to end the war. It’s an obligation, and a responsibility, and if any of them are going to try to do that, it may not soothe your anger but it JUST MIGHT save a few thousand kids. And with all due respect, that’s more important than your anger.

Look. I’ve read (no idea if it’s true) that many serial arsonists are firefighters. This is a similar situation. The started the fire, but then they put it out. They need to be held accountable for starting the fire, but part of that is their responsibility to put it out. If after they started it they just sat on the curb and watched it burn, that would be even worse. The VERY LEAST they owe this nation is to try to bring an end to this horror that we’ve decided they are responsible for.

By the way, my personal opinion is no amount of anti-war demonstrations or punditry would have prevented bush and cheney from invading iraq, so the claims of responsibility for pundits seems overblown to me, but consensus seems to be they made a real contribution. So lets make sure they make the same contribution in the cause of ending the killing…

mikey

Time for a total outsiders view on this:

Danish atheist chiming in here…
I’ve been fascinated by american politics for at least the last 12 years, (I’m 27), and I’ve been reading a lot of different american politcal blogs/websites for at least half that time.

Okay, with that out of the way, let me begin my ranty bloviation:

How the hell could -anyone-, left/right/center/liberal/conservative/(g)libertarian/male/female/tranny… how could -anyone- fall
for the Bush administrations case for a war against Iraq?

I remember 9/11.
I remember turning on my tv and going to CNN.
It was right after the first plane had struck and before the second.
First, I thought “Shit, what a horrible accident!”…
then the second plane hit and I thought: “Okay, this ain’t no accident”.

And when the U.S. identified Bin Laden as the man who orchestrated it
and the Taliban as his enablers, I was all for the invasion of Afghanistan.

And it seemed to go well.
In the 2000 election I had hoped Gore would win.
But Bush, however much I disliked him, seemed to, at least, have this war under control.

That didn’t last long, however.
The case for a war against Iraq was being pushed harder and harder,
and on such bullshit grounds that I actually felt sick when I watched Colin Powell doing the Bojangles before the U.N. about R.V.s being mobile factories-of-evil-terror-biological-nuclear-doom-to-us-all.
It seemed to me as I watched it, that Powell didn’t really believe it himself, but that he felt he had to do it out of loyalty.
Which is just as bad as believing it, I think, if not worse.

Keep in mind that this is all grossly simplified, but really:
Why should ANY credit, apart from a token: “welcome back to the fold of the potentially sane”, be given to those who fucked up so badly that they actually cheered on the invasion of Iraq?
Suuuure…. now that the war is going badly they want to wash the blood off their hands and comb the bonesplinters out of their hair.
So basically they are unprincipled poll-wagon-jumpers.
To mangle a certain Cohen:
“First we take Iraq… then we take Iran!”.

Yeah, we should just “forgive and forget” the lib-hawks,
because they’d NEVER urge such a foolish war again!
No, really!

Yeah, and hell is going through a nuclear winter…

What’s with the false dichotomy? Just because MY happens to finally have come around to my point of view on the Iraq war doesn’t mean I have to gay-marry him. Doesn’t this whole “you’re with us or you’re against us” thing go back to the OIIDP that HTML was railing against ever so recently?

Now, I realize that HTML, himself, was mostly just saying “Fuck you, MY, for thinking you’re the whole progressive blogosphere and neglecting to admit that most of us were right,” which is valid and fair, but there’s been a bit of sentiment in this thread that seems to be along the lines of, “I’m against MY being against the war because he’s politically impure.” Which is pretty weird when you’re trying to save thousands of innocent lives. If I’m pulling people out of a burning building, I could give a fuck less if the guy helping me happens to have a “marriage=1m+1f” bumper sticker on his pickup truck. I’ll deal with that later.

Hey, while I was typing, mikey made a firefighting metaphor too! Great minds…

“I’m against MY being against the war because he’s politically impure.�

More like, “I’m against ever trusting MY again on anything because he has shown himself to be untrustworthy on a deadly important issue.”

Hey, Mikey.
You said:

“By the way, my personal opinion is no amount of anti-war demonstrations or punditry would have prevented bush and cheney from invading iraq, so the claims of responsibility for pundits seems overblown to me, but consensus seems to be they made a real contribution. So lets make sure they make the same contribution in the cause of ending the killing…”

I know what you mean, and from what I can gather from your personal history (Full Disclosure: A couple of months ago I found myself with way too much time on my hands and for some reason decided to read through the Sadly, No! archives from start to finish, comments included),
you are a former soldier deeply commited to -avoiding- war, especially because you have experienced it and know what hell is.
But that isn’t, really, the point here.
The point is that the faulty rethoric used by pro-war “liberal”
talking/writing heads would just as easily lead to war with Iran as it did with Iraq, since they are so loathe to admit any failure at all.

Those arguments are, with respect, less than worthless.

Yglesies isn’t just starting a fire, and then, finally, helping rescue people, he’s going right ahead and starting a new fucking fire while we’re trying to rescue people and stop the first fucking fire they helped create. But oh, he feels so badly about the first fire that he’s going “well, I think we all deserve blame for this fire.”

I’m against MY doing *anything* anymore. Anti-war, pro-war, he’s been so blatantly wrong that whatever he does from this point on is going to trip us up.

Let him sit in the back of the police car and think about what he did.

“atheist said,

June 14, 2007 at 20:14

“I’m against MY being against the war because he’s politically impure.�

More like, “I’m against ever trusting MY again on anything because he has shown himself to be untrustworthy on a deadly important issue.â€?”
—–

Hi!
A fellow hairless simian here,. from halfd a world away.
And I agree wholeheartedly.
How could anyone, -anyone-, get the obvious outcome of invading Iraq WRONG?
It still boggles any mind not already calcified.

(Full Disclosure: A couple of months ago I found myself with way too much time on my hands and for some reason decided to read through the Sadly, No! archives from start to finish, comments included),

Holy shit. Was it worth it? What was the best thing about doing that?

Would Matt Y (or any of the others) have called themselves “progressive bloggers” back in the day (2002)? I don’t think so.

Back then “progressive” wasn’t cool. Now it is. So are blogs! So is being anti-Iraq war.

Progressive is a great word (so much better than Liberal) but it’s definition is extremely vague. Sucks to see Matt, Drum et al. co-oopting it and using it for their own purposes.

There is a definite difference in ideological stance between teh Clique and the DFH “radical” Lefty bloggers, and maybe that is exactly why the Clique was so wrong about Iraq and other things like Free Trade.

But it’s not polite to talk about ideology. So 20th century.

The policies we should be fighting for are whatever the Beltway Conventional Wisdom decides is “Politically Realistic” at any given time.

If, as a blogger, you go along with that principle first and foremost, you will be considered “serious”.

This goes back to what I wrote yesterday with respect to Ilyka:

Destructive people who have recently discovered that their destructive behavior was wrong whouldn’t be allowed to assume leadership positions among those who have been opposing that destruction for a good long time. Where’s the apology? Where’s the attempt to make restitution?

A Maxwell Smart-tian “sorry about that” just ain’t good enough.

I’m sure someone’s already gone into this, but another major reason to be wary of former war supporters is the open question of why they supported it.
1.) They were flat out fooled. Probably the general majority, and to my mind the lack of success on this issue forces me to ask whether their other work is also substandard.
2.) They were being careerist, and saw that they had to cheer it on for the sake of having a job. No one will ever admit to this motivation, but it’s the single biggest reason I don’t trust anyone who was pro-Iraq war, even more than issues of competency. Opinions formed by what the person holding your paycheck tells you to think mean shit all to me.
3.) They were like a former friend of mine and simply wanted blood, and didn’t care whose it was. We’d been attacked, and bodies needed to hit the floor to soothe their ruffled souls. We’ll call this the Dennis Miller option.
None of these are mutually exclusive, and there’s probably motivations I’m not considering, but any of these reasons alone is more than enough cause for me to not trust a journalist/pundit any further.
mikey, I think I’ve said this before, but it’s not about kicking people off the bus. It’s about making sure the people driving it are qualified to do so. MY and the like are absolutely unqualified.

Diff brad makes an excellent point: This is not about telling people to leave our movement/party/tendency/orgy, it’s about challenging their claims to authority.

People who are full of shit simply do not get to tell other people what is right and what is wrong without beign challenged loudly and often. Period. It’s really that simple.

And all those centrists who are trying to disguise yourselves as “progressives”–fuck right off. Be honest enough to admit that you’re centrists.

On the subject again of pundits being rewarded for being wrong, disastrously wrong, Tom Friedman seems to be getting his own show called–get this–“The World is Flat.” The same Tom Friedman who, on “Charlie Rose,” claimed that young American boys going house to house in Iraq, saying “Suck. On. This.” was a justification for going to war. How is it that such flippancy in the face of mortal danger and chaos grants one special access to the role of serious foreign policy expert? Isn’t MY writing a book on foreign policy? With what experience? Blogging?

Where’s the apology? Where’s the attempt to make restitution?

Exactly!! Restitution is exactly what I’m talking about. If they used their power and influence to contribute to starting the war, why would we not want them to make restitution by using that same power and influence to contribute to ending it? This isn’t about possible future transgressions. It’s about digging out of the hole that many of us believe they helped dig us into. From there, well ok, let’s see what they have to say, and act accordingly. Nobody has explained effectively why this would be bad…

mikey

Mikey–

That’s the problem.. They’re not even attempting restitution. They’re attempting to gloss over their culpability and again seize the stage to tell the rest of us how we should be thinking/voting/acting.

These are the junior-league 21st-century Kissingers and Westmorelands and McNamaras. They made murderous decisions (or at least made murderous recommendations, and propagandized for murderous decisons), were shown wrong, and demanded to retain their decision-making power.

That’s the issue. “Let’s see what they have to say” sets us up for more of the same. How about “once you’ve finished coming up with a plan to rebuild a shattered Iraq and offered a formal and heartfelt apology to the world, then you can maybe–maybe–be allowed near an op-ed piece again” as a policy here?

In 1915, Winston Churchill advocated the invasion of Gallipoli to open a supply line to Czarist Russia:

“Later in November, First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill put forward his first plans for a naval attack on the Dardanelles, based at least in part on what turned out to be erroneous reports regarding Turkish troop strength, as prepared by Lieut. T. E. Lawrence. He reasoned that the Royal Navy had a large number of obsolete battleships which could not be used against the German High Seas Fleet in the North Sea, but which might well be made useful in another theatre. Initially, the attack was to be made by the Royal Navy alone, with only token forces from the army being required for routine occupation tasks.”

It turned into a disaster, as we all know.

By your reasoning, HTML, Winston Churchill should never have been allowed to return to a position of power in government (he resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty after the debacle). He made a mistake that cost tens of thousands of British and Commonwealth soldiers their lives, based on faulty intelligence.

There are numerous other examples of people making disastrous mistakes and later returning to perform valuable service. If someone makes a mistake, it doesn’t mean they are incapable of being correct on some other matter. The decision to marginalize someone is something I think you need to approach with great care, because you stand a chance of discarding a talented person you might dearly wish to have available to you at a later date.

a different brad said,

June 14, 2007 at 21:47

I’m sure someone’s already gone into this, but another major reason to be wary of former war supporters is the open question of why they supported it.
1.) They were flat out fooled. Probably the general majority, and to my mind the lack of success on this issue forces me to ask whether their other work is also substandard.

Why would you not ask this question anyway, all the time? I think we’ve learned that lesson, though perhaps it was taught before and we simply forgot it.

You all are quick to discount the possibility of being fooled. I was in favor of the Iraq invasion in March 2003. Not that my opinion mattered, I am not even a D-list pundit and have no ability to affect national policy one way or the other. But at the time, I believed that the government had access to sources of intelligence that were not available to me, and it was simply incomprehensible to me that the Government of the Untied States would obfuscate, mischaracterize and willfully misinterpret intelligence to trump up a case for war. That’s something aggressive, rogue nations like Saddam Hussein’s did, not the United States. And given that Yglesias and Drum and the rest were similarly not privy to the true state of the intelligence, and may similarly have given more credence to the administration’s claims than we now know is warranted, I think it’s extremely unfair to now hold them to what I see as a difficult if not impossible standard.

You all say that the evidence that there was no legitimate basis for invasion was painfully evident to anyone with eyes, so the only possible justification for supporting the invasion in 2003 was either blinding stupidity or willful complicity and desire for war. That’s easy to say now, when we have all (or at least enough of) the facts on the true state of affairs available to us. I think the administration was very clever and sneaky, and we know they went to great lengths to control and conceal information. I think they realized that with Blix about to confirm that he found no evidence of WMDs and Saddam cooperating, however grudgingly, with the inspectors, their window of opportunity for declaring invasion the only acceptable option was rapidly closing. So they rushed to get their war started before Blix could issue a conclusive report, discounted what he did report as misleading and cited their secret sources to raise doubts about his finding nothing. And they succeeded; by the time the Downing Street Memos came out and revealed the true extent of their duplicity, we were already done with the invasion and were committed.

To come back years later and condemn all the “liberal hawks” for being fools or warmongers simply seems blatantly unfair. Yes, you were all right about Iraq and are entitled to do your happy dance. And I understand the desire to tell those who were wrong that they now should STFU and let you lead. But like I said, I think that’s a dangerous attitude; what would have happened to Britain if Churchill had not been available to lead it? As some here have said, Yglesias has been a strong voice in favor of things you are in favor of; silence him, and that’s one less voice on your side. Can you afford the loss?

You had me, Doc, then you lost me. It is not productive in this subject area to conflate pundits and players. MY, Drum, Sully, Hitchens, none of them is even on the same PLANET as kissenger. Kissenger, Westy and McNamara made the decisions, told the lies, took the lives, supported the animals. They did not write about it. They did not “suggest” it. They did not “encourage” it. They did it. They are war criminals. They are murdering thugs.

You may be unhappy with LibHawk pundits because they wrote oped pieces in support of murderous thugs, but my man, if you honestly believe the culpability of Yglesias and Kissenger is the same, well, all I can say is I don’t think thats a rational conclusion.

Nothing MY has ever done, or ever will do, will come within a light year of the horrors Kissenger unleashed in the soccer stadium in Santiago in ’73 or in East Timor in early ’76. This either ludicrously accuses the punditocracy or give the real killers a pass…

mikey

I think the term “Progressive�, whatever it originally meant (Helen Keller considered herself a Progressive, and she was a Socialist) eventually came to mean (and still means) “activist liberal�, instead of “laissez-faire liberal�. Considering my generally low opinion of liberals, I’d consider Progressive an insult, but obviously YMMV.

Jillian, I call myself a progressive for the same reason lesbians in the 1970s called themselves dykes. It’s a useful word that needs to be reclaimed, and for the vast bulk of the American public that doesn’t read left-of-center political blogs, it has a certain amount of attention-getting value. At least for the people in my age cohort, they might have a vague memory about WJBryant getting laughed at in ‘Inherit the Wind’, or something about the Minnesota guy whose plane crashed, or — farmers! yeah, there were definitely farmers involved, somehow or other. We’re not going to be able to reclaim ‘socialist’ or even ‘social democrat’ from the Reichtard ratfuckers, and while I’m more liberal than practically any professional Democrat that just shows how worn and stretched-out-of-shape the L-word has gotten from misuse.

I’m a Progressive. I believe that progress can be made, and that it’s our job to make it. Most Americans are still in favor of progress, and the minority that aren’t will be voting for Repub thugs anyway. Ten years from now, if there’s an organized national Progressive Party that hands out badges and gets seats at the big-media dais, I might not “qualify” for the label, but right now, it’s as close to my overruling political philosophy as will fit on a pinback button!

Anyone who took the case for war with Iraq seriously for even a second was, at the time they were taking it seriously, an ignorant fool who was incapable of applying anything they ever learned about American history in a real-world context. Period.

I’m not prepared to make a blanket statement that such a person is, fundamentally, an ignorant fool – but at the time they endorsed the war, they were sure giving a good imitation of one.

And yeah, I do realize I am now talking about seventy percent of the American population. Don’t care. Doesn’t make me change my assessment at all.

I’m also not calling for all of them – or any of them – to commit ritual suicide over this…..but you’ll have to pardon my – our – skepticism of anything that’s ever said again by anyone who demonstrated that they could be THIS ignorant and foolish.

And be careful, liberalrob, when trying to say who’s supposed to be on “your side”…..there’s a good chance you don’t know which side most of us actually ARE on.

Liberalrob–

Good point about Churchill. But, as you point out, he resigned following the disaster. No one has resigned here. Many of those were wrong about the war–the ones we’re talking about here–have been promoted.

I was against the war at the time, even granting the existence of weapons of mass destruction. Rather, especially granted the existence of wmd’s. For, as soon as none were found, people started claiming that they had been sold to al Qaeda or hidden in Syria or Iran, thereby spreading them out all over the place and putting them in the hands of all sorts of unsavory actors.

But there were other good reasons to be against the war. Some of them enunciated by Dick Cheney at the end of Gulf War I–you don’t know what will happen to a country when you invade it. We could have reasonably guessed chaos would have followed.

But my point isn’t to rehearse those reasons, so much as to insist that those in positions of authority had an obligation to look at the bullshit arguments of the experts for what they were–bullshit. Going to war is big deal–especially for the young (and not so young) men and women who will wage it–and for those against whom it will be waged. People will die. That’s serious. People took to this war lightly–Tom Friedman’s Suck.On.This. Theory for instance. And few have had the balls to resign (for a time) and figure out where they went wrong and wonder whether they ought to enjoy such positions of authority.

Ah, but Anne Laurie, regardless of whether or not you are a “Progressive”, you’re already an Awesome.

If y’all can reclaim “Progressive”, that would be truly fabulous, because it has a great potential to be an umbrella term that all Lefty-types can come together under, without worrying about who’s a social dem, who’s a socialist, who’s a commie, who’s a black flagger…..I wish you a lot of luck with that program. Honest – no snark.

I’m content to call myself a socialist because – well, I’m a socialist. Don’t worry, though – come the Revolution, I promise to get y’all exemptions from the “up against the wall” action. Even for some of the liberals.

Hell, a lot of good people have called themselves “Progressive”. I can only hope to do half as much good for the world as did Jane Addams (and I give her a pass on the identity politics because you sometimes give people from ages past passes on things that you don’t give to people who live in the here-and-now).

That’s something aggressive, rogue nations like Saddam Hussein’s did, not the United States.

HA HA HA HA HA.

And given that Yglesias and Drum and the rest were similarly not privy to the true state of the intelligence, and may similarly have given more credence to the administration’s claims than we now know is warranted, I think it’s extremely unfair to now hold them to what I see as a difficult if not impossible standard.

We managed it.

I was certain that every word out of the administration’s mouth was a fucking deception, and I was a G.E.D.-certified retail employee bagging groceries. So why the fuck should we be light on people who are *employed* to examine this shit and got it wrong?

You all say that the evidence that there was no legitimate basis for invasion was painfully evident to anyone with eyes, so the only possible justification for supporting the invasion in 2003 was either blinding stupidity or willful complicity and desire for war. That’s easy to say now, when we have all (or at least enough of) the facts on the true state of affairs available to us.

It was easy to say then. All the true state of affairs were THERE before 2001, let alone 2002, 2003. We didn’t get it wrong, we didn’t play cheerleader, we didn’t fall for all the bullshit. So either we’re all supremely brilliant geopolitical masterminds (on the whole, doubtful), or the case being made was such spectacular bullshit that even those of us on the fringe could see it was horseshit.

To come back years later and condemn all the “liberal hawks� for being fools or warmongers simply seems blatantly unfair. Yes, you were all right about Iraq and are entitled to do your happy dance. And I understand the desire to tell those who were wrong that they now should STFU and let you lead.

It’s not blatant. You see, you got it wrong. You got it wrong when all the evidence was RIGHT THERE. You got it wrong when those of us down in the gutter had it right. You got it wrong because you wanted to spite us hippies, us peaceniks, us commies and socialists no matter what we were saying. You got it wrong because you thought America was different.

You got it wrong, we were right, and it’s not unfair to expect you to stop acting like you’re the ones who were vindicated.

As some here have said, Yglesias has been a strong voice in favor of things you are in favor of; silence him, and that’s one less voice on your side. Can you afford the loss?

Yes.

Liberalrob–

If you believed that the Bush Admin was trustworthy, on the level, and acting in good faith–at any point, knowing what you know about Republicans, Texas oilmen, guys named Bush, or politicians generally–then you are extremely naive and/or deluded. Many, many, many people saw through the BushCo game–it didn’t take a Ph.D., dude. Screwing that one up ain’t nothin’ to brag about.

Mikey–

You’re right; I’ll grant you that there is a huge difference in impact between an Yglesias and a McNamara; but their fundamental instincts are the same; they’re both destructive; and they shouldn’t be allowed to speak for any thinking person until they’ve come clean about their horrendously destructive behavior and made amends, or at least attempted to. Perhaps a better comparison would be with Walter Winchell, popular hack and metaphorical fellator of J. Edgar Hoover?

mikey- My problem is why should I assume people who loudly followed Bush into the hole, then took years to admit that, in fact, it is a hole that we’re in, are capable of finding their way out of the hole? How do I know they won’t create new problems that might have otherwise been avoiding in getting out of the hole?
Especially when there are other people to listen to, people who noticed the hole and that we were headed into it.
Careerists now have to turn on Iraq and Bush. Hell, even the right wing is trying to turn on Bush. For MY and the rest to be against the war now doesn’t mean they’ve comprehended a damn thing except how to keep having a job. As Jillian said, a vast majority of people were wrong. Horribly, lethally, wrong. The people who were right should get a chance at the wheel, we’ve earned it. Not me personally, but the digbys, the billimons, the rude pundits. It’s as simple as wanting to listen to the people who get it right.

Jillian said,

June 14, 2007 at 23:49
Anyone who took the case for war with Iraq seriously for even a second was, at the time they were taking it seriously, an ignorant fool who was incapable of applying anything they ever learned about American history in a real-world context. Period.

If a policeman knocked on your door in the middle of the night, waking you up, and said, “Jillian, there’s been a bad wreck on the highway, a huge cloud of chlorine gas is headed this way, it will be here in 2 minutes and you have to evacuate immediately,” would you run to your TV set and turn on the local station to confirm his story, or would you grab the kids (or dog or who/whatever) and leap in the car to get the hell out of there? There is such a thing as trust in those to whom we entrust authority to not willfully misuse or betray that trust.

“And be careful, liberalrob, when trying to say who’s supposed to be on “your sideâ€?…..there’s a good chance you don’t know which side most of us actually ARE on.”

Of course, if Yglesias has never ever been ON your side there’s no reason for you to take him in. He’s been on MY side a number of times, however, and I think of myself as a Liberal/Progressive, and I think that’s true of many others as well. I wasn’t speaking particularly to you, Jillian. I was making a general case.

Shit, if Ann Althouse is qualified to write for the NYTimes’ editorial page, Digby should be in charge of it. Dave Neiwert should be running their newsroom. You could practically restaff the whole paper with better qualified people with people of various stripes who got it right from the beginning.
I’m not saying if you got the war wrong I’ll never listen to you again. Everyone fucks up, especially me, even if I didn’t about the war. But when you have an existing talent pool available of people who got it right, and for the right reasons, I see no rational reason why those folk shouldn’t be given preference in leadership positions over those who were wrong.

If a policeman knocked on your door in the middle of the night, waking you up, and said, “Jillian, there’s been a bad wreck on the highway, a huge cloud of chlorine gas is headed this way, it will be here in 2 minutes and you have to evacuate immediately,� would you run to your TV set and turn on the local station to confirm his story, or would you grab the kids (or dog or who/whatever) and leap in the car to get the hell out of there? There is such a thing as trust in those to whom we entrust authority to not willfully misuse or betray that trust.

liberalrob, I submit you are incredibly naive. I wouldn’t even know where to begin taking this apart – whether it’s the fact that you had a bit more than two minutes to do some research on your own and find out the facts of the situation (which were available from early on for anyone willing to do the fairly easy work involved) or the idea that you actually trust your elected officials to tell you the truth about a matter which might take us to war – hell, the idea that we trust elected officials AT ALL. They aren’t THERE to be trusted. They are there to be overseen. Trust is for two year olds. Accountability is for grownups. Please stay out of politics until you decide which one you are.

Liberalrob- That’s a false analogy. I’m kind of with Jillian in not even knowing where to begin to say why, but I’ll give it a shot.
There were roughly 18 months between the fall of the Towers and the invasion of Iraq. It was not the middle of the night, and you did not lack for time for confirming the story on your own.
Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, and even in the most nightmarish of scenarios presented was not as imminent a threat as a deadly cloud of poisonous gas two minutes away.
What if the policeman was accompanied by a trained scientist saying the cop was wrong and there was no threat, as was the case here where the entire world, aside from BushCo, and Tony Blair, was mentioning Saddam wasn’t a threat and wasn’t connected to Al Qaeda?
I’m sorry you were frightened and got it wrong, but there’s no defense of the mistake.

brad, I have to say I agree with that. But then I thought about it and I agree with it because it’s not what I’ve been saying. I’m not saying you or anyone should read them or trust what they write. Hell, we all have to make that decision about every single thing we read, from USA today to a mcdonalds menu.

What I keep saying is if they had the influence to be responsible for starting a war by what they write, and they want to now use that influence to write that we need to END THE FUCKING WAR, that is a good thing. You don’t need to read it or trust them, because influencing you won’t help. It will only help if they can influence congress, the white house and the pentagon, all of which, as you guys have pointed out repeatedly, are inside the beltway where the pundits have the most influence.

Hell, I was against invading iraq, I was against invading afghanistan too. Other than destroying the sudanese air force I can’t think of a military action I’d be for, but that isn’t getting those kids home any faster. I don’t know that anything a pundit writes or doesn’t write can help, but if they have the power and influence and are willing to use it to further a cause I believe is very goddam important, I say let ’em write, write, write and write some more. No matter who they are, or what they’ve done…

mikey

OK, here’s a compromise:

All the pundits who were horribly wrong about Bush and this bloody war: For the next four months, write only about the absolute necessity of immediate withdrawal. If it works, and we see withdrawal by the end ot that four-month period, then we’ll be willing not to smear figurative shit in your faces every time you touch a keyboard. If we’re still in Iraq at the end of this experiment, seek honest work.

Howzat?

DocAmazing said,

June 15, 2007 at 0:12
If you believed that the Bush Admin was trustworthy, on the level, and acting in good faith–at any point, knowing what you know about Republicans, Texas oilmen, guys named Bush, or politicians generally–then you are extremely naive and/or deluded. Many, many, many people saw through the BushCo game–it didn’t take a Ph.D., dude. Screwing that one up ain’t nothin’ to brag about.”

I’m not bragging, and neither (to my knowledge) is Yglesias. I think we should have pulled out of Iraq at least two years ago, and given what is known now we should never have gone in to begin with. “Many, many, many people” may have “seen through the BushCo game,” but it still amounted to a minority in March of 2003; and minorities don’t get to lead, at least not in this country (they do get to obstruct, however, but even then they usually have to exceed 33%). Go back and look at the support for the administration in 2003; according to the NY Times polls, over 60% of Americans supported invading Iraq to get rid of Saddam. That’s a majority, last time I checked.

As far as trusting GW/Reps/oilmen/Bushes/politicians, yeah, I kind of did trust them to not intentionally go out to fuck up the country. Because it’s their country too, you know? They have to know that there’s a point past which they cannot go, or the country (or the world) will rise up and destroy them; and I thought that experienced political operatives like they supposedly were would know that, and would not approach that line; and even if they did, the bureaucracy would act as it always had and be a brake on any excesses. I think nobody could have anticipated the depths to which this administration has sunk in its reckless pursuit of power above all else; maybe those of you who instinctively hated anything Republican did, but like I said you’re a minority and minorities don’t get to lead, for precisely the reason for which we now have a glaring example. A minority has hijacked the Republican party, engineered elections to get and maintain themselves in power, and put the country on the course of disaster. That will now change. 2006 was their first check, 2008 will be the next.

Patkin said,

June 15, 2007 at 0:11
“It was easy to say then. All the true state of affairs were THERE before 2001, let alone 2002, 2003.
Really? That’s amazing! So you had conclusive proof in 2001, let alone 2002 and 2003, that Iraq had no weapons programs, and that there were no WMDs there? Are you secretly Scott Ritter? If not, why weren’t you contacting the CIA to deliver this important intelligence to them? Of course, they would have just lied about it, but surely you could have told someone.

What is all this, anyway? Are you guys sour-grapesing because you don’t get to be in charge? Are you hammering on Yglesias because he’s “Big-Media Matt” and has a paying gig being a pundit, and nobody gives a rip what you and I say down here in the Sadly, No comments? I’m getting that feeling, that you’re a bunch of grognards griping about how unfair it all is. Hey, news flash, life’s not fair. Matt was in the right place at the right time, with the right skills, and he got the job. I wish I could get paid to be a pundit too; as you can see I know how to use the Great Gazoogle and Wikipedia as well as anyone, I think I’m pretty articulate online and obviously I have opinions on everything. Howcome Matt Yglesias gets to get paid for opinionizing on the intertubes and I don’t?

Yeah, he was wrong about Iraq. So were a lot of people. He’s on the right side now. Give him credit.

Liberalrob, give it up. If your argument is “most Americans are ididots,and so was I”, well, that’s not a great argument to make. Nor is it particularly to the point: leading opinionmakers have a responsibility to check the facts, and not just share mob passions. You ask if Patkin was secretly Scott Ritter–why would he need to be, given that Scott Ritter is Scott Ritter, and made it clear from the jump that the whole Bush story was lies?

Jesus, have you completely forgotten Watergate, COINTELPRO, the Indian wars, Iran-Contra–hell, there are so many examples proving the persistent malfeasance of your “policeman in the night” that it amazes me that you would even use the argument!

So it took an incredibly bloody fiasco for Yglesias to see what the majority of the world and all of us dirty fucking hippies to see. Big deal. Credit for that? How about a medal for not beating up old ladies at bus stops? How about a cash reward for not strangling kittens?

given what is known now we should never have gone in to begin with.

I see others have gotten here before, but it was known then and not just now. Really and truly, there was no WMD case for war.

rob, you show up here a few times a year with the same schtick….”yeah, I was for the war, but so were a lot of other people, and you can’t really blame us, can you?”

Our answer never changes: yes, we do blame you. We blame all of you, even if it means blaming a hundred and fifty million Americans. Obviously, the blame isn’t portioned out in equal amounts – the Asshole in Chief gets the bulk of it – but if you supported the war, we blame you.

What do you want? Absolution? Talk to your priest. Make your own peace with your own conscience. We aren’t here to make you feel better about yourself. We’ve all done execrable things that we have to live with, and I don’t think I have any special advice to offer up on this topic…you’ll have to figure it out yourself, the way the rest of us do.

What is it you want, exactly?

Ah, how cute.

No, I’m not Scott Ritter. Here was my conclusive proof though.

“The administration said there was a weapons program and WMDs. The administration has lied about everything they’ve ever done since the inauguration. Why should we trust them now?”

I don’t want to be cruel about this, but that line of reasoning left me correct at the end of the day, and left you wrong.

You want to whine and bitch about saying it’s unfair that you don’t get credit for getting it just now, while telling us life’s not fair? You want to say that because we anticipated this we’re still wrong for not giving the power-crazy authoritarian fuckheads a chance? You want to act like this is jealousy?

Go fuck yourself, rob, and sit down.

Jillian said,

June 15, 2007 at 0:25
liberalrob, I submit you are incredibly naive.
Maybe. I don’t think so, however. And I submit that whether you admit it or not, there is SOME degree to which you have to trust elected officials to act in the best interest of the country. You simply CANNOT know everything they know. You rely on the system to expose instances of abuse and on the threat of punishment for abuses to be an effective deterrent; but exposing malfeasance takes time and is subject to gaming. That is what happened here.

the idea that we trust elected officials AT ALL. They aren’t THERE to be trusted. They are there to be overseen.
Really? You don’t trust any elected officials AT ALL? Wow. I’d go crazy. Lock my doors and never go outside. Those guys are EVERYWHERE!

a different brad said,

June 15, 2007 at 0:22

Shit, if Ann Althouse is qualified to write for the NYTimes’ editorial page, Digby should be in charge of it. Dave Neiwert should be running their newsroom.

Agreed! Our press has been disgraceful for decades. Not all of it, but ye gods there has been some absolute dreck.

a different brad said,

June 15, 2007 at 0:42
What if the policeman was accompanied by a trained scientist saying the cop was wrong and there was no threat, as was the case here where the entire world, aside from BushCo, and Tony Blair, was mentioning Saddam wasn’t a threat and wasn’t connected to Al Qaeda?

OK, let’s keep pushing that analogy. The trained scientist is speaking Japanese, and he’s holding his hand over his mouth and speaking so softly you can barely hear him.

The point was, when someone in authority gets in front of you and says DANGER, the natural inclination of most people is to believe him. It’s not a matter of being scared, it’s because you hired this guy to protect you and he’s saying there’s danger. The entire world may have been saying Saddam wasn’t a threat and wasn’t connected to AQ, but you know over half the people of this country thought there was an AQ connection for months AFTER we went in, and my memory is that the backlash against the WMD evidence was just getting started when the invasion went in; too late to stop it. Meanwhile the news from the Admin was 100% danger, danger, danger, we have to go in, we have slam-dunk evidence, we have to go now or it’s too late. And in the end, they went ahead and went before the opposition really got itself together. It was neatly done. Very slick.

Eef la blogsfera was The Starsheep Enterprise, Kevin Drum would be the automatic doors.

(bathe, bathe)

The point was, when someone in authority gets in front of you and says DANGER, the natural inclination of most people is to believe him.

Hi, liberalrob, I’d like to introduce you to a man who would really like you. His name is Stanley Milgram. You and he could make beautiful Nazis – err, music – together.

but you know over half the people of this country thought there was an AQ connection for months AFTER we went in

Jesus, is there anything you WON’T believe just because “over half the people of this country believe” it? UFO abductions? Psychic powers? Astrology? Elvis is still alive and having a gay relationship with Jim Morrison? Humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time?

Here’s a thought….over half of all Americans are of average or below average intelligence. Think about it.

Or don’t. You don’t seem to like thinking very much.

What is it you want, exactly?

To participate in your discussion. I wanted to point out that I think you’re making a mistake stamping Yglesias, and me, with the scarlet letter. And I wanted you to understand why I thought that. I’ve done that as best I can.

I will now go attempt to fuck myself while sitting down.

I wanted to point out that I think you’re making a mistake stamping Yglesias, and me, with the scarlet letter.

Your argument is essentially “I’m a sucker.” Please accept the letter S.

Really? That’s amazing! So you had conclusive proof in 2001, let alone 2002 and 2003, that Iraq had no weapons programs, and that there were no WMDs there? Are you secretly Scott Ritter? If not, why weren’t you contacting the CIA to deliver this important intelligence to them? Of course, they would have just lied about it, but surely you could have told someone.

liberalrob:

I think you are misunderstanding what Patkin said. I think that Patkin is saying that, as he looked at the situation in 2002-2003, taking in what was said by Bush’s administration, and what was reported in the papers, and said by people, it was obvious to him that the war was being pushed hard, and dishonestly.

Correct me Patkin if I am wrong.

Anyway, that is the experience I had. Everything about the way the war was sold smelled like bullshit to me. And it was more than that- I didn’t see a good reason for it, even if I believed them. Even if there were Chemical or Nuclear weapons in Iraq, it still did not make sense to invade. If Iraq had Nukes, then it was simply part of a club which included India, Pakistan, Russia, Israel and China- any one of which might be our deadly enemy in the future.

I didn’t have special information. I didn’t need special information. I just needed my own eyes and judgement.

Now, I think there are basically two points being made on this thread.
1. Yglesias is being dishonest now about progressive bloggers. He’s saying that they mostly supported the invasion of Iraq, when in fact they mostly did not support it. He is trying to cover his ass by spreading blame.
2. The fact that Yglesias was so easily fooled about Iraq makes his current opinions suspect. I mean, nobody is trying to “revoke” his “progressive license” or something. It would be laughable to believe that we could do such a thing. We have no real ability to affect Yglesias’s career in any way. We are simply pointing out that his lack of critical thought on Iraq calls what he says now into question.

Hokay. I’m convinced. Not that this uncompromising, unforgiving position is right, just that you guys hold it and you ain’t giving it up. I could not live in that binary world, where someone can be irredeemable. I guess I should say “Full Disclosure – there was more than one District Attorney who hung that label on me”. And I guess I do find it out of character for people who otherwise see the world a lot like I do. Frankly, taking the specific content out of it, it sounds like a conservative position. You know. “Fuck ’em, toss ’em over the side, they were wrong, there’s nothing they can say or do now that has value.

I guess I understand that you are very angry and not willing to forgive. I’m sorry, that just feels wrong to me. It’s like capital punishment. I don’t care if they deserve it, I don’t want to be the kind of person that wants to dispense it. I hope I never do anything to make you that angry at me…

mikey

No, you did a pretty good job, atheist. I won’t argue rob’s slur that I didn’t trust any of the administration prior to that point, but it’s hardly like they gave any reason for me to do so.

And yeah, even if we had accepted “Iraq has nukes!”, I was going to end up going so the fuck what? We lasted through a Cold War where actual nukes were going to be off the coast of Florida, we could survive an Iraq that couldn’t fire a spitball into the air without it being shot down.

That it was bullshit in the end barely matters. It wasn’t just bullshit, it was poorly plotted-out bullshit.

mikey:

Look, they’re not just wrong on one thing in the past, they’re wrong *now* and show no signs towards actual improvement. Yglesias here is going “well, it was nice of Shrum to say the progressive bloggers were right, but I wasn’t.” If it isn’t true about him, then all the progressive blogs were wrong.

And really, because they’re getting their arms twisted into saying they were wrong before, except not really, cause gosh darn if America is SPECIAL and would so fix the next problem, and this was a fluke, means they haven’t learnt anything. They’re not our friends. They’re not our allies. They’re not the calvary here to help us at the last reel. They’re the same wrong fucking people who’re fleeing a sinking ship, and who’re going to remain wrong even when they’re “on our side”.

Yglesias is never going to help us, no matter what punditocracy pull he has. He’s just going to continue serving #1, and if the mob starts screaming about OMGWTFDOWEDOABOUTIRAN, that’s where Yglesias is going to bloviate at.

And y’know what, this has nothing to do with conservative positions. He’s objectively incorrect and shows no signs of actual improvement. He can get a job working retail or clerical work, because as a progressive pundit, he’s just crap.

I’m not mad, mikey. If I were mad at everyone I thought was an ass, I’d never survive the commute in to work in the morning. I’ve driven in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, and I’ve never seen anything like the traffic in Miami. These people are INSANE. My boss has apparently driven through Mexico City once or twice, and he concurs – it’s worse here.

I’m perfectly willing to forgive anyone, but seriously – what does that mean?

Here’s an example. My dad, as I’ve mentioned before, is a petty thug type gangster. He’s Irish-Italian, and from Hudson County, New Jersey, so it’s not really much of a surprise. It explains why I’ve never watched The Godfather or The Sopranos – that stuff hits too close to home, and it’s not cool or sexy or funny….it’s scary as hell. The first serious threat against my life was made before my second birthday, and we ended up moving a few thousand miles to get away from it. My dad’s family is full of violent, vicious men, some of whom have done really horrible things to me – and I’m pretty sure my dad knew what was going on and did nothing about it.

He was also personally abusive to me. I never got beaten very much, but the incessant cruelty was probably worse than the beatings ever could have been. My dad’s favorite thing in the world to do was to stand in front of my very small self and my even smaller brother’s self and beg God to forgive him for whatever he had done that made God curse him with such awful children.

I got kicked out when I was eighteen because my parents were divorcing and they just couldn’t afford to have me live there anymore. It was a pretty rough time for me (although thankfully only a few weeks here and there of homelessness), but I finally managed to get settled into a job in Florida.

While at work one day, I started getting shooting pains in my left arm, I broke out in a cold sweat, and my whole left side started tingling. My bosses weren’t dumb, and called the paramedics. I got rushed to the hospital, and after the workup, I was fine. I think I was nineteen or twenty at the time. I got kept overnight for observation, but I just went home the next day.

I called my mom, who was living on the west coast at the time, to tell her what had happened. Her response was “I’m sorry you aren’t feeling well, be sure to let me know how you’re doing, I love you.” I called my dad, who was living on the east coast. His response? “You must really hate me to do this to me. I’m going to fly down there and beat your fucking face in for scaring me like this.”

When I hung up the phone, my chest hurt so badly I couldn’t breathe. Didn’t take long for me to put two and two together.

I stopped calling my father. I waited a couple of weeks, and wrote him a letter, pouring my heart out about the way the things he did hurt me. I told him I wanted a relationship with him, but if he ever did that to me again, I’d cut off contact with him, for my own health.

Sent the letter, held my breath, called him.

Things were okay for a while after that, but it couldn’t last, because he didn’t get it. I stopped calling.

I haven’t spoken to my father in fifteen years.

Am I angry at him? No, not really. I’m sad, very sad, that I don’t have what most people think of as a father, but I’m not angry. But I’m not going to let HIS illness ruin MY life. Letting people into my life that treat me that way just might ruin my life. I’m not taking that chance, because I really do deserve better than that.

Have I forgiven him? I don’t know if that even means anything anymore. The whole thing is beyond anger, beyond hurt feelings, beyond petty, childish silly things. It’s about the difference between ekeing out an existence and having a life. Some people have to be kicked out of your sphere of awareness for your own good.

And some people need to be not blindly let back in to the sphere of decision making or opinion influencing for everyone else’s good.

It’s not about being mad. Really.

Sorry for the ramble.

I get it patkin. I do. Really. It’s what you believe, and I respect that. It just doesn’t work for me, ok?

I didn’t mean it’s a conservative position. I meant it’s the kind of binary, black and white, with us or against us position you might hear them take on a different topic.

No, I’m not saying you guys are wingnuts. I get the unity and certainty of the argument. Clearly it resonates with my kind of folks. But it just sounds wrong to me. I can’t do that. And for what it’s worth, that’s not about Yglesias, or any of them. That’s just about me…

mikey

C’mon, Mikey, no one said Yglesias or the other pro-war pundits were irredeemable, just that they haven’t apologized, acknowledged their mistakes, and shown that they aren’t going to fuck up again in identical fashion.

No one’s saying that they’re bad people, or that we don’t want them to vote against the Republicans, or any of that. However, when somone fucks up grossly and in the face of all common sense and shows no understanding of having fucked up, do you encourage them to try, try again or do you sit them down for a long talk?

Picture, if you will, a guy who drives drunk. He’s convinced he drives better when drunk–it relaxes him, he can loosen up and concentrate on the road. Ooops–he hits something–sideswipes a tree. Does he, at that point, say to himself, “Hmmm, this driving and drinking thing isn’t working out the way I thought it would” or does he say “Goddamn tree! Why do trees keep popping up in our public roadways! Something ought to be done about those trees!” Well, in this case, the trees are inconvenient facts, the driver represents pro-war punditry, and the car is a manifestation of Vishnu.

Crappy metaphors are a specialty of mine.

Honestly, had I never heard of Scott Ritter I still would have known it was bs.
Not because I knew Bush was the avatar of everything I find anathema.
Because they wanted to invade Iraq back in 99, back before Al Qaeda existed in the rightwing mind.
It was very, very simple.

Thanks, Jillian. I’m truly sorry for what you got for no better reason than being born. Good people get shitty deals, and the Hilton family has Paris. Whatever. You’ve done ok, and you’re making a difference. That counts.

I AM angry. I’ll ALWAYS be angry. When I learned to survive, it was this epiphany I had one night. I was part of a company size perimeter around a couple of disabled M113 AAVs. We had got there late, so we got out a few claymores and scraped some crappy holes. No wire, no heavy weapons. We had 82 mortars and M60s. About 90 guys, and a couple of ma deuces on the AAVs. The mortars were firing illum rounds intermittantly, and the NVA was hitting us up and down the line with sapper teams, probing for an opening. About 2am, I saw some movement and put twenty rounds downrange. I squated down to change mags and this skinny fucker in a tan uniform with red shoulder flashes jumps in my hole and rips off a burst from his AK. Now this little bastard is UGLY. He’s gasping for air, his face is all red and pocked with acne scars. His eyes don’t really focus and his breath is NASTY. But he’s got that very serious NVA bayonet fixed on his AK. The burst he fired missed badly, he fired it more out of surprise and fear than he did to kill me. So then he swings the barrel toward me and [chunk] the bayonet cuts shallowly into my tricep and stops, he rips off another burst that runs his mag dry and covers my whole right side in powder burns.

Time stopped. We kind of looked at each other. Neither of us had a live round to shoot. I wasn’t some goddam redcoat, I didn’t have my bayonet fixed. Like I’m gonna go around fucking bayoneting people? What is this, 1830? The epiphany hit me that day, and changed everything forever and ever, amen. I thought, shit, I’ve got to find a way to kill this guy, right now. It’s like there was nothing else, no battle, no gunfire, no tracers, no flares. Just him and me, and I kind of magically understood that I had to get angry, get fucking mad. I had to learn to hate this crappy little piece of shit, and I had to flip his switch, and I had to WANT TO. Something shifted down inside of me. I felt it go. And I knew, you could just tell, it was never going to shift back. I felt calm, warm and safe. I dropped my rifle, took his face in my hands, turned him around with just his head, pulled his hair back, got my hands around his skinny fucking chicken throat, and I squeezed as hard as I could, calling him every vile, hateful thing I could. He was dead in seconds. I felt everything in there collapse, and I felt the life just go out of him. And I shoved his piece of filth crap body down in that hole and stood on it the rest of that night. And I wanted to kill. I looked for targets.

And the rest of my tour I was good. Damn good. The sergeants noticed, and had me leading fire teams and setting guns. I had learned to survive, because I had learned to hate. You can channel all the things you deny are within you, you can call them to the surface, you can embrace them to live, to kill, to hate.

But they don’t just go away when you’re done. They never go away…

mikey

I hate situations pretty often. I hate stupid, thoughtless words and attitudes that bring harm into the world. But I almost never hate people. The truly vile ones – the Fred Phelpses, the Bill Kristols – but few others.

People do make me sad a lot, though. There’s a lot of sadness to go around.

But I love mikey.

I dunno much of anything to say to Jillian and mikey in response to sharing such personal, and moving, words. As has been established, I drew a lucky ticket in life. I can’t pretend I get it. (Though I was once very close to someone whose story has close parallels to yours, Jillian, so I have some tiny idea of how hard it must have been to cut him off despite it all.) All I can say is thanks for not hating folk like me, at least when we haven’t earned it, and maybe, if we’re lucky, we can make it less likely others will have to go through what you have.

Jillian, mikey:

The fact that you two guys went through so much awful shit and still came out as good people. Well, it’s inspiring.

I’ll be honest, I’ve lived a life pretty much described as that warm center of the universe that all light crowds around. I don’t suffer anything, I didn’t go through any bad shit as a kid, I never had to look at someone’s eyes as the light went out of them.

And to be honest, I still hate a lot of people. Maybe it’s the anger of being young and seeing everything being done wrong, maybe it’s just the impression that there’s a lot of people in this world who really deserve to be hated for what they spout. Or maybe I’m just sick in the soul, and I’m trying to make up for it by hating kleptocrats, bigots, racists and warmongers instead of whichever minority is on the low end of the pole.

I really hope that one day I can get to a point where even those people are capable of being forgiven, but that’s just not who I am yet.

Hey brad, m’man. Don’t mean nothin. Based on what I’ve come to understand about you, I’d share a hole with you any time. ‘Sides, we’d get the righteous care packages from your family, right?

mikey

Thanks, mikey. I’m even, if paintball rifles are any indication, a half-decent shot, so I might not even be a liability.
N I’d just have the fam send cash, unless the hole was out in the desert or summin.
Considering how things sound in the military these days, I’d have care packages be all the sets of body armor they felt like they could afford.

Fuck that. Cookies, and fruit, unless things have changed radically. Oh, and booze…

mikey

Oh bite me. Yglesias rocks. He’s out there producing new content while all you do is snipe at the right-wing blogsphere ( a “target rich environment” if there ever was one)

Yglesias rocks.

“Rocks” is not a word I ever thought of for him. Does it mean something new again?

If a policeman knocked on your door in the middle of the night, waking you up, and said, “Jillian, there’s been a bad wreck on the highway, a huge cloud of chlorine gas is headed this way, it will be here in 2 minutes and you have to evacuate immediately,� would you run to your TV set and turn on the local station to confirm his story, or would you grab the kids (or dog or who/whatever) and leap in the car to get the hell out of there?

Liberalrob, I shite you not: That knock actually came at our door, just before 7am one fine morning, and the policeman insisted we look carefully at his ID before telling us about the overturned tanker truck leaking flourine gas at the offramp 200 yards behind our back yard. And his official instructions were that we should STAY THE FVCK INSIDE, with the windows shut, because that’s where we were safest at the moment, and if the Proper Authorities couldn’t contain the leak safely then the cops would know who needed to be evacuated from which houses. What the cops did *not* want was a bunch of terrified drivers tying up the local surface roads and causing more accidents from sheer panic. And, as the nice cop explained to me then & the local media repeated later, the noisy guy in a uniform banging on the door and insisting you needed to leave ‘immediately’ just wanted to steal your valuables after you’d stuffed granny & the wedding photos in the car and fled.

So, LR, you really need to find a new analogy. Because even if we accepted the (flimsy) reasoning that Iraq was thisclose to fedexing WMDs to DesMoines, those guys banging on the door? They took advantage of your sweaty panic to steal some of your most valuable civil rights, which Halliburton is now fencing to a megacorporation based in the Caymans and operating in China. If only you’d had the presence of mind to ask them for some ID first…

If a notably corrupt and incompetent policeman knocked on your door in the middle of the night, waking you up, and said, “Jillian, that swarthy man down the road is going to kill you in your sleep with poison gas, you need to go over there and blow off his head and imprison his children so we can declare his bitchin’ deck and pool our personal property,â€? would you run to your neighbor’s house to confirm his story, or would you grab the semi-automatic and take out his entire household in a blaze of glory to the rockin’ sounds of Metallica? There is such a thing as trust in those to whom we entrust authority to not willfully misuse or betray that trust, and there’s being a blind authoritarian idiot.

Fixed your typos. It continues to shock me with what a cavalier attitude the libhawks treat violent invasion and occupation of a sovereign nation. It’s fucking scary, is what it is.

A classic in the genre.

The only difference between someone like Yglesias and someone like Peter Beinart is that Beinart is more entrenched. They still have the same instincts.

Mikey, this is not a unversalist logic I’m using here. I argue what I do and mean what I say — ruthlessly, yes — in the context of *punditry*. It’s not about manicheanism as a philosophy — it’s not about “black and white”.

BTW, Absolutely on topic, here’s a classic by the late Steve Gilliard.

One more time to try make my point, mikey. I *agree* that the imperative is to stop the war. That’s what matters. But it also matters to stop *future wars*. One part of doing that is to do what one can in curtailing the popularity of people who are philosophically pre-disposed to accomodate wingnut warmongering. There is a reason why Matt Yglesias and his sort fell for the war. The Iraq War’s failure has *not* caused that reason to die within them. They will fall for another because that’s what he thinks. So who gives a shit if he’s finally human and aware enough to see that this one is a mistake, if oen knows that he’d do the same fucking thing tomorrow if the situation were to repeat (and it WILL repeat). Why is the idea of being nice and forgiving to someone who is merely a careerist sort of pundit so important that it supercedes the idea of shunning pundits with influence who are destined to be war-enabling idiots in the future? IMO, the case for forgiving people like Yglesias is about humane feelings to an individual rather than about anti-war principle and poltical strategy.

Now THAT is something that does make sense to me. Thanks, HTML!

mikey

Maybe it’s been mentioned upthread, but one thing about Yglesias’ comment bugs me – the inclusion of Ezra Klein in the ‘progressives’ who were for the Iraq War.

Wasn’t Klein like 12 or something when the invasion happened? I did find this on the archives of his old blog:

I will say this in Steven’s favor though, he is all sorts of right when he says that the war, motives aside, will end Saddam’s brutal reign. That’s something worth supporting, but it’s not so transcendental as to inoculate Bush to the criticism he so richly deserves. We should end his brutal regime, but there’s no reason that we have to hack away at our relations with every other country in order to achieve that goal.

He’s talking about Steven den Beste. Very progressive.

they want to now use that influence to write that we need to END THE FUCKING WAR

What scares me (and probably a lot of other people), mikey, is that they may instead just want to move it to another location.

I’m with HTML, Jillian, Anne Laurie, Patkin, Doc, RB, oh hell probably everyone else except ‘liberalrob.’

They don’t get a pass to enable them to cheerlead for the same fucking crimes somewhere else if someone with higher approval poll ratings than BushCO and/or a (D) beside their name decides that this is what will Make America Strong Again.

And IMO they have NOT shown that they have learnt anything except that they will line up behind whoever’s POPULAR.

They’re not on ‘our side.’ They’ve NEVER been on our side.

Seems to me Ezra (via that archived quote) isn’t wrong in supporting the ouster of Saddam Hussein per se. Alas, life on the ground is a tad more complex.

Its this constant decades-old goddamn tinkering with the Middle East that led us to this place. Every fucking US president for the last 70 (?) years has considered it their foreign policy petri dish.

From the latest issue of a Discovery article on the tech-backwardness of Islamic countries: “We are not behind because of Islam. We are behind because of what the Americans and the British have done to us.”

Sorry if this goes a little off topic, but part of the problem here is just what the hell are we talking about when we say “progressive”? The word’s become a shibboleth, a tag anybody to the left of Ben Nelson is eager to appropriate. So even in the stunningly truncated spectrum in American politics that falls left-of-center, you’re bound to have some turf wars. To Yglesias et al. in the center left (or just center), it seems to be a way of proving one’s Democratic bona fides without recourse to the poisoned label “liberal”, while those of us on the Left use it to distinguish ourselves from the mainstream Dem. liberals and also (frankly) to avoid the slippery slope that runs from an admission of being a leftist straight to Communist (via radical, Socialist, and Marxist–words that ought to carry some meaning but have just come to stand for one another).

I think it’s pretty clear that the word progressive can’t be stretched to accomodate the split, but since every other label we might chose to self-apply has been turned into a slur, we’re left to either squabble over whose claim in legitimate or just ignore the problem–purge one another, pretend we’re all one happy if slightly dysfunctional family (“no enemies to the left”), or, worse yet, carelessly adapt labels to fit our tastes (Delong a social democrat? What the fuck!?) .

But a resolution, even a mere accomodation, would require some kind of ideological dicussion. And as shystee said earlier, “it’s not polite to talk about ideology. So 20th century.” So I guess we’re all Progressives, and we hate each other for it.

I kind of agree. Politics has become far too fragmented. One’s politics is not the same as political theory. Politics is, or at least has been in the past, about big ideas. What is the role of government? What is the role of the military? What should the government provide, what should the market provide? Should the government act as a nanny, a referee, a regulator? While many of us can come up with areas of disagreement, we would likely agree in broad strokes about the big questions.

Look. Whatever we choose to call ourselves, the opposition seems to have perfected the ability to turn that word into an epithet, a slur as you say. Liberal. Left wing. Hell, they’ve got people using the term “Democrat Party” ’cause the thought that we might be associated with “democracy”, something they claim is good, is a thought they find offensive.

Pick any word. Use it to identify the large group of americans who think in general like we do. The Rovian smear machine will immediately start working on tarnishing that word, making it a negative. So maybe we’re better off without a word..

mikey

Pick any word. Use it to identify the large group of americans who think in general like we do. The Rovian smear machine will immediately start working on tarnishing that word, making it a negative. So maybe we’re better off without a word..

Or, maybe we are just calling ourselves ‘Liberals’, or ‘Socialists’ at every single opportunity, thus helping to rehabilitate those words. Like homosexuals did with ‘Queer’. We need words to describe ourselves, our beliefs. If we keep allowing the right wing media to deny us words for ourselves, then I think we’ll find it hard to accomplish much of anything.

People can decide that they hate ‘Identity Politics’, but, to me, it’s necessary. We can’t keep pretending that we don’t care, we can just run to another word. I don’t think being nameless would be workable either. We should fight back and defend our territory.