Author: Matt Barganier

Jonah Goldberg, whose still unreleased masterpiece Liberal Fascism now has its least moronic working subtitle yet, has posted what is already being hailed as the “Best. Update. Ever.” Oh my, how will Ron Paul’s acolytes ever respond to Evelyn Waugh’s defense of (wait for it, wait for it) fascism?

National Review‘s Kathryn Jean Lopez explains Thomas Smith’s false reporting from Lebanon:

That’s why I wrote, in my first editor’s note on the subject, that we “should have provided readers with more context and caveats” – the context that Smith was operating in an uncertain environment where he couldn’t always be sure of what he was witnessing, and the caveats that he filled in the gaps by talking to sources within the Cedar Revolution movement and the Lebanese national-security apparatus, whose claims obviously should have been been treated with the same degree of skepticism as those of anyone with an agenda to advance.

As one of our sources put it: “The Arab tendency to lie and exaggerate about enemies is alive and well among pro-American Lebanese Christians as much as it is with the likes of Hamas.”

One question: will we be allowed to quote this back to the neocons the next time they cite their buddies in Beirut regarding Syrian perfidy, or will they call us racists?

Over at Slate, Jack Shafer cites our very own David R. Henderson in a discussion of the War on Drugs.

Liam Madden from Iraq Veterans Against the War sends the following:

In 1969, the My Lai massacre helped fuel popular opposition to the Vietnam War. U.S. political and military leaders insisted that such crimes were isolated exceptions. Members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War knew differently.

In January of 1971, over one hundred Vietnam Veterans gathered in Detroit to testify their experiences to America. Their testimony, called the Winter Soldier Investigation, revealed that atrocities were systemic and responsibility laid at the highest levels of government.

The U.S. Government lied to get us into war and continues to conceal the true nature of military occupation.

On the weekend of 13-15 March, 2008, Iraq Veterans Against the War will assemble history’s largest gathering of US veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Iraqi and Afghan survivors. They will provide first hand accounts of their experiences and reveal the truth of occupation.

Click here to sign the statement of support.

Headmaster Sullivan tells us to clean our plates:

Imagine an Obama-McCain race: adult, graceful, necessary, and good for us.

Ah, Mr. Platitude vs. Mr. Come-Unglued: yep, it’ll be a regular Metamucil martini. Very adult!

Today’s nugget of conventional wisdom comes from liberal hawk George Packer:

In this election, the isolationist candidate is the Texas congressman Ron Paul. He frequently attacks the core rationale of Bush’s foreign policy, and receives enthusiastic applause for doing so, which indicates that Republican views about the war in Iraq might be more heterodox than the leading candidates and their strategists assume. But his brand of anti-interventionism reduces the Republican debate to hawks versus cranks. “They attack us because we’ve been over there. We’ve been bombing Iraq for ten years,” Paul said at a debate in South Carolina. “I’m suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it.”

Packer, who worked so hard to get us into Iraq that he cannot bear the thought of leaving, begins the very next paragraph as follows: “The room for genuine discussion in the Republican field is so limited…” Yes, it’s a shame that there are such narrow limits on our foreign policy discourse. How did we ever reach this sorry pass?

Link.