I can’t watch much more of this vicious stupidity – the only relief I can find is that the biggest a**hole on stage, Joe Biden, has no shot of winning. But he’s only the worst by a smidgen.
Anyway, if you must have live blogging, David Weigel’s doing an entertaining job.
Another week, another dreadful column from Anne Applebaum, this time about why we can never ever ever ever leave Iraq. Applebaum, along with Cathy Young and a few others, occupies a weird niche in establishment punditry: as yawn-inducing in her analysis as David Broder and as neocon in her foreign policy as anyone at The Weekly Standard, she nonetheless manages to double-dip as a libertarian sage, at least in some quarters. Fortunately, some libertarians aren’t letting her get away with it.
Jim Henley shreds her latest:
This is the stupidest column anyone has ever written for any venue. I sure am glad Anne Applebaum returned to Washington in time to let us all know that, like Madeleine Albright’s America, she sees farther than others. I know just where “a dose of humility†is missing: Applebaum’s column.
There’s an implication lurking underneath the self-regard – that since all the Iraq options have downsides, what we happened to be doing at the exact moment Anne Applebaum started paying attention again is the sensible course. Needless to say, there’s no argument in favor of, to coin a phrase, staying the course. …
IOZ:
Rarely are all the miserable aspects of the sunk costs fallacy so energetically invoked at a columnist’s Ouija. The author reviews briefly a series of bogus politicians’ bogus plans for Iraq, finds them all lacking, and prescribes that since we’re already soldiering, we must therefore soldier on. …
Applebaum lists a series of mighty disasters proceeding from an American departure, then says:
Perhaps these things would never have happened if we hadn’t gone there in the first place–but if we leave, we’ll be morally responsible.
We’re already morally responsible. We did something wrongly, and we don’t have the power to put it right. It cannot be rectified, remediated, or forgiven. The practical, tactical, strategic, ethical, and moral failures are ours already. We can’t take them back, but we can leave and stop implicating ourselves ever further in their unwinding.
Henley and IOZ have been monitoring Applebaum’s abortions for some time now, and nary a word needs to be added to their collective verdict. As a columnist at the Washington Post, Applebaum has all the exposure a person of her talents could possibly ask for – there’s no need, and no reason, for libertarians to expand her platform by treating her as a kindred spirit, much less calling her “outstanding,” “one of America’s most insightful journalists,” “a fine journalist, an excellent writer, and a judicious historical researcher,” and “a fantastic writer, a careful scholar, and possessed of a moral sensibility that is judicious, practical, and finely tuned.”* There are already enough lips stuck to the backside of this bien-pensant bore.
*Obviously, I invented these clumsy, fawning quotations, and hastily, I might add. No one would really write such things.
Christopher Hitchens disses Lord Black, though his bile, the product of a feud two decades ago, seems tempered by his gradual convergence with the Borg (“I remember running into a very conservative gentleman in the corridors of the American Enterprise Institute a year or so ago…”). In a nutshell, it’s Hitchens the aristocratic commie versus Black the make-believe aristocrat. Rather dull, actually, but we wouldn’t want you to miss an episode in the Great Neocon Crack-Up.
Look whose praises Christopher Hitchens was singing 30 years ago.
(Via Jonathan Schwarz. Dennis Perrin has further observations.)
Brian Conley of Alive in Baghdad will appear in a segment on Good Morning America July 5. The show airs 7-9 a.m. Eastern.
I don’t usually bother with the right-wing legal blog Volokh Conspiracy for reasons Jim Henley summarized years ago. So I was pleasantly surprised to find these comments on the Libby commutation.
[W]hether Scooter Libby’s original sentence was exactly correct is an interesting question I can’t answer; while I have a rough sense it was in the right ballpark, I didn’t follow the case closely enough to have any particular views of that.
Nonetheless, I find Bush’s action very troubling because of the obvious special treatment Libby received. President Bush has set a remarkable record in the last 6+ years for essentially never exercising his powers to commute sentences or pardon those in jail. His handful of pardons have been almost all symbolic gestures involving cases decades old, sometimes for people who are long dead. Come to think of it, I don’t know if Bush has ever actually used his powers to get one single person out of jail even one day early. If there are such cases, they are certainly few and far between. So Libby’s treatment was very special indeed.
Eugene Volokh chimed in with his agreement, then Kerr added this:
The Scooter Libby case has triggered some very weird commentary around the blogosphere; perhaps the weirdest claim is that the case against Libby was “purely political.”
I find this argument seriously bizarre. As I understand it, Bush political appointee James Comey named Bush political appointee and career prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate the Plame leak. Bush political appointee and career prosecutor Fitzgerald filed an indictment and went to trial before Bush political appointee Reggie Walton. A jury convicted Libby, and Bush political appointee Walton sentenced him. At sentencing, Bush political appointee Judge Walton described the evidence against Libby as “overwhelming” and concluded that a 30-month sentence was appropriate. And yet the claim, as I understand it, is that the Libby prosecution was the work of political enemies who were just trying to hurt the Bush Administration.
I find this claim bizarre. I’m open to arguments that parts of the case against Libby were unfair. But for the case to have been purely political, doesn’t that require the involvement of someone who was not a Bush political appointee? Who are the political opponents who brought the case? Is the idea that Fitzgerald is secretly a Democratic party operative? That Judge Walton is a double agent? Or is the idea that Fitzgerald and Walton were hypnotized by “the Mainstream Media” like Raymond Shaw in the Manchurian Candidate? Seriously, I don’t get it.
I would like to hear some of you bullsh*t neolibertarians out there explain how it can be anything other than abuse of power for a president to free his cronies who have obstructed investigations into his administration while thousands of nonviolent, victimless “criminals” rot in America’s prisons.
