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Apr. 24th, 2007 10:31 amHTML Mencken goes off on a glorious rant about Matt Yglesias and the other "we were wrong before we were right about Iraq" liberals:
Sensible Liberalism has grown and metastized enough to the point that gradations — or perhaps even separate strains — can be discerned within the whole. There’s, for instance, Liebermanism, a movement dedicated to wingnut fellow-travelling to the bitter end. Then there is Colmesism, which people mistake for a sensibility simply lacking in pride and gumption — a sensibility personified by a cowering bobblehead whose claim to fame is being the cablenews version of a pinata. But Colmesism, I would posit, is not about that at all; rather, it’s about gullibility and a congenital and suicidal desire to compromise on ideological grounds. To be plain: Colmesism is not about personality but about ideology.
[...]
You know who doesn’t deserve being paid for their opinion? Just out of principle? Anyone anywhere who was for the Iraq War for whatever amount of time. Period. I mean, that’s a fucking minimum. And Matt Yglesias doesn’t meet it.
And why Matt Yglesias got that one wrong — again, a very very fucking hard thing to get wrong — isn’t because he’s precisely not a polymath — though real polymaths who ought to be paid for their opinion, people like John Emerson or even Brad DeLong, got Iraq right. It’s because his first instinct is accomodation with the Right; it’s because his political judgement was forged post-Clinton, thus he was completely naive to the facts of innate wingnut depravity. I suspect he thought of the Kosovo operation as the rule rather than an exception; for such bovine people, the sicky-sweet neocon catchphrase “I believe America is a force for good in the world” functioned as a cattlecall. Of course some of us could recognize imperialism’s euphemisms when we heard them; for those who couldn’t, well … it doesn’t really make any difference whether it was from ignorance or stupidity. Fuck ‘em. They need to spend a long time in the journalistic wilderness before they again deserve serious attention.
Iraq is too important to forgive and forget the stupid fucking idiots who got it wrong (and often, not only got it wrong, but concentrated on attacking those who got it right). It’s the touchstone of a pundit’s political judgement.
And then in the comments he goes on to sum up my own reaction to the Democratic contenders to the throne:
Seriously, I’m more angry and depressed about the state of politics than I’ve been since 2003. I see the future and it looks like 1999. A cult of personality surrounding a charismatic serial triangulator and abetted by ‘liberals’ in the press.
I for one do not welcome our Obamaite, Sensible Liberal overlords.
Excellent points all.
Sensible Liberalism has grown and metastized enough to the point that gradations — or perhaps even separate strains — can be discerned within the whole. There’s, for instance, Liebermanism, a movement dedicated to wingnut fellow-travelling to the bitter end. Then there is Colmesism, which people mistake for a sensibility simply lacking in pride and gumption — a sensibility personified by a cowering bobblehead whose claim to fame is being the cablenews version of a pinata. But Colmesism, I would posit, is not about that at all; rather, it’s about gullibility and a congenital and suicidal desire to compromise on ideological grounds. To be plain: Colmesism is not about personality but about ideology.
[...]
You know who doesn’t deserve being paid for their opinion? Just out of principle? Anyone anywhere who was for the Iraq War for whatever amount of time. Period. I mean, that’s a fucking minimum. And Matt Yglesias doesn’t meet it.
And why Matt Yglesias got that one wrong — again, a very very fucking hard thing to get wrong — isn’t because he’s precisely not a polymath — though real polymaths who ought to be paid for their opinion, people like John Emerson or even Brad DeLong, got Iraq right. It’s because his first instinct is accomodation with the Right; it’s because his political judgement was forged post-Clinton, thus he was completely naive to the facts of innate wingnut depravity. I suspect he thought of the Kosovo operation as the rule rather than an exception; for such bovine people, the sicky-sweet neocon catchphrase “I believe America is a force for good in the world” functioned as a cattlecall. Of course some of us could recognize imperialism’s euphemisms when we heard them; for those who couldn’t, well … it doesn’t really make any difference whether it was from ignorance or stupidity. Fuck ‘em. They need to spend a long time in the journalistic wilderness before they again deserve serious attention.
Iraq is too important to forgive and forget the stupid fucking idiots who got it wrong (and often, not only got it wrong, but concentrated on attacking those who got it right). It’s the touchstone of a pundit’s political judgement.
And then in the comments he goes on to sum up my own reaction to the Democratic contenders to the throne:
Seriously, I’m more angry and depressed about the state of politics than I’ve been since 2003. I see the future and it looks like 1999. A cult of personality surrounding a charismatic serial triangulator and abetted by ‘liberals’ in the press.
I for one do not welcome our Obamaite, Sensible Liberal overlords.
Excellent points all.
