Random Sunday

Summer always brings out the internet feuds. The current feud between Mark Ambinder and every liberal on the internets is still going strong. Today Krugman fires the next volley.

But I’d like to return to one point: even after retracting his statement about people who correctly surmised that terror warnings were political being motivated by “gut hatred” of Bush, he left in the bit about being “reflexively anti-Bush”. I continue to find it really sad that people still say things like this.

Bear in mind that by the time the terror alert controversy arose in 2004, we had already seen two tax cuts sold on massively, easily documented false pretenses; a war launched with constant innuendo about a Saddam-Osama link that was clearly false, and with claims about WMDs that were clearly shaky from the beginning and had proved to be entirely without foundation. We’d also seen vast, well-documented dishonesty and politicization on environmental policy. Oh, and Abu Ghraib was already public knowledge.

Given all that, it made complete sense to distrust anything the Bush administration said. That wasn’t reflexive, it was rational.

Indeed, as I said on Twitter last night, it was the only rational response. Having watched this same theme play out several times now with various *serious* pundits, I can't fail to notice the legacy journalists who cheered on the war are just as determinedly blind as any wingnut. They can't simply own a mistake and move on. There's always that little justification about why they just had to take that position. Which I guess is just human nature, but it is really galling when they blame their failings on the dirty hippies and refuse to fully acknowledge we were right. As is dead on, not a single thing we said didn't come to pass, and sometimes surpassed our most pessimistic predictions.

In other news, and no, there's no way I'm linking to it, World Nut Daily is reporting, "Talk-show host Sean Hannity, a vocal opponent of Barack Obama's policies, said today he would not rule out a bid for the presidency in 2012." I'm not even going to click in to read it, but you can find it on Memeorandum right now if you must. Thinking he should tap Pat Buchanan as his running mate. What a ticket that would make.

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