This morning I discoursed on the intellectual corruption of the New Republic. It's not that I think they're too far right; it's that they're incapable of adding to the political dialogue with anything other than a mindless repetition of talking points.
I take that back now. The New Republic has added to the political dialogue something actively worse than the mindless repetition of talking points. They've created a new talking point, or at least co-opted one from the Right. In a piece this week, editor Peter "the dumbass" Beinart argues that the fact that Kucinich wants to withdraw from Iraq forces the other Democrats to agree with him or risk intellectual dishonesty. Here's Beinart:
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Howard Dean knows the perils of trying to have it both ways on Iraq. After all, he has spent the last year clobbering John Kerry for supporting war in the Senate while denouncing it on the campaign trail. So imagine Dean's surprise when, at the October 9 Democratic debate in Phoenix, Dennis Kucinich turned the charge against him. "This morning, in The New York Times, [Dean] wouldn't take a position on the eighty-seven billion dollars, and the governor says that he's still for keeping seventy thousand troops in Iraq," said Kucinich. "Now, it's either right or wrong. If we're wrong to be there, as I believe we are, we should get our troops out."
Kucinich, of course, is no threat to Dean's front-runner status. But his critique does make a certain sense. Dean's attacks hurt Kerry because the logic behind them was so clear: If you think the war is so bad, why did you vote for it? Today, however, the debate has largely shifted from war to postwar. Dean and other leading Democrats are calling the Iraq occupation a disaster that is breaking the bank, poisoning America's reputation around the world, and sending young men and women home in body bags. To which Kucinich asks a logical question: If you think the postwar is so bad, why not bring Americans home?
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Opposing Bush's reconstruction plan, and lacking a realistic one of their own, the Democratic candidates are vulnerable to Kucinich's logic. After all, if you don't have a strategy for winning the peace in Iraq, why stay? Democratic public opinion is clearly moving in this direction. A CBS poll in late August found that 53 percent of Democrats wanted the United States to either increase troop levels in Iraq or hold them steady, versus 37 percent who wanted to decrease the number. By last week, that figure had reversed itself. In a late October Washington Post/ABC News poll, 54 percent of Democrats said the "U.S. should withdraw forces from Iraq to avoid casualties," while only 40 percent wanted to keep them there.
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The unhappy truth is that, by mishandling postwar Iraq and alienating much of the world, the Bush administration has left the United States with two bad options: rebuild Iraq largely alone, at great cost in money and lives (and with no guarantee of success), or withdraw largely alone, in a Vietnam-like defeat. The leading Democratic presidential contenders, who like most candidates hate tough choices, are trying to pretend they don't have to make one. But the longer they oppose the Bush reconstruction strategy, the more they will find themselves pushed toward the alternative, which is no reconstruction at all. On Iraq, Kucinich now represents the Democratic vanguard. Unless the other candidates face reality, he could soon represent the Democratic mainstream.
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Beinart's rhetorical farts take the following form: if you think that Bush is messing things up, that entails that you think the diametric opposite of what Bush proposes is the correct choice.
That, by the way, is the exact same logic that goes "You think that the US should not have interrupted the weapons inspections? Then you support the continuance of Saddam Hussein and his torture."
How about this flash of brilliance, Peter: I think that Bush's reconstruction strategy is doomed to failure, so I support a different reconstruction strategy. My strategy relies on robots to do the peacekeeping. Or whatever. The point is that Beinart's logic makes no sense.
Furthermore, it gives credence to idiots like Andrew Sullivan (late of TNR) to say that Democrats oppose reconstructing Iraq. They're isolations. Blah blah blah blah. Um, no. It's not like Bush's plan is the only plan.
There remains, unbelievably, yet another story in this week's New Republic to be systematically torn apart. But I'll leave that for later.