One reason why much of the chattering class hates the Internet so much is because it has exposed them as having no clothes, although the image of a naked Robert Novak or David Brooks ought to be, if nothing else, disturbing, both to them and to us.
But this is old news, as is the fact that most, though not all of the exposed pundits, are on the Right side of the political divide, mainly because the circle they need to square, the one between their relatively rigid ideology and the unyielding tide of reality, is a virtually impossible task.
Watching columnists of all political stripes and states of intellectual undress grapple over the last half-dozen days with the president's most recent Iraq speech and policy, however, has been a quite entertaining, and as I explain after the jump, has brought to mind for me a long-lost personal memory from 28 years ago.
Three columns on Iraq caught that caught my eye this weekend are good examples of what I have seen and heard from the pundits. First is George Will, who starts out Sunday's column with a reference to a quote by French general Marshal Foch in the First World War.
Say what you will about Will, he is frequently wrong, but rarely inept. That said, usually when Will begins with some self-conscious historical anecdote to show how educated he is, it is a sure sign that he has little of substance to say. He was true to form. In his first five grafs on Sunday he stated three times that the president was probably wrong in thinking his new policy of additional troops will work. So far, so good. But of course, the argument can't be left there, so this travesty was vitiated in Will's mind by his perception that war critic's plans are no better. Note to Will: Bush's critics are not president. Their plans may be interesting to look at, but they have no practical effect, and the two are therefore not comparable.
On the same page was a piece by Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, who seems like a thoughtful fellow. He states that critics of the escalation "rightly argue that it may well be too little too late, way too late, [b]ut ... it is still the right thing to try" because it has some good parts, like a jobs program "in a country where too many angry, disenfranchised, unemployed young men are joining insurgent groups and militias," although it's worth noting that Will dismisses the jobs program, saying that "Shiites are not torturing Sunnis with electric drills and Sunnis are not beheading Shiites because both sides are suffering from the ennui of unemployment."
But I digress. O'Hanlon's argument is absurd. It is like arguing that it is right to board a plane at the airport knowing it's going to crash because it promises a good in-flight movie.
Then today was Fareed Zakaria (could not find a link). I don't know his work too well, but he seems like a reasonably thoughtful person on TV. Today he wrote an interesting column asserting that Bush's "surge" has a good shot of succeeding militarily (contra, Will, infra), but that won't be a good thing because of the political consequences that will flow from success. "The greatest danger of the Bush policy," he writes, "isn't that it won't work but that it will[.]"[sic] Got that? The policy is bad if it fails, and worse if it succeeds. Oy.
According to Zakaria, the answer to the puzzle of Iraq is "a sustained strategy of pressure on the Malaki government -- unlike anything Bush has been willing to do yet[.]" He doesn't define "sustained pressure," but as a father of three young boys, I can only chortle at that. I mean, in all seriouosness, what can we do to pressure this guy short of killing him? Take away his Nintendo DS?
But the problem in this particular case, for once, is not the columnists, but that the escalation policy announced by Bush is itself so irrational that it defies any kind of rational discussion. It is almost as if it is beyond legitimate criticim because, before the logic behind it can be criticised, it must be identified, and this logic is beyond identification or characterization. It isn't just that it involves circular reasoning or pretzel logic, it goes beyond that. It is an original lack of rationality that the world has never before seen, something that has not even been named yet.
When I was in grad school, one of my housemates defined a new art form. He may have been under the influence of something at the time, or it may have just reflected the fact that he was a lunatic. Anyway, his idea was that, say, a sculpter would sculpt a staue as reralistically as he or she could, then discard the sculpture. The art would lay in the peices removed from the original stone to create the sculpture. A sketch, for another example, would consist of the portion of the pencil not used to produce the drawing.
Brilliant, actually, when you think about it. He called it "Pre-Post-Modern-Negative-Realism." The art itself could never be recognized or identified, no matter how perceptive the viewer, as what it actually was, even though it a had an immutible symbiotic relationship with a traditional piece of art that would be instantly recognizable to even the most unsophisticaded viewer, say a drawing of a person, or a sculpture of a horse. Pre-post-modern-negative-realistic art was, on its own terms, beyond understanding, evaluation or criticism by anyone.
Bush seems to have accomplsihed that with this policy.
Brilliant, actually. Or lunacy.