"Jacob Weisberg’s No Good, Horrible, Very Bad Brain"

[BurtWorm]

By Weldon Burger at BTC News:

http://www.btcnews.com/btcnews/1427

Want to champion civil liberties? Violate them early and often. Need to burnish your national security credentials? Support the biggest national security blunder in modern history.

That, in a nutshell, is the advice Slate editor Jacob Weisberg is offering Democrats in the wake of Joe Lieberman’s no good, horrible, very bad day.

“Lieberman’s opponents,” Weisberg allows, “are not entirely wrong about the war. The invasion of Iraq was, in ways that have since become hard to dispute, a terrible mistake. There were no weapons of mass destruction to be dismantled, we had no plan for occupying the country, and our troops remain there only to prevent the civil war we unleashed from turning into a bigger and more horrific civil war. Just about everyone now agrees that the sooner we find a way to withdraw, the better for us and for the Iraqis. The problem for the Democrats is that the anti-Lieberman insurgents go far beyond simply opposing Bush’s faulty rationale for the war, his dishonest argumentation for it, and his incompetent execution of it. Many of them appear not to take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously. They see Iraq purely as a symptom of a cynical and politicized right-wing response to Sept. 11, as opposed to a tragic misstep in a bigger conflict. Substantively, this view indicates a fundamental misapprehension of the problem of terrorism. Politically, it points the way to perpetual Democratic defeat.”

“Not entirely wrong” about the “terrible mistake”??? Great god almighty, they’s a hurricane a’comin.

Oddly, Weisberg fails to identify these Lamont supporters, or anti-Lieberman insurgents, as he prefers, who fail to take the threat of terrorism seriously; no more does he identify how they manifest this lack of seriousness. And no more does he offer any evidence of how Lieberman’s decision to continue supporting this terrible mistake/tragic misstep constitutes anything other than an act of monumental irrationality. Instead, he enthusiastically makes the case that opposition to someone who supports an action that has demonstrably undermined our national security itself demonstrates “a fundamental misapprehension of the problem.”

This is beyond thick; not only was Lieberman’s fall a consequence of his decision to make a career of attacking Democrats and enabling the Bush administration — and with a float mocking the Bush smooch following Lieberman all over Connecticut, Weisberg’s ignorance of that objection seems more than a bit daft — but when you strip away all the excess fluff, which is virtually the entire column, you’re left with the notion that Democrats are required to endorse every application of force, no matter how stupid, no matter how gravely it threatens our national security, if they want to be taken seriously on national security issues.

Weisberg will never cope rationally with any issue even peripherally involving Iraq unless he finds it within himself to forgive those who managed to identify the war as a terrible mistake a year or two or three before he did. Until then, he’ll find himself locked in the embrace of his own logic: Want to be a pundit? Put down your brain and slowly back away.

[BurtWorm]

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