The Pundits, They Burn!

I've been collecting really bad editorial columns for a new feature I think I'll call "This Week In Abominable Punditry," but I never got around to last week's. So I'll just bullet-point it here for your perusal:

• If I had to give out an award for abominable punditry, clearly it would have to be called the Golden Hiatt. In this edition, Fred blames Harry Reid for being so mean and angry and bullying Senators around on Iraq, disabling them from coming up with a nice sensible centrist solution for themselves. In other words, he's claiming that if Harry Reid and the Democrats weren't pushing for a change of course, Republican moderates who have voted in lockstep with Bush for over four years would suddenly break with the President and come up with their own plan. Talk about waiting for Godot.

• It's never a carnival of abominable punditry without John Stossel, who actually argues that life expectancy isn't a function of health care, just simply that "in America we kill each other more." Murder to BOLSTER an argument! Why didn't I think of that? He also laments that patients don't "shop around" for health care, and he's right because when I break my ankle, it is my right and duty as a capitalist not to get it set and fixed immediately but to comparison shop. (This, by the way, is part of a common thread of Michael Moore-bashing that has a root in journalistic exceptionalism, where they must scrupulously fact-check his numbers without concern for their own.)

• David Brooks' column, where he peers into the soul of George W. Bush and finds a man at peace, certainly qualifies for abominable, but Matthew Yglesias makes an interesting point about one passage:

Conservatives are supposed to distrust government, but Bush clearly loves the presidency. Or to be more precise, he loves leadership. He’s convinced leaders have the power to change societies. Even in a place as chaotic as Iraq, good leadership makes all the difference.

Now I suppose their must be some conservatives for him this "are supposed to distrust government" dictum applies, but for the past fifty or so years that's clearly not the case. The mainstream conservative belief is that the government needs to be given dramatically greater scope to gather information and to deploy force -- including deadly force -- and threats thereof.

Indeed, and that's something Jonah Goldberg conveniently forgets in his abominable column, where he asserts that liberals only hate strong executive power when applied to George Bush (and he backs it up with tales of FDR, which certainly resonate for everyone over the age of 80, but not many others). In fact, conservatives' views on the Presidency have transmorgrified to a far greater degree over time, even constructing wild theories validating the Imperial Presidency and reconciling it with conservatism. It should not surprise you that Goldberg gets this backwards. If it does, please go directly to The Corner and come back after total immersion in the bullshit.

• Our "Abominable Punditry in History" series takes us back to the words of Thomas Friedman, one of America's most-respected foreign policy writers, mind you, who said this about Kosovo:

Like it or not, we are at war with the Serbian nation (the Serbs certainly think so), and the stakes have to be very clear: Every week you ravage Kosovo is another decade we will set back your country back by pulverizing you. You want 1950? We can do 1950. You want 1389? We can do 1389 too.

Classy. I guess achieving every objective without the loss of a single American life was too neat and clean.

• And finally, there's the all-timer from Bill Kristol, Why Bush Is A Winner, a raft of lies and uncomfortably bad predictions that managed to only convince one person in the entire country:

Bill Kristol's the-war-is-being-won piece in The Washington Post brought him plenty of ridicule, but at least one person liked it.

President Bush read the July 15 Outlook article that morning and recommended it to his staff.

"I like the cut of this guy's jib! Never thought about it that way! I'm actually doin' a good job! This guy's like Einstein! I wonder what else he thinks about me?"

Peace out.