All through reading Michael Ignatieff’s NYT Mag contribution to the chastened hawk’s mea-minima-culpa genre, it took a tremendous effort of will to suppress the urge to grab the nearest fork and make like Oedipus. (No, no, Mom, the other thing.) But the Wheel of Karma turns, and David Rees’ takedown at Hufflepuff returned a solid laugh for every time I’d winced at the original.
And as long as I’ve brought it up, let me just echo Yglesias’ point about the weirdness of Ignatieff’s main theme, which is that he erred because his cloistered academic analysis was inferior to the simple wisdom of bus drivers and other Jess Plain Folk. As it turns out, people who actually had relevant academic expertise called this one pretty well, on the whole.
2 responses so far ↓
1 Barry // Aug 8, 2007 at 11:46 am
There’s a theme I’ve been trying to spread: ‘the people who lied us into this war, and lied us through this war, will continue to lie to us’.
I feel that there are two types of war supporters – those who have publicly admitted their error, with no excuse, and the rest. Anybody who plays some excuse game (e.g., ‘how was I to know that overthrowing a government with no clue as to what to do next would turn out badly?’, ‘how was I to know that a failed businessman would also f*ck up when given far more power?’) is merely a continuing liar.
I’d like to know if there are any prominent counter-examples to this; I’m running on my own casual observations here, and we all know how that can turn out.
2 sangfroid826 // Aug 8, 2007 at 5:22 pm
I thought Ezra Klein was the only one who had a mother lurking on his blog.