Wednesday, December 06, 2006
Centrism, centrism, uber alles
Cynthia Tucker vs. reality:
This is bizarro-world political correctness, where it's considered gauche to have voted against the war even though 90 percent or so of Americans now agree with that point of view. And I supported the war. But obviously, people who argued the other way look an awful lot smarter than me, in retrospect.
I used to buy into this fetishization of centrism, this out-of-hand dismissal of "liberal" views. It seems pretty clear now that this was a poor framework for evaluating whether to support sending American troops to invade a country.
Is there any set of facts that would cause someone like Tucker to (1) question her assumptions, or (2) be held accountable for her mistakes? Another 3,000 dead American soldiers? Another 300,000, dead Iraqis? Another 3 million? Another $50 billion? Another billion people in the world who say they dislike and mistrust the US?
Or would she still consider whatever she might expect to come out of the mouths of Broders to be the lodestar for political analysis?
"The simple fact of the matter is, every serious Democrat who was in the Senate at the time, voted for the war--or voted to authorize the president--and Al Gore was one of the few Senate Democrats who voted in 1991 for the first Gulf War."So, by definition, everyone who was right was frivolous. It's tough work, maintaining this faux seriousness in the face of all reason and experience, but Cynthia Tucker is up to the task.
This is bizarro-world political correctness, where it's considered gauche to have voted against the war even though 90 percent or so of Americans now agree with that point of view. And I supported the war. But obviously, people who argued the other way look an awful lot smarter than me, in retrospect.
I used to buy into this fetishization of centrism, this out-of-hand dismissal of "liberal" views. It seems pretty clear now that this was a poor framework for evaluating whether to support sending American troops to invade a country.
Is there any set of facts that would cause someone like Tucker to (1) question her assumptions, or (2) be held accountable for her mistakes? Another 3,000 dead American soldiers? Another 300,000, dead Iraqis? Another 3 million? Another $50 billion? Another billion people in the world who say they dislike and mistrust the US?
Or would she still consider whatever she might expect to come out of the mouths of Broders to be the lodestar for political analysis?
