Anals of Euphemism

Here is my question: Can a nation whose largest, most influential, and theoretically most cosmopolitan daily newspaper refers to the common Persian practice of washing the anus after defecating, the ass after shitting, as washing "their bottoms" really expect to convince the world that it is the keeper of the flame of civilization?

I'm not certain that I mean this as a joke.

Let Me Just Say This about That

Word.

I could argue on the misplaced primacy of the corporation over the nation, but Chayefsky was hyperbolizing and Dennis and I are coming at the same collusion from different ends. The eternal question of whether true lefties can get along with minarchic yahoos like myself seems to me to be predicated on a gross surfeit of optimism. We are not going to smash the state-as-is, ergo it is of no import how we're going to settle the question of public provision in the coming pasttime paradise. To engage in doctrinal disputes when your doctrines are irrelevant to the actual, physical, temporal conduct of human life on this planet for the duration of your life and everyone's life is to drown in the pool of your own reflection. We're all engaged in the task of forestalling madness by hurling pebbles at the leviathan and then ducking out of sight. Dennis and I are two kids making trouble in the same alley, and there's no reason to argue when there are grownups to torment.

There is something I'd add to Dennis' post, though, which is that these progressives ever-yearning to take something back from something, are not so out of line with the political culture they seek to yank internetwards as they themselves seem to believe. Their world-view, such as it is, more or less equates the current setup with the way things oughta be, admitting some tinkering may be desirable. The fact that they more strongly advocate withdrawal from Iraq--fuller and immediater if not full and immediate--really only indicates that they haven't the brains to understand what it will mean to yank our Yankee cock out of that unconsenting Arab orifice. They still view the Iraq war as a mistake and, more tellingly, a distraction, and seem to understand the consequences of withdrawal as the advent of universal healthcare.

Their leaders, meanwhile, from whom they credit themselves with dissenting, are smarter, or have access to the briefing papers, or at very least have staffs telling them what to think, and they understand that we have Fucked Up in a very fundamental way, and that the investment made to this point cannot be unmade. To quit this enterprise would have deeper ramifications than your basic pwoggler is able to consider, and no one but you, me, and seven dudes building orgone accumulators in West Virginia is looking to get into any actual, like, you know, political upheavals. The New Deal, electronics innovation, a robust but not uppity labor movement, free clinics, hybrid cars, and a slightly revanchist Republican minority against which hackles can occasionally be raised--this is what the Donklesphere wants. We can come home, militarism can be momentarily tempered by regrets at having "lost," and some prodigy can design a really slick monument. Et cetera.

To this tiresome tune I can only reply by quoting the immortal Walter Sobchak: "I got buddies who died face-down in the muck so that you can I could enjoy this family restaurant." Needless to say, I'm not going to prattle on about brave so-and-sos defending our such-and-suches. The world needs no further hymns to heroism, the second deadliest fallacy after god. But in Walter's words are this truth: that The Troops™ are indeed operating in service of empire, and that to alter the endeavor now requires a greater committment of mental and verbal resources than, say, extracting an apology from a baby-faced former senator who, by the way, is running for office, and hopes he has your vote.

No Finance, No Romance Is How She Told Me Goodbye

I'm diggin the current imbroglio that pits the "Rudy's only in it for the money" camp against the "Rudy's only interested in power" camp. As if they're exclusive categories! Hey--it's almost as if he's an asshole on both accounts.

Kaplan at Slate notes that Giuliani does not in fact know what the fuck he's talking about. He is quite clearly insane. Of course, the fact that he's parlayed his insanity into a gazillion dollars and a huge global business bullshitting gullible MBA types and Saudi princes of lesser rank and inferior intelligence is fine by me. Personally, I would be more than willing to have my employer shell out a couple grand so that I could play a few rounds in Scottsdale and listen to Rudy tell me that someone moved my cheese. This hardly qualifies the guy "to lead," as goes the neologistic expression of what it is to be president.

Meanwhile, is it not the case that New York elected this meshuga to the office of mayor more than once? And is that not one further demerit for a once-great city sinking ever further into a sad life as the lucrative backdrop for TNT reruns of unamusing HBO?

Foodie Friday III

A slice of frittata, a green salad with a tangy vinaigrette, a glass of clean white wine or crisp, dry rosé--lunch or light dinner all summer.

Frittata with three onions

This frittata combines the rich flavor of caremalized yellow onions, the bright flavors of fresh leeks and green onions, and the rustic, extra-salty taste of Pecorino Romano. I cook mine in slow-rendered fat from pig jowls (pig jowl bacon, rind and meat removed, fat cut into small chucks, and slowly heated over a low flame), but butter or olive oil work just as well. The pig fat, if you don't mind the extra labor, adds a great smokey flavor, though.

8 eggs
1 large yellow onion
1 large leek
a handful of green onions
about 2 cups of freshly grated Pecorino Romano
pork fat or butter
olive oil (for caremalizing the yellow onions)
nutmeg
whole-milk yogurt
sea salt
black pepper

Slice one large yellow onion so thinly that the slices are nearly transparent. Heat a small amount of oil--just enough to coat the pan--in a heavy-bottomed saute pan or skillet, then toss the onions over medium-high heat until they soften and begin to give up their moisture. Turn the heat way down and leave the onions to slowly caremalize. Resist the temptation to stir them--it is slow, constant heat without disturbance that brings the natural sugars out of flesh.

Cut the green part off the leek and reserve its white bottom. Trim the root end. Slice it in half length-wise, then cut each section into thin half-moons. Leeks are naturally sandy, and the easiest way to wash them is to cut them, then throw the cut pieces into a colander and rinse them in the sink. Empty them onto a paper towl and set aside to dry. Trim a handful of green onions into sections about three inches long.

Break your eggs into a bowl. Whisk together. Add a pinch of salt (not too much--the rest will come from the cheese), a few twists of black pepper, and a little freshly-grated nutmeg. Never, ever, ever, ever use powdered nutmeg. It is a bitter, bitter, horrible, terrible thing. Add 1.5 tablespoons of good, whole-milk yogurt--goat's milk yogurt is preferable. Add a cup or so of freshly grated Pecorino Romano. Whip vigorously for several minutes until a light foam of bubbles holds on top of the eggs.

Quicky saute the leeks and and green onions in pork fat or butter. Add the caremalized yellow onions. Give the egg mixture a final, firm whisking, then pour them into the pan. Reduce the heat to medium low. As the eggs begin to firm up on the bottom, grate another cup or so of Romano onto the top. Then dust the top lightly with black pepper.

Turn your broiler to high, and place the oven rack above the middle but not so close to the flame or element that your eggs will burn. Remove them from the stovetop and place them under the broiler. Monitor them closely. They will firm and rise in the oven. The top should brown nicely and evenly and develop a slight crust because of the cheese. When the top is golden brown, remove it from the broiler.

Let it cool for a moment--the eggs will naturally contract and pull away from the pan a bit. Then loosen the edges with a spatula, and shake the pan vigorously to dislodge the frittata fully. Slide it onto a cutting board or plate. Slice. Eat hot, at room temperature, or chilled, garnished with a chiffonade of baby arugula.

Le cadavre exquis

RUFUS T. FIREFLY: Gentlemen, Chicolini here may talk like an idiot, and look like an idiot, but don't let that fool you: he really is an idiot. I implore you, send him back to his father and brothers, who are waiting for him with open arms in the penitentiary. I suggest that we give him ten years in Leavenworth, or eleven years in Twelveworth.

CHICOLINI: I'll tell you what I'll do: I'll take five and ten in Woolworth.

It's now reported that the Office of the Vice President isn't part of the executive branch. Or says it isn't part of the executive branch. Back to you, Rufus:

FIREFLY: I'll see you at the opera tonight. I'll hold your seat till you get there. After you get there you're on your own.

That is to say: In order to avoid oversight by an executive agency operating under the aegis of an executive order specifically reaffirmed by the sitting president under whom The Dick serves, The Dick's Office has disavowed its membership. Yeah, well, you're still named Heather, Heather.

This plays nicely into my disunified field theory for understanding the present, apotheotic moment in the history of our empire. So much dissident effort is squandered in the search for a master narrative that accounts for the consolidation of executive power, or the so-called outsourcing of government work to private contractors, the invasions, the subversions, the lies, the repressions, the gutting of agencies, the parliamentary hijinks of the unlamented Republic majority, the martial fervor of war supporters, the Kafkaesque absurdities of the Terror War, and on and on down the list to such minor farces as the faithless, loveless, useless boondoggling of the the Office of Faith-Based Initiatives. And there is a lesson here, which is that plots don't necessarily have plots.

While everyone searches for a puppeteer, the more mundane reality takes its course. No one is actually in charge. There are greater and lesser influences surely, but at the end of the day a lot of bad men are doing bad things all on their own. That is not to say that there is no collective endeavor on the part of the current junta to wreck the world. It's to say, rather, that they are wrecking the world in the manner of an exquisite corpse.

My Kingdom for a Horse

Ezra Klein says something funny.

This points to the more serious question of how it came to pass that the proponents of markets in the public sphere became such uniform bozos. I mean, the proponents of a more robust, socially democratic state sector manage to maintain in their ranks a mighty collection of tongue-wagging loonies as well, but with nowhere near the universality of popular free-marketism. Having been least on the raw end and most on the receiving end of the American deal, I understand that smarmy white dudes are going to be less enamored of corrective economic measures by governments, and yet just for once I would like to turn on the teevee and see the merits of economic alternatives to state capitalism discussed and defended by someone who doesn't look like he's just killed a black hooker and bitten the head off a kitten--not necessarily in that order.

NOBODY CALLS ME CHICKEN, NEEDLES, NOBODY!

"He was messing with him and called him retarded," [Cmdr. Hilton] Burton said. "The suspect didn't take kindly to it."

What Really Grinds My Gears

Victor Davis Lancelot Autobot Polyglot Hot-to-Trot Cosmonaut Loves-Me-Not Hanson has one of those periodic stemwinders in which the inability of other peoples to follow our orders serves simultaneously to make our interventions and invasions useless, ill-advised exercises of unappreciated altruism and to make them totally necessary, inescapable, civilizational obligations. In Palestine, you see, everyone is a damned terrorist, or will be, or once was, or has previously indicated that he might one day have contemplated becoming one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I defy anyone to read his article and tell me they don't hear this instead:

Wouldn't Hold Out Much Hope for the Credence

Evidently "EARLY MARIJUANA USE [is] A WARNING SIGN FOR LATER GANG INVOLVEMENT."

And I'm like, early marijuana use? You mean like wake and bake?

(Via Sullum at Reason)

Negotiatin'

Ezra Klein makes sense as he knocks the options-on-the-table crowd who advocate leaving the "option" of bombing or invading Iran "on the table" even as they say we ought not to bomb Iran.

I've made the point before that what options-on-the-table journos and pundits and bloggers and think-tankers reveal is the staggeringly if not startlingly cloistered intellectual and economic world in which they reside. Anyone in business, anyone who's ever negotiated anything, understands: Of course some things are off the table. Which is really just a way to say that a productive negotiation requires a set of reasonable and mutual parameters.

So when you negotiate a new contract with a bargaining unit, you may leave yourself room for belligerance, and you may let them sweat about cut wages and benefits, but everyone understands that coming to the table together means you're not threatening to close your shop, to hire a team of lawyers, and to fight a pitched battle to decertify the union and fire every one of the lazy bums. That radical option is indeed off the table.

On the other hand, you can loudly and repeatedly proclaim that you won't forego the option of spending every liquid penny in your budget to switch to a non-unionized shop. Oh, you're not saying you're gonna do it. It's just on the table. And the boys on the other side of the conference room know just what that means: That it's exactly what you intend to do.

Take Back America for The Future of the Children Who Are Our Future in the America We Have Taken Back. 2007.

Evidently there is some sort of Donkle confab currently accounting for the thoughts and nocturnal emissions of the pwoggler class. It's called "Take Back America 2007," which naturally causes us to ask: Take it back from whom? Take it back to what?

Party politics in America is essentially conservative, by which I mean fantastical. Everyone imagines a lost Utopia. For conservatives, it consists of Beaver Cleaver and Family, except that father returns home to a 5 o'clock bible study rather than a 5 o'clock highball and Wally's great ambition is to join the Marines and to pacify something, someone, somewhere. For liberals, the lost horizon is an idealized late-90s in which some oleaginous Clinton offers them an anodyne prosperity that they imagine to be more generalized than it really is, all the while protecting their beautiful minds from our daily air raids on other, non-belligerent nations. Fine. Whatever.

Yet the specter of such conferences, in which polls are brandished and election results extrapolated with unconcealed defensiveness to prove the mandate of heaven lies in liberal causes, is a vision of ersatz triumphalism masking deep personal and organizational inadequacies. What reaction can there be to people so eager to proclaim themselves revolutionaries and so disdainful of anything unpragmatically revolutionary except laughter? The great clarion cry for a new order is inevitably, invariably tempered by marginal nit-picking over how quickly, precisely, to turn tail and run from Iraq, how many troops, exactly, to leave behind, how much private interest can remain in a universal health plan, and so on and so forth.

So: a collection of supposed voices of the people eager for nothing so much as the chance to hobnob with famous candidates, every one of whom is able to nod politely and send such-and-such pwoggler into a new media swoon: "She really understands the power of the blogosphere!" Oh, get bent you losers. If a politician can make an old grouch at a lunch counter think he's listening, then he can do the same for a dweeb with a laptop and a few popular biographies rolling around in his little brain.

No Fuckin' Way!

I will admit that I never actually believed in Ward Churchill. I considered him a culture hero, a sort of bizarro Moses, cobbled together from the deeds and biographies of many to create a singular figure for the purposes of narrative coherence.

Turns out, he's real. Here I am, reading Charles Mann's 1491 (a popular volume these days, I gather), and there he is on page 131 of the hardcover addition, talkin' 'bout sum shit.

Will wonders never cease?

Bloomsday

Listen up. If Mikey Bloomberg wants to spend a billion of his own bucks to make trouble for the Donks and the Pachys, then it is nigh unto a holy obligation to help. Consider: here is a man almost as crazy as H. Ross Perot, but much, much richer. Remember those 30-minute, pie-chart-laden, Perotista infomercials? Well, Mikey's already got his own goddamn TV station!

Anyway, what I really want to talk about is what Al Sharpton said. Needless to say, in the biggest city in the country, full of its most influential businessmen, financiers, academics, artists, musicians, socialites, and politicial figures, it is Sharpton who first weighs in on Bloomberg's hypothetical run. Equally needless to say, he weighs in whackily:

Al Sharpton, a fellow New Yorker and former Democratic presidential candidate, likened Bloomberg's decision to the often mysterious ways of teenage romance.

"A girl in high school catches you looking at her and she starts wearing nice dresses," Sharpton said. "It doesn't mean she's going to date you. But she's at least teasing you, so it really increases your hope. This is a serious tease."

Asked whether he would endorse Bloomberg if he ran, Sharpton said: "I'm not saying I would necessarily endorse him. But I wouldn't rule it out either."

A serious tease! OMG. LOL. ROFLMAO. ASL. DSW. RCA. NBC. DVD. HRC. Who is this man? Someone call Oscar Wilde.

A Very Palpable Hit

Arthur Silber says I was a jerk to use Maria Callas mockingly, and he's right. The Callas of McNally's dreadful Master Class is admittedly an easy target, and a fiction. So, to pick on a coinstrumentalist of mine:

Here is a video of Jascha Heifetz being an asshole in a master class.


And here is Heifetz at his height, playing Paganini 24.


And here, finally, is Heifetz when his skills began to fail him, playing Bach.


The last is a perfectly passable performance, and in many ways played more feeling than the famously imperious style of his heyday, but the point, I think, is evident.

Maoi

Andrew Bacevich observes all the major presidential candidates, Donkle and Oliphant alike, advocating for large increases in the manpower of the American military.

This bipartisan consensus — which even includes Bush, who recently unveiled his own five-year plan to enlarge the Army and Marine Corps — illustrates the inability or refusal of the political class to grasp the true nature of our post-9/11 foreign policy crisis. Any politician who thinks that the chief lesson to be drawn from the last five years is that we need more Americans toting rifles and carrying rucksacks has learned nothing.

In fact, this enthusiasm for putting more Americans in uniform (and for increasing overall military spending) reflects the persistence of a second consensus to which leading Democrats and Republicans alike stubbornly subscribe.

This second consensus consists of two elements. According to the first element, the only way to win the so-called global war on terrorism, thereby precluding another 9/11, is to "fix" whatever ails the Islamic world. According to the second element, the United States possesses the wherewithal to effect just such a transformation. In essence, by employing American power, beginning with military power, to ameliorate the ills afflicting Islam, we will ensure our own safety.

This is sheer twaddle, as events in Iraq have manifestly shown. Yet even today, among mainstream Republicans and Democrats, expectations persist that the United States can somehow reform and therefore pacify the Muslim world.

Good. Yes. True. And he even restates his thesis as an aphorism, for the slow:

More meddling will evoke more hatred.

In six words, a century of bloody policy dissected.

Along comes Kevin Drum, the ruined Maria Callas of the centrist Clintonian repertoire, coughing out the great arias and converting great melody to trite, bathetic, unmelodic yawps.

I go back and forth on this, but the main caveat I'd add is that although Bacevich is probably right that merely increasing the size of the Army is pointless, it's possible that it would make sense to improve our peacekeeping ability in certain specific ways.

A guy who complains about an absence of specificity while hocking up a euphemism like "peacekeeping ability" is a guy who missed his calling as a Music Man. I know that as part of their daily ablutions the warriors of Donkledom wash themselves with the memory of the Kosovo campaign, but this article of faith in the power of "more Americans toting rifles and carrying rucksacks" to ease the burdens of the suffering peoples of the world, stop brother from killing brother, untie the hair of Absolom from the tree, upend the cornerstone of the Tower of Babel, make lion lie with lamb and eat of the hay . . . why, it's just lunacy.

These people are like the Easter Islanders. They will cut down every last tree and shrub, then stand on their bare shores marvelling at their works.

Look Over There, a Healthcare Proposal!

With all of the Washington-New York Axis of Insiders risen (aroused?) in defense of a man who entered adult life in the late twentieth century bearing the Delta Upsilon Phi Beta Alpha Omega clubhouse nickname "Scooter" against a "nugatory issue" that shouldn't be "a legal matter in the first place," it's timely if not worthwhile to consider exactly why this laughably nicknamed appendage to the governmental apparatus is going to prison and how it came to be that the former aide of one of the most reviled men in the nation has come to represent in the eyes of his colleagues and compatriots not the general rottenness of his boss, but rather some kind of unsullied opposite.

As a general caveat, I should say that I remain an unabashed enthusiast for the precipatating act of the whole sordid storm, which is the "outing" of a covert CIA agent. Let us out them all, I say. Neither do I share the enthusiasms of the pwoggler class for the independent prosecutor, Patrick Fitzgerald. Michael Chabon once wrote that inside the heart of every woman is a policeman. Well, inside the heart of every prosecutor is a gangster.

Nevertheless, the conviction among Scooter's defenders that Fitzgerald went after their boy, the press corps, and "government gossips," all to the cheers of scalp-seeking war opponents, presumably out of spite at not getting the goods on some bigger fish, is a tawdry retelling of a simpler and more common narrative. For good or ill, it remains a crime to lie to prosecutors and grand juries and the like, and the ultimate outcome of the case under investigation isn't dispositive. Yet the inverse isn't necessarily true. In the case at hand, the ultimate outcome of Fitzgerald's initial investigation was plainly linked to the truthfulness of witnesses, and he said as much when he announced his indictment of Scooter. Libby wasn't the only liar, you see. The tawdry collection of hangers-on, hustlers, and well-compensated whores who passed through his offices were by any estimation one of the most self-servingly dishonest collection of hacks in recent memory. These were people who by all indications had a pathological aversion to simple truth-telling, who would lie just to lie. They didn't lie to preserve advantage, to protect self, to conceal wrongdoing--or, if they did, it was by accident. Dishonesty became its own end. And what is there to say beyond that? Scooter Libby got caught in a lie, and now he's been pinched, tried, convicted by a jury. Defending a grotesque liar because his lies weren't germane to anything is a moral perversion.

And yet the underlying motivations of Scooter Libby's defenders are worse and more sinister than mere defense of the right of certain classes of people to wallow in falsehood. Here is Richard Cohen:

As Fitzgerald worked his wonders, threatening jail and going after government gossips with splendid pluck, many opponents of the Iraq war cheered. They thought--if "thought" can be used in this context--that if the thread was pulled on who had leaked the identity of Valerie Plame to Robert D. Novak, the effort to snooker an entire nation into war would unravel and this would show . . . who knows? Something. For some odd reason, the same people who were so appalled about government snooping, the USA Patriot Act and other such threats to civil liberties cheered as the special prosecutor weed-whacked the press, jailed a reporter and now will send a previously obscure government official to prison for 30 months.

I'll be the first to call the hopes of the cheering section naïve, but that doesn't make it unreasonable to hope that a healthy shaking of the branches might bear some fallen fruit. The "press" and "previously obscure" official were precisely the folks who "snookered" a nation into war. Let's not be children. Those who constantly tell us to stop looking for past faults so that we may come together and fix this thing are those most averse to the assignation of responsibility, knowing as they do how much of it belongs to them.

Unprecedented!

Tim F. at John Cole's Balloon Juice surveys the scene and says:

It ought to depress the hell out of me that our army is bleeding to death in the mideast without accomplishing a thing while the FBI has started getting cozy with its J. Edgar Hoover roots. We live in the crazy black helicopter land that used to exist only in Tim McVeigh’s fevered imagination, but with extra incompetence abroad.

Here's the rub: McVeigh wasn't fevered, and he wasn't imagining.

Vidal's essay on McVeigh contains an excerpt from a letter McVeigh wrote shortly before his execution.

I chose to bomb a Federal Building because such an action served more purposes than other options. Foremost, the bombing was a retaliatory strike: a counter-attack, for the cumulative raids (and subsequent violence and damage) that federal agents had participated in over the preceding years (including, but not limited to, Waco). From the formation of such units as the FBI’s "Hostage Rescue" and other assault teams amongst federal agencies during the 80s, culminating in the Waco incident, federal actions grew increasingly militaristic and violent, to the point where at Waco, our government – like the Chinese – was deploying tanks against its own citizens.

…For all intents and purposes, federal agents had become "soldiers" (using military training, tactics, techniques, equipment, language, dress, organization and mindset) and they were escalating their behavior. Therefore, this bombing was also meant as a pre-emptive (or pro-active) strike against those forces and their command and control centers within the federal building. When an aggressor force continually launches attacks from a particular base of operations, it is sound military strategy to take the flight to the enemy. Additionally, borrowing a page from U.S. foreign policy, I decided to send a message to a government that was becoming increasingly hostile, by bombing a government building and the government employees within that building who represent that government. Bombing the Murrah Federal Building was morally and strategically equivalent to the U.S. hitting a government building in Serbia, Iraq, or other nations. Based on observations of the policies of my own government, I viewed this action as an acceptable option. From this perspective what occurred in Oklahoma City was no different than what Americans rain on the heads of others all the time, and, subsequently, my mindset was and is one of clinical detachment. (The bombing of the Murrah Building was not personal no more than when Air Force, Army, Navy or Marine personnel bomb or launch cruise missiles against (foreign) government installations and their personnel.)

I hope this clarification amply addresses your question.

These are the words of a zealot, perhaps, but not a madman. Tim McVeigh didn't live in a world of black helicopters, chemtrails, and reptilian government. He lived in a world in which America acted imperially abroad and with increasingly repressive policies at home, in which the old protections of posse commitatus were being pushed aside as SWAT teams armed themselves like commando units, no-knock raids became the norm in the Drug War, and like the old imperial powers at the turn of the twentieth century, the United States used terrorism as a pretext for all sorts of official skullduggeries and curtailments.

(Let us pause here to note that Osama bin Laden has also clearly and rationally articulated grievances that do exist, and yet the persistent estimation of him locates motivation in some fairy tale about heavenly virgins and a hatred of something called freedom.)

So: We don't live in "crazy black helicopter land," but in America, and for many decades we've been constructing a sophisticated national security state, though few of us have noticed. As is the case with our manaical foreign policy, it's taken the skill-less, unsubtle, deliberately bombastic, cosmically inept actions of the dauphin and his court to make the magnitude of the sureillance and SWAT state evident to folks disinclined to "conspiracy theories." And yet they persist in denigrating the idea that our present misfortunes have demonstrable lineages in order to maintain the illusion that George W. Bush is an aberration.

Remember the Maine!

"As some point," avers Atrios, "it will be necessary to seriously revisit the question of the war in Afghanistan." I like the "at some point," the false judiciousness of a man who mocks that quality in others and complains ceaselessly of the various cadres of Wise Men for their habit of shunting all moments of decision six months into the future. But it's his second paragraph, a veritable archetype of dismal pwoggler self-exculpation, that gets me:

Post 9-11 the Andrew Sullivans of the world helped create a climate where even asking about the efficacy of the conflict was problematic, and of course those of us who suggested that going to Iraq might be a wee bit of a distraction from Afghanistan were also attacked.

It is true that "the Andrew Sullivans of the world" squealed high and loud that dissent was treason, a tactic wielded equally by the, ahem, "Left" in those halcyon pre-Iraq days when we had but one war, a good war, in Afghanistan. Yes, those kooks at ANSWER were awfully funny. And yet it wasn't Sullivan of Fox News or any of the other habitual targers of pwoggler ire that made it anathema to ask "about the efficacy of the conflict" in Afghanistan. Rather it was the nearly universal assent to the idea that Afghanistan was a good war, and not only that, but a necessary war. Then, after the doomed conflict in Afghanistan was itself well underway and the doomed conflict in Iraq was rolling inexorably down the pike, it was the constant verbal tick of the, ahem, "Left" to add some affirmation of the Afghani endeavor in order to show their bona fides as a critic of this, the Iraq War, but not some Chomsky-reading Jew faggot pacifist who probably spends all his time reading ISO broadsheets and protesting the School of the Americas. There was an hysterical personal need to manifest one's toughness and to accredit one's procedural objections to the war in Iraq by yelping a generalized willingness to engage in armed conflicts, just not this armed conflict, and to disclaim the more egregious insults of the Andrew-Sullivan right by claiming with a shit-eating grin and a towering but deeply misplaced feeling of cleverness that you, too, supported the war in Afghanistan. Often the bombing of Kosovo would find itself jangling around for good measure.

Now it's clear that what we lonely few predicted about Afghanistan is coming to pass. The forces ranged against us waited, bided, and now they have the game-day look in their eyes. What they lacked in satellites and carrier groups, they made up for in patience. America was never going to liberate Afghanistan from the Taliban any more than we liberated Iraq from Saddam Hussein. The idea itself is a category error. You can't liberate a people from their native rulers, no matter how awful, no matter how they acquired power, by election or by coup. It may be possible to liberate a people from an external occupier--France from Germany--but it is a pure conceit to say that we liberated Germany from Nazism. In any event, we lost Afghanistan before we arrived. But sure, let us "seriously revisit" it, and salve ourselves recalling our unexpressed moments of private doubt.