Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps? (Robert Kagan/Joe Lieberman Edition)

The Washington Post continues to give air to the vastly overrated Robert Kagan, who calls Joe Lieberman "the last honest man":

The Last Honest Man: If Lieberman loses, it will not even be because he supported the war.... Lieberman stands condemned today because he didn't recant. He didn't say he was wrong. He didn't turn on his former allies and condemn them. He didn't claim to be the victim of a hoax. He didn't try to pretend that he never supported the war in the first place. He didn't claim to be led into support for the war by a group of writers and intellectuals whom he can now denounce. He didn't go through a public show of agonizing and phony soul-baring and apologizing in the hopes of resuscitating his reputation, as have some noted "public intellectuals."

These have been the chosen tactics of self-preservation ever since events in Iraq started to go badly and the war became unpopular. Prominent intellectuals, both liberal and conservative, have turned on their friends and allies in an effort to avoid opprobrium for a war they publicly supported. Journalists have turned on their fellow journalists in an effort to make them scapegoats for the whole profession. Politicians have twisted themselves into pretzels to explain away their support for the war or, better still, to blame someone else for persuading them to support it...

Guess Kagan didn't get the memo.

Joe Lieberman is no longer the old Joe Lieberman who attacked Jack Murtha, saying: "We undermine the President's credibility at our nation's peril."

Today we have a new Joe Lieberman, who has no problems undermining George W. Bush's credibility: "I supported our war in Iraq but I have always questioned the way it was being executed. This administration took far too many shortcuts. We continue to suffer the consequences, as do the Iraqi people."

Comments

[anne]

These last days conservative senior officers, senior correspondents, are finding reasons to fear for stability, for peace, in Iraq. A workable democracy when the political condition involves continuous violence is a mere fancy. Translating democracy in Iraq through the Middle East seems even more of a fancy. Of course, I would like us to leave Iraq immediately, and have wanted this for more than 3 years and wanted no war before that, but the Administration is not even entertaining the idea. What then?

[anne]

All the times, I was asked how can we possibly leave Iraq, when of course all we had to do was just leave. As though, we only could figure out how to invade countries and having invaded were doomed to stay forever for want of knowing how to leave. Well leave Iraq, immediately. Just leave, get it, we have the best logistics officers in the world. They know how to leave, so leave, now.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/05/opinion/l05iraq.html

In Search of the Way Out of Iraq

To the Editor:

Speaking before Congress about the growing threat of a civil war in Iraq, Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, "Shiite and Sunni are going to have to love their children more than they hate each other."

His statement calls for the question: Are we going to ask our children — the young men and women who have so bravely and generously sworn to defend our Constitution — to die while we wait for these two sects with longstanding animosity to learn to love one another?

How can we look our soldiers in the eye and tell them that this is now the mission they are fighting and dying for?

Marguerite Crowley Weibel
Columbus, Ohio, Aug. 4, 2006
The writer is the mother of a marine.

[andres]

Hmm. The problem with Kagan, imo, is not that he misses the memo, but that he has this naive idea that a politician should be rewarded for being consistent in his positions. They never have been and they never will be. Lieberman deserves to lose the nomination not because he's insufficient in his criticism of the war but because he didn't criticize the war when it mattered: either in the runup to March 2003 or the runup to November 2004.

[Michael Gibbons]

Jo Leiberman reminds me of a chamellion,one day he's a democrat,the next day a republican.He's consistently inconsistant and for that he should be replaced by a true democrat. Refusing to admit that you've made a mistake does not make you honest, just stubborn.

[me]

And Zig Zag Zell Miller is still stumping for REPUBLICAN candidates in Georgia. One Republican who said he was like Miller got his head handed to him in the primary here in Georgia, and , the 3 Christian RW candidates all got hammered as well.

[bncthor]

..."Refusing to admit that you've made a mistake does not make you honest, just stubborn."

Or, maybe, in the case of Senator Lieberman, simply reaching the point in life where it's time to just fade away and start drafting one's memoir.