I Cogitate
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Matt Yglesias nails it
Credit Matt Yglesias for shedding further light on the so-called experts who have failed to learn lesson one -- that being 'keep my mouth shut and let people guess if I'm an idiot rather than speak and confirm it.'
Actually, I don't wish to call the people Yglesias mentions in his column idiots. Such is too harsh and inaccurate.
But this paragraph is so telling:
"...Meanwhile, the very elites we're supposed to trust can't seem to get their stories straight. Ignatius says everyone's looking for the exits in Iraq, and we should just calm down. O'Hanlon and Pollack want us to stay put. And as TPM Media's Greg Sargent pointed out Monday, the optimism of O'Hanlon and Pollack is at odds with the conclusions of Brookings' own Iraq Index project. It reported July 23 that "violence nationwide has failed to improve measurably over the past two-plus months," and that -- contrary to their enthusiasm about the provision of electricity and other essentials -- "the average person in Baghdad can count on only one or two hours of electricity per day," far less than they had under Hussein. More ironically still, the person in charge of the Iraq Index is none other than Michael O'Hanlon!..."Just where is the pundit scorecard? The one that should accompany pundit-penned articles, from authors listing left, center and right, and detailing just how accurate/inaccurate so-and-so has been of late?
For the most part, it's a nice cozy club. Those who are generally offered space in the major media outlets, print and television, are not the likes of you or me regardless of how accurate or insightful it is what we have to say. No, they are establishment, upper-crust types who parade about in a social circle far above the hoi polloi. But the telling fact is that predictive accuracy is not critical for access -- getting and maintaining print space simply requires having a 'safe' reputation, meaning the content isn't going to be too 'out there' or 'radioactive.' Being counted on to be 'reasonable' is quality one. Kudos for the Los Angeles Times for offering Yglesias the space for his column -- now, how about hiring him for a weekly one? How about getting Iglesias, or others, a regular or semi-regular spot on "Meet The Press" in lieu of the same-old, same-old?
Ain't gonna happen for the aforementioned reasons. So thank you for the 'net -- it remains the most democratic method of communication even with all its 'problems.'
D.C. elites want you to shush on IraqGo here for the remainder.
Be afraid when the same centrist consensus that has a lousy track record on the war lashes out at parti
Matthew Yglesias
August 2, 2007
The United States is now well into the fifth year of a war in Iraq that has, at a cost of hundreds of billions of dollars, managed to get more Americans killed than 9/11 while alienating global opinion, undermining our strategic posture around the world, arguably speeding nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran and detracting from American efforts against Al Qaeda. The nation's elites, ever vigilant, have located the source of the problem: Public outrage over the sorry situation.
Washington Post foreign affairs columnist David Ignatius, for instance, wrote on Sunday that "a good start" in finding an exit from Iraq "would be for Washington partisans to take deep breaths and lower the volume."
That same day, Anne-Marie Slaughter, dean of Princeton's prestigious Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, argued in the Post that, in the foreign policy realm, "the fiercest battle is no longer between the left and the right but between partisanship and bipartisanship." The former, with its hard-right hawks and strident antiwar types, is bad, of course.
Given that the initial authority to use military force in Iraq was a completely bipartisan affair, with backing from the then-leaders of the House and Senate Democratic caucuses, plus the two men who would eventually make up the party's 2004 presidential ticket, and also the woman who's currently the front-runner for the 2008 nomination, one might wonder when, exactly, this partisan tussle was so fierce. To Slaughter, though, criticizing people for collaborating in policy fiascoes is part of the problem, not the solution. "In the blogosphere," she complained, "pillorying Hillary Clinton is a full-time sport." What's more, "[Barack] Obama has come in for his share of abuse as well."
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