Diversity

Oh that whacky, whacky Washington Post opinion section:

The famously liberal Washington Post op-ed page displays its commitment to ideological diversity today. The contributors, in full:

John Bolton, Robert Novak, George Will, Michael Gerson and Robert Samuelson.

For commentary of a different stripe, readers might want to turn here.

And of course it seems like only yesterday that they were upset that new, less alarmist intelligence on Iran might make the people who were right about Iran feel vindicated. Or something.

Comments

What Liberal Media!?

Posted by bob | December 6, 2007 4:47 PM

Matt,

What are your thoughts on this Op/Ed in the FT, by the British Foreign Secretary?: "Why we must not take the pressure off Iran". As far as I know, the foreign secretary of Britain's Labour government isn't a wingnut. Perhaps this is worth you reading and commenting on.

Posted by Fred | December 6, 2007 4:52 PM

Hey Fred, there is a big difference between putting pressure on Iran and bombing the fuck out of them. No one is taking about taking the pressure off Iran.

Posted by Pritesh | December 6, 2007 5:21 PM

For once, MY hits upon a fortuitous typo.

The WaPo op-ed page is indeed wacky, but they're also all about wanting to whack somebody - Iran, for instance.

Posted by Anderson | December 6, 2007 5:39 PM

Yeah, Matt, I guess since there's an English guy writing in a newspaper about being careful about Iran you might stop calling for the United States to deliver all of its ICBM's and the codes to Iran while we adopt Shari'a law and outlaw IQ studies too.

It's only a measure of Iran's true threat that they would dare allow our own President to convince himself that there was an imminent threat of Iranian nuclear weapons only so recently after convincing himself that there was an imminent threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destructions. Those bloody Persians!

Posted by El Cid | December 6, 2007 6:16 PM

Wow, that's wacky.

Much better yesterday when they had left-wing Ruth Marcus, left-wing David Broder, and commentators from the left-wing Carnegie Foundation for International Peace and the left-wing International Crisis Group. That's much better balance. Or the day before when they had left-wing EJ Dionne, left-wing Eugene Robinson, left-wing Richard Cohen, left-wing Anne Applebaum, and a left-wing AIDS activist.

Balance, baby.

Posted by Al | December 6, 2007 7:38 PM

I think Al is confused or disingenuous.

Anyone who thinks Broder is "left-wing" needs to go read The Communist Manifesto, or hell, the US Populist Party's 1892 Platform. These documents are considerably to the left of what Broder writes. Or perhaps visit the website of The Guardian or Liberation.

Similarly, in what world is Cohen or Applebaum "left-wing"?

Even Dionne and Robinson are pretty standard American mid-century liberals.

Then again, it seems as though anyone to the left of Franco is a damnable Commie for Al.

Posted by Daniel Shays | December 6, 2007 7:50 PM

Daniel good points all, but you missed the biggest one:
The left-winger from the "left-wing Carnegie Foundation for International Peace" was none other than Bob Kagan. Yup, he sure is a lefty.

Posted by d | December 6, 2007 9:05 PM

I could see them putting George Will on it, and even the lying and treasonous Robert Novak is at least nominally a "columnist". But John Bolton?

The flaming white moustached lunatic?

This guy is so weird even the Republicans back off and make the sign of the cross when they see him coming.

Even Chris Ford is scared of that nut!

Now he thinks the entire intelligence community has been infiltrated by Al Qaeda and that bin Laden wrote the Iran NIE!

They need to get a straitjacket for this guy.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | December 6, 2007 10:03 PM

George Will is, like John McCain, a member of the rump of the GOP: you know, people who still believe in stuff like science, reason, and discourse.

Posted by daniel shays | December 6, 2007 11:06 PM

It should be noted that the only metric by which Bolton (a Trotskyist) and Gerson (a religious progressive) can be called "conservative" is if you redefine the term. You don't find any influence from Hayek, Burke, etc. in anything either believes. Gerson has already suggested a redefinition to universal jeers from the Right.

If WaPo fired them and replaced them with Pat Buchanan and, I don't know, Alan Greenspan, you might have a better point.

Posted by Shinyk | December 7, 2007 4:26 AM

Re Richard Steven Hack

Mr.Hack never ceases to amaze me. How can he have such a low opinion of the murdering rapist Robert Novak, the most anti-Israel columnist this side of Pat Buchanan around? I suppose he would argue that stopped clocks are right twice a day.

Posted by SLC | December 7, 2007 8:28 AM

called "conservative" is if you redefine the term

That's more conservatism's problem than Matt's. The term itself and the positions of its champions have always been rather vacuous - it's simply not an intellectually very interesting or consistent school of thought.

Posted by novakant | December 7, 2007 1:42 PM

That's more conservatism's problem than Matt's.

If the left-leaning commentors can exclude Broder, Applebaum, Dionne, etc. without offering good reasons for doing so, I can certainly exclude commentators by offering reasons.

Gerson is an open progressive on domestic policy. Bolton is a closet communist on foreign policy. The conservative coalition exists/existed as a bulwark against both progressivism and communism--excluding both Gerson and Bolton.

The term itself and the positions of its champions have always been rather vacuous - it's simply not an intellectually very interesting or consistent school of thought.

Conservatism is, in parts, an outgrowth of classical liberalism. If Locke, Burke, Smith, Jefferson, etc. were "vacuous," what does that say about liberalism, which begins and ends with Marx--a man whose ideas about the state have been proven wrong by history.

Posted by Shinyk | December 7, 2007 2:18 PM