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A principled disagreement has arisen at Sadly, No over the hiring of Matt Yglesias by the Atlantic magazine, a subject which, although riveting to a minority, is barely a blip on the radar in the larger scheme of things. In the course of the back and forth, though, HTML Mencken nails the much wider and more important point:
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You know who doesn’t deserve being paid for their opinion? Just out of principle? Anyone anywhere who was for the Iraq War for whatever amount of time. Period. I mean, that’s a fucking minimum. And Matt Yglesias doesn’t meet it.
And why Matt Yglesias got that one wrong — again, a very very fucking hard thing to get wrong — isn’t because he’s precisely not a polymath — though real polymaths who ought to be paid for their opinion, people like John Emerson or even Brad DeLong, got Iraq right. It’s because his first instinct is accomodation with the Right; it’s because his political judgement was forged post-Clinton, thus he was completely naive to the facts of innate wingnut depravity. I suspect he thought of the Kosovo operation as the rule rather than an exception; for such bovine people, the sicky-sweet neocon catchphrase “I believe America is a force for good in the world” functioned as a cattlecall. Of course some of us could recognize imperialism’s euphemisms when we heard them; for those who couldn’t, well … it doesn’t really make any difference whether it was from ignorance or stupidity. Fuck ‘em. They need to spend a long time in the journalistic wilderness before they again deserve serious attention.
Iraq is too important to forgive and forget the stupid fucking idiots who got it wrong (and often, not only got it wrong, but concentrated on attacking those who got it right). It’s the touchstone of a pundit’s political judgement.
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Abso-fucking-lutely.
I’d add a corollary to that: it’s also a touchstone of a pundit’s personal moral judgement if she or he chooses to hang out and socialise with people who enabled and supported the Iraq invasion and occupation.
At the moment in Washington there’s more social stigma attached to having a child at the wrong preschool than there is to enabling mass murder, world disaster and institutional thievery on the grandest-ever scale.
