Dancing as Fast as He Can
Digby on the mutability of the conservative fantasyland, as embodied by the wooden puppet who just wants to be a real boy, David Brooks:
… Can someone remind me again why i am supposed to take these people [like Brooks] seriously? This is some kind of bi-polar reality in which they “believe” certain things one day and then as soon as they are no longer able to hold the facts at bay, simply shift to a completely different stance without so much as a backward glance at their own mistaken judgment. (Josh Marshall documented a similar shape shift from Robert Kaplan earlier this week.) I guess being a hawkish pundit means never having to say you’re sorry.
…
But, honestly, anybody who thought that it was a good idea to illegally (and virtually unilaterally) invade and occupy a middle eastern nation that had not attacked anyone, in the name of freedom and democracy was nuts. (To compound the error by thinking that you could use torture and humiliation in the process and still somehow be seen as a valiant liberator is simply mind-boggling.) If there is ever a case in human events in which you cannot adopt an “ends justify the means” philosophy it’s in the realm of spreading liberal values. The minute you do it, you have defeated yourself.
This was not a difficult thing to understand for those who actually believe in liberal values. It seems, however, to still elude those who for the last decade, at least, have been swinging wildly from one position to the other without even pausing for breath. David Brooks has managed to go from starry-eyed neocon optimist to dreary, cold hearted realist in less than 18 months. I shudder to think where he and his friends might land by 2008.
