So, my RSS reader routinely presents me with a quandary. A bare minimum of once per day, the Weekly Standard‘s Michael Goldfarb produces a piece of truly stunning hackery audacious even by the standards of partisan blogging. Often, I’m tempted to comment on this. Normally, I refrain on the grounds that it’s low-hanging fruit, and could probably provide enough material for its own dedicated blog if I began giving in to this temptation with any regularity. Still, just to get it out of my system, I’ve settled on a compromise: I’ll just link the hackiest post I read on a given day via this charming photo of an old Hackney cab. Writers other than Goldfarb will be eligible, though I expect he’ll be difficult to unseat. Without further ado:
3 responses so far ↓
1 John Markley // Apr 8, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Goldfarb remarks,
“Again, Obama believes government can do anything…except secure victory, stability, and democracy in Iraq.”
This is hardly a new insight on my part, but it’s amusing how he (rightly) faults Obama for his faith in the state to solve all sorts of problems at home, in a peaceful and prosperous country- and then immediately expresses his own faith in that same state to solve all sorts of even bigger problems in an impoverished, violence-wracked foreign culture on the other side of the planet. A lot of ideologies require some degree of doublethink to accept, but it’s not usually this blatant. It’s a miracle that the cognitive dissonance hasn’t caused some sort of Scannersesque cranial explosion yet.
2 Micha Ghertner // Apr 9, 2008 at 11:28 am
John,
Isn’t this just a function of all political hypocrisy claims made by one ideology against its mirror opposite?
Any time a Republican says to a Democrat, or a Democrat says to a Republican, or a Socialist says to a Capitalist, or a… something along the lines of:
“You believe in A but not B, and yet A and B are both causally connected or sufficiently similar in some really important way, so therefore you are being a hypocrite”,
the accused usually ignores the original charge of hypocrisy and instead rejoinders with his own charge,
“But you believe in B but not A, yet A and B are both causally connected or sufficiently similar in some really important way, so therefore you are the one being a hypocrite, not me.”
3 Julian Sanchez // Apr 9, 2008 at 12:12 pm
I don’t think it’s perfectly parallel here. Presumably we’re all a good deal less sanguine than Obama about the power or competence of government to achieve various Great Things. But look, I don’t think it should be remotely controversial to say that you need orders of magnitude more faith in the power of government to advocate invading and occupying an ethnically and religiously divided country halfway around the world, with the intent of turning it into a functioning democracy.
Basically, there are two versions here of the “Government can do X, but not Y” position here. I think they’re both wrong, but only Goldfarb’s is actually ridiculous.