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Monday, August 28, 2006

Matthew Yglesias Hits the Nail on the Head as Usual.

As usual he convinces me he is very smart by stating the blindingly obvious. It looks easy, but I would be glad to do the same and haven't learned his trick for finding blithering idiocy in respectable publications.

Today he argues that a war can be against the interests of both combatants. Guess we better not invade Canada.

But to me, the striking sentence in the post is the following "It sounds sufficiently dippy that I hesitate to express the view, but the simple fact of the matter is that going to war is rarely a good idea." I have no doubt that Yglesias' perfect ear correctly infers that the statement sounds "dippy" in Washington today. We have reached the point that a self proclaimed liberal hesitates to say that "war is rarely a good idea." This is a grim situation. I don't know how long it will last, but I do hope that Washington, the city, survives the view that it sounds dippy to say war is rarely a good idea.

I can usually identify Yglesias from the prose before reading the byline (the guess who wrote this game is one of the reasons I love Tapped). Often the post I guess is his was written by Greg Sargent. This time I read to the end imagining that Josh Marshall was writing (maybe the photo of Marshall tricked me).

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