Berg's Law In Action -

Berg's Law In Action - Berg's Law - my iron-clad law of liberal opinion about Iraq - is on garish display this week.

The law states:

No liberal commentator is capable of discussing more than one of the justifications for the liberation of Iraq at a time; doing so introduces a context in which their argument can not survive

Brian at Boviosity noticed it in this Sullivan piece yesterday, in re a NYTimes editorial:

"The White House recently began shifting its case for the Iraq war from the embarrassing unconventional weapons issue to the lofty vision of creating an exemplary democracy in Iraq."

Money quote from the editorial:

The White House recently began shifting its case for the Iraq war from the embarrassing unconventional weapons issue to the lofty vision of creating an exemplary democracy in Iraq. Mr. Bush would look breathtakingly cynical if he seemed to be rushing the preparation for real elections with an eye toward improving his own re-election chances.

"When did you stop beating the Iraqi people, Mr. President?

Then, today, Sullivan ran this post, which would seem to expand Berg's Law to coverage of the War on Terror in general - in this case, a spectacularly myopic Michael Kinsley editoral, of which Sullivan notes:

Mike Kinsley pulls off the astonishing feat of trying to tackle how president Bush went from being an anti-nation-building realist to a liberal internationalist in a few years without mentioning a certain incident that occurred, oh, say nine months or so into his presidency. Memo to Mike: some terorists attacked U.S. soil on September 11, 2001. 3,000 people or so were killed. It made a teensy little difference to U.S. foreign policy. Kinsley's gaffe, however, is revealing about certain strands in some liberals' thought these days. For them, 9/11 changed nothing important; it meant relatively little; it was a distraction from more important issues like Enron, as Paul Krugman opined, during the height of the Raines madness. These people don't just have blinders on; they've attached them with super-glue.

Which may actually be a whole new law: "The hard left's entire argument depends on ruthless, relentless control of the context of the argument".

I'm going to have to work on a book. Maybe I'll call it "Everything I Needed To Know, I Learned from Paul Begala".

Posted by Mitch at November 14, 2003 05:38 AM