Sunday, November 27, 2005

OOOPS! (or, Who Knew that Shoe Leather Tasted that Bad?)

Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings has a piece called Intellectual Honesty Watch in which right-wing bloggers, eager to be the first to heap scorn on Joe Biden's call for Iraqi withdrawal apparently missed the memo that Biden's plan = GWB's plan. Here's the kicker:
Now: imagine for a moment that the bloggers I just quoted actually sat down and thought about Biden's plan, concluded that it was a bad idea, and that this reflection explains their posts. In that case, you'd expect them to respond to today's White House statement with horror and alarm. After all, it's one thing for the Senator Powerline calls "the Delaware windbag" to adopt a plan. He is in the minority party, and has no real influence over policy. It's quite another for the President of the United States, our Commander in Chief, to embrace a policy that "gets the entire war on terror fundamentally wrong", and shows that people who adopt it "cannot ever take charge of American security" and "are unfit to direct this country's foreign policy". The thought that Bush, who does direct America's foreign policy, is 'unfit' to do so, since he 'gets the entire war on terror fundamentally wrong', should be terrifying.

And yet, oddly enough, not one of these worthies has seen fit to comment on Bush's embrace of Biden's plan. And it's not lack of time: they have somehow managed to fit in posts on Whoopi Goldberg, Cindy Sheehan, the Carnival of the Cats, and all sorts of other momentous topics. But somehow the fact that our President is, by their standards, unfit to direct our foreign policy seems to have escaped their notice.
Am I going to give them the benefit of the doubt that they haven't seen the 'Bush plan' news story? Not a frickin' chance, especially in the case of instapundit considering that he acts as something of a news aggregator. Remember, just because you read it on the internet, doesn't make it true. Conversely, just because you don't read it, doesn't mean it isn't there.

Is this surpising? No. Sad? Yes. Likely to repeated on a near daily basis by both political wings? Absolutely. C'est la blogosphere.

1 comment:

Fletch said...

While I would love to read the rightie bloggers eat crow, I actually find it much more satisfying to let my imagination create its own scenes of embarassing apologies.