For some reason--on the Chris Matthews show this morning--I was convinced that on a panel that included both Joe Klein and Andrew Sullivan, Cynthia Tucker, the Editorial Page Editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, would be the sane one on the issue of Iraq.
Alas, I was mistaken.
While defending Hillary Clinton's vote for giving President Bush a blank check in Iraq, she had to go and say something completely idiotic like "every serious Democrat" voted in favor of giving President Bush the authority to go and screw up the entire Middle East.
Really Cynthia? Perhaps you should put a call in to former Democratic Senator Bob Graham, Chairman of The Senate Intelligence Committee at that time, who not only opposed the joint resolution but implored his colleagues to do the same based upon what he knew. You might want to also explain how Carl Levin, Pat Leahy and Russ Feingold, among others, are not "serious" in your book.
Just sayin'...
posted by Cliff Schecter @ 12:14 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
Damn liberal media.
I saw it too, Cliff. Transcript backs us up. I came across your site by Googling "every serious democrat" + tucker, hoping that it's being shouted from the rooftops, and that masses of outraged citizens are picketing the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in protest. Alas, 4 hits. Bookmarked your site, at least.
Anyway, Tucker: "I also think that the peacenik wing of the Democratic Party may have learned a lesson from their failures in Connecticut, where Ned Lamont lost in the general election to Joe Lieberman. The simple fact of the matter is, every serious Democrat who was in the Senate at the time, voted for the war--or voted to authorize the president--and Al Gore was one of the few Senate Democrats who voted in 1991 for the first Gulf War."
Ha ha! Stupid peaceniks, always wrong about stuff. Well, not wrong, technically, but... certainly not the sort of people we should regard as worth hearing. That will spare us the trouble of addressing their arguments.
This is bizarro-world political correctness, where it's considered gauche to have voted against the war even though 90 percent or so of Americans now agree with that point of view. And I supported the war. But obviously, people who argued the other way look an awful lot smarter than me, in retrospect.
The fetishization of centrism is something I used to buy into. It seems pretty clear, now, that this was a poor framework for evaluating whether to support sending American troops to invade a country.
Is there any set of facts that would cause someone like Tucker to (1) question her assumptions or (2) be held accountable for her mistakes? If another 300,000, or 3 million Iraqis die, would it lead to any kind of reckoning? Or would she and her ilk still consider whatever comes out of the mouths of Broders to be the lodestar for political analysis? And would they continue to play a major, disproportionate role in shaping which views are acceptible in Washington?
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