Matt Yglesias

A Different Kaus

I met McNamara once, at a conference. He was self-effacing, and breathtakingly concise. I understand the charm. But there is something wrong with a culture in which a McNamara is feted for his “guts” while George McGovern and Gene McCarthy, who opposed McNamara’s mistakes, are regarded as nobodies. In one of the uglier passages of In Retrospect, McNamara sneers at the antiwar protesters who marched on the Pentagon in 1967. If they had been more “disciplined” and “Gandhi-like,” he says, “they could have achieved their objective of shutting us down.” Instead they were “troublemakers” who “threw mud balls” and “even unzipped [soldiers'] flies.” This is contrition? Shouldn’t McNamara be admitting that the mudball-throwers, after all, had been right?

That’s Mickey Kaus, being a liberal, back in 1995 writing for The New Republic. Way more surprisingly, though-provoking, and interesting than any quantity of tired “contrarianism” about how conservatives are always right about everything.

The Real Bill Ayers Kind Of Sucks

I thought that a lot of the ire directed at Bill Ayers by conservatives during the campaign was pretty ridiculous. Not only in terms of the transparently ridiculous efforts to “link” him to Barack Obama, but in terms of the level of outrage directed at his misdeeds. When I tally up all the Vietnam-era wrongdoing in this country, Ayers, the Weather Underground, and their absurd terrorist plots don’t come to the top of my list. The architects of the war are responsible for the deaths of many people.

But being the target of unfair criticism does not, on its own, exonerate a person. And Ayers’ odd little New York Times op-ed only re-enforces one’s sense that unfair criticism can certainly be directed at a guy who very much deserves to be the target of criticism. An inability, down to the present day, to see that what the Weather Underground was up to was wrong, counterproductive, and insane is really hard to grasp.

Holbrooke on Bundy

Richard Holbrooke reviews a book on McGeorge Bundy and puts a liberal foot forward:

Bundy never believed in negotiations with the Vietcong or the North Vietnamese. This, coupled with his enduring faith in the value of military force in almost any terrain or circumstance, were his greatest errors. They contributed to a tragic failure. With the nation now about to inaugurate a new president committed to withdraw combat troops from Iraq and succeed in Afghanistan, the lessons of Vietnam are still relevant. McGeorge Bundy’s story, of early brilliance and a late-in-life search for the truth about himself and the war, is an extraordinary cautionary tale for all Americans.

Seems sensible to me.

Gotta Finish The Book

Uh oh! Via Jason Zengerle and Mike Allen:

George STEPHANOPOULOS, on GMA, re the president-elect and the economy: “He’s already doing more than any incoming president has ever done this quickly … One Obama adviser told me what they’d like is a combination of ‘Team of Rivals’ and ‘The Best and the Brightest,’ which was the David Halberstam book about the incumbent Kennedy administration.

Maybe Obama ought to talk that idea over with Halberstam. I don’t recall that book as having had a happy ending.

UPDATE: I’d forgotten, but Halberstam passed away last year.

Getting Passionate

As I was saying yesterday, I think the conservative effort to demonize Bill Ayers as somehow the greatest monster of American history is absurd. He was involved in violent extremism amidst an era of extremism in American politics and plenty of his contemporaries did worse stuff in the name of upholding white supremacy or prosecuting the Vietnam War than anything Ayers did in opposition to it. That said, my former boss Mike Tomasky is sure right to call BS on this statement in support of Ayers:

The current characterizations of Professor Ayers—”unrepentant terrorist,” “lunatic leftist”—are unrecognizable to those who know or work with him. It’s true that Professor Ayers participated passionately in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, as did hundreds of thousands of Americans.

Martin Luther King, Jr. participated passionately in the civil rights and antiwar movements. And yet he never set bombs anywhere, nor advocated that anyone else set bombs anywhere. Ayers did. Was Ayers more passionate than King? No. Was Ayers more violent than King? Yes. And King was right and Ayers was wrong — that’s really all there is to it. Now and again you do see a strand of thought on the left that equates willingness to engage in violence with one’s level of passion and commitment. That was the Weather Underground in its day, and it also I think represents the thinking of some of the so-called “liberal hawks” of the 21st century. But the notion that passionate commitment to the cause of justice is best exemplified by killing people — and especially by a “tough-minded” willingness to contemplate killing innocent people — is ludicrous.

The “unrepentant terrorist” thing is a bit complicated. One thing you can say in Ayers’ defense is that it’s perfectly clear from his present-day conduct that he, in fact, realizes that unleashing a podunk domestic terrorism campaign would be a stupid and immoral thing to do. He could be going around setting off bombs. Instead, he’s a professor and a community activist. On the other hand, he seems sufficiently entrenched in egomania and self-righteousness that he can’t bring himself to actually admit that. And until he does admit that he was wrong, he’s hard to defend.

The Excluded Middle

Jonah Goldberg throws down the gauntlet:

It seems to me the liberal left needs to decide, was Ayers a horrible figure to be ashamed of, or a hero? If you don’t like this choice, why?

This is baffling. Is Jonah Goldberg a horrible figure to be ashamed of, or a hero? You must choose! But he’s neither. He’s just a guy. What Ayers did was wrong, and it’s troubling that, unlike most 60s-era radicals, he can’t seem to see that even in retrospect. But I dare say he’s responsible for a good deal less violence, death, and destruction than is, say, Henry Kissinger. It’d be dumb to idolize Ayers’ actions from back in the day but he’s hardly history’s greatest monster or even the greatest monster involved in 1960s political controversies.

Tropic Thunder

For some reason, most of my friends felt based on the preview that Tropic Thunder looked terrible. I thought it looked okay. Then I saw it last night and . . . it’s okay. Plenty of funny stuff, but little in the way of genuinely hilarious stuff. The exception is Tom Cruise who, apparently, should have focused his career on doing comic supporting roles. Except I guess the choices he’s actually made have made him incredibly wealthy, so he probably doesn’t have too many regrets.

Young and Sweet, Only 72

Walter Isaacson chats with John McCain about Abba:

Speaking to Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Institute in Colorado on Thursday, McCain found himself explaining a recent interview with Blender Magazine in which he selected ABBA’s 1976 track “Dancing Queen” as his favorite song.

“What were you thinking?,” Isaacson asked him, looking incredulous.

“If there is anything I am lacking in, I’ve got to tell you, it is taste in music and art and other great things in life,” McCain joked. “I’ve got to say that a lot of my taste in music stopped about the time I impacted a surface-to-air missile with my own airplane and never caught up again.”

Yes, yes, we get it — John McCain is so famously reluctant to discuss his POW experience or exploit it for political gain that he manages to bring it up in the context of wildly unrelated questions about his affection for 1970s-era Scandinavian pop acts. And wait a minute — Abba’s from the seventies! Spencer Ackerman notes:

What? McCain was shot down in 1967. ABBA began making music in 1972. Don’t try this shit on me, McCain! Your POW experience has nothing to do with your Partridgey musical taste.

Something to ponder over your weekend. This is really kind of a softball question, it should be possible for McCain to give a more normal answer.