Whose making me mad now: Peter Beinart

In today’s Washington Post, Peter Beinart, who can be a thoughtful center-right commentator about foreign policy issue writes an absurd piece in the Washington Post Outlook Section titled, “Admit It: The Surge Worked”

Let’s dismiss this quickly. To argue that the surge worked in the absence of how it fits into Iraq War policy is akin to a gambler who lost thousands at the poker table telling tales about how he won a couple of hundred bucks on his last hand.

Aside for echoing John McCain’s failed political strategy of pretending that the only decision that matter in the Iraq War was the surge, the rest of Beinart’s piece makes the even more absurd argument that, to be intellectually honest, liberals and Democrats need to acknowledge when Bush was right – as, according to him, he was on the surge. Beinart writes,

Younger liberals, by contrast, have had no such chastening experiences [the Gulf War of 1991 and welfare reform]. Watching the Bush administration flit from disaster to disaster, they have grown increasingly dismissive of conservatives in the process. They consume partisan media, where Republican malevolence is taken for granted. They laugh along with the "Colbert Report," the whole premise of which is that conservatives are bombastic, chauvinistic and dumb. They have never had the ideologically humbling experience of watching the people whose politics they loathe be proven right.

Apparently, Beinart missed most of the last decade in Washington. What Beinart describes is Republican Washington since at lease 1994. But he decides to use this to describe progressives, with whom Beinart might have had a couple of run-ins.

So, here’s my advice for Beinart. Next time you decide to blast progressives because they were right, how about condemning conservatives for acting like they were right when evidence suggests they weren’t.