Sometimes it just takes me longer to get around to posting on certain topics than I expect. One advantage to delay is that, quite often, someone else winds up making the same point. Instead of rolling out my own rhetoric, all I need do is link to somebody else. Conserves effort; even helps reduce depletion of the global rhetoric reserve!
For instance, I was all set to point out the flaws in the estimable James Fallows’ argument in last Sunday’s New York Times business section about the blogging business. Fallows offered a qualified but optimistic picture of the way Google’s AdSense text ads might provide a healthy business model for bloggers. I was primed to point out the problems here — AdSense doesn’t work well unless your blog has a very narrow focus, and doesn’t bring in many dollars unless that focus is on something sellable (like tech gadgets). But Dana Blankenhorn beat me to it. So you can go read his response.
Similarly, I was gearing up to fulminate about the absurdities in Alan Murray’s Wall Street Journal column arguing that President Bush’s deceptions surrounding the war in Iraq somehow didn’t “break a covenant” with the American people the way President Clinton’s deceptions about Monica did. What Bush critics label as “lies,” Murray argues, the president actually believed in at the time: “Mr. Bush’s broad-brush division of the world into good guys and bad guys can be criticized for its crudeness and simplicity. But most who know him believe it is how he sees the world.”
But Murray’s effort to get Bush off the hook for his pre-war distortions of reality collapses in the face of the president’s continued assertions — up to this week — about ties between Saddam and al-Qaeda. The rest of the world knows these assertions are utterly bogus. The 9/11 Commission, with its access to classified information and its staff headed up by a former Bush administration official, has now confirmed they are utterly bogus. (Various attempts on the part of some conservative commentators to defend what Bush is saying these days on the basis of technicalities are appalling; by contrast, the Clinton-era parsings of “the meaning of is” — which at the time were elevated to the level of impeachable offenses — were small potatoes.)
At this point, Bush’s and Cheney’s repetitions of the Saddam/Al-Qaeda link represent desperate acts of official mendacity that are simply indefensible. In any world other than one in which, as Dennis Hastert’s spokesman recently reminded us, one party controls “all three branches of government” (refreshing honesty about the Supreme Court, there, no?), we would be hearing talk of impeachment once more.
But no need for me to vent further — Brad DeLong has laid this all out ahead of me.
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