Matt Welch nails it
By immediately below.
The natural path for this to take is for us to start parsing Atrios’ argument narrowly until we discover we all pretty much agree, and I’m not sure that’s all that valuable, but….I read atrios a bit more generously than Rob. I took his central point to be that we oughtn’t play up the extent to the segment of our side’s opposition of Afganistan was based on bad reasons and we should acknowledge that some of our side’s opposition to Afganistan was based on good but wrong (probably…the chances of history vindicating that war are still somewhat less than 100%) sensible logic. President Bush talks like Christianity is a nice thing, and of course much of it is. He downplays the venal nastiness of a good chunk of it. It’s really a no-brainer.
(Let’s all agree to not speculatively argue about what fraction of Democratic opposition to Afganistan was pacifism driven and what fraction was Christianity is nasty and so on, it’s kind of a waste of time. We can probably stipulate that Harvard undergrads are probably not representative).
Pacifists, when talking about policy, are in the curious position of a) always making bad arguments (to the extent that their commitment to pacifism is the basis of their arguments) and b) often being correct in their conclusions. The pacifists were entirely correct in their conclusions about the 2003 Iraq war, however flawed their reasons were. On the other side, the Republicans have a chunk of people who’d support just about any war we could gin up excuses to fit. Hell, we’ve got a few of those people, too. They’re more numerous and a lot more dangerous. But their conclusions are occasionally correct as well. I suspect the current balance of political factions is more likely to land us in ill-advised wars than keep us out of advisable ones at this juncture. But those people are *never* considered a problem for Republicans. We should probably figure out why this is the case before we start taking them seriously about our “problems.”
Do the Democrats have a “Michael Moore problem?” Clearly, yes. But our Michael Moore problem has very little to do with a documentarian from Flint, Michigan; it has to do with the floating signifier “Michael Moore” who hates America six ways from Sunday and conspires with Jacques Chirac and Osama Bin-Laden to ban the bible in West Virginia while he’s the honored guest of John Kerry and the Clintons.