On the Nature of All Things

Of the few dozen professional pundits who together drive the collective consciousness of our fair republic, perhaps a handful provide us with consistently useful commentary, while many others seem to have earned their influence largely through inertia. A pundit, after all, is rarely fired. Having achieved a certain degree of name recognition, his real job is essentially finished.

I have spent the better part of a year in study of the nation’s political commentary over the last decade, with a particular focus on the sort one finds on the op-ed pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post. A small portion of the resulting nonsense will be discussed on this blog over the next couple of months. The purpose of all this, aside from keeping me off the streets, is to convince The Reader that the nation is facing an existential problem that’s nonetheless rarely addressed by respectable media outlets, for obvious reasons. More specifically, it is my intention to convince The Reader that such inexplicably well-regarded columnists as Thomas Friedman, Charles Krauthammer, Richard Cohen, and David Broder are, contrary to their billings, so deeply incompetent that they are doing actual damage to the public’s understanding of the world and its workings.

To a lesser extent, I will also be covering lesser-known computer strategy games. Or maybe I won’t.

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In a couple of days, this column will begin with the first of many mean-spirited attacks on people who are just trying to do their jobs; we’ll start with Martin Peretz, the guy who actually managed to ruin The New Republic. In the meantime, my new piece detailing the various failures of Charles Krauthammer may be found at Vanity Fair. An excerpt:

When NATO sought to derail another potential Balkan genocide by way of its 1999 air bombing campaign against Serbia, Krauthammer denounced the move as mere wide-eyed liberal amateurism on the part of Clinton, arguing that air strikes would be insufficient to force Milosevic out of Kosovo. Bizarrely enough, he tried to convince his readers that General Wesley Clark agreed, quoting the then-NATO commander as telling Jim Lehrer, “we never thought that through air power we could stop these killings on the ground.” But the columnist leaves out the rest of Clark’s answer in which it is explained that “the person who has to stop this is President Milosevic” and that the purpose of the air campaign was to force him to do just that. For good measure, Krauthammer also criticizes Clinton for playing golf in the midst of conflict (“The stresses of war, no doubt”); he seems to have changed his mind on the propriety of such things around 2002 or so.

Even after the Kosovo campaign proved successful, Krauthammer was still ideologically committed to chaos in the Balkans, having also predicted in ‘99 that NATO involvement “would sever Kosovo from Serbian control and lead inevitably to an irredentist Kosovar state, unstable and unviable and forced to either join or take over pieces of neighboring countries.” When an ethnic Albanian insurgency arose in Macedonia along its border with UN-administered Kosovo in 2001, he felt himself vindicated, announcing that “the Balkans are on the verge of another explosion,” making several references to Vietnam, and characterizing our continued presence in the region as a “quagmire.” The violence ended within the year, having claimed less than 80 lives. Kosovo has since joined both the IMF and the World Bank; Macedonia is preparing for membership in NATO and the EU.