http://www.workingforchange.com/blog/index.cfm?mode=entry&entry=E77FC026-F68E-B656-8B28EFF93F6E893CPeter Beinart Has No Clothes
By David Sirota
No matter how many times Establishment pundits and politicians contradict themselves and push policy prescriptions that then fall flat on their face, the sheer audacity of these people to continue puffing out their chests as "experts" never ceases to amaze. It's positively incredible, really - only in politics (and perhaps economics) can someone embrace brazen hypocrisy, make high-profile predictions that end up being wildly off the mark and then not only keep their job, but continue to be billed - and to bill themselves - as a guru.
The most high-profile example of this these days is Peter Beinart, the editor of the New Republic. He is running around promoting himself as the Democratic Party's visionary leader on foreign policy - sententiously berating the Democratic Party for not telling America "what their vision is" on foreign policy.
Beinart, you may recall, is one of the Washington pundits who most loudly echoed the Bush administration's push for war in Iraq. "If the Democratic Party becomes the anti-war-with-Iraq party...we really will no longer have a 50-50 nation, we'll have a 60-40 Republican nation," Beinart declared on Fox News in 2002. "The Democrats will be in a kind of McGovernite wilderness for a generation.” He was, of course, about as far off the mark as one can get. Today, polls consistently show that Iraq has been a major factor in the decimation of President Bush's approval ratings. And it is no secret that one of the major reasons Democrats haven't done a better job of capitalizing on those poor numbers is because they have refused to support getting us out of Iraq.
But bad predictions are nothing when Beinart's subsequent attacks came. The Washington Post wrote the month before the invasion in 2003 that "Beinart is a full-fledged, talon-baring hawk on Iraq, a stance that has led him to assail, among others, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.)." Beinart specifically "chided Kerry for making anti-war noises after voting to support action against Saddam Hussein, saying Kerry's presidential candidacy 'is doomed to fail if Kerry keeps speaking so dishonestly about Iraq.'" In the New Republic, Beinart attacked Kerry for "think
he can have it both ways on the war."
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