THE LOW POST: 101 Ways to Lie About Iraq

I bring this up because Klein's latest offering is a piece praising John McCain's "consistency" on the Iraq issue. "McCain, whether you agree with him or not, has been entirely consistent about the war," he writes. About a hundred blogs wasted no time in blowing up that absurd statement (Among other things McCain, who recently criticized those silly Americans who thought the Iraq war would be easy, said some version of "We're going to win and we're going to win easily" about a half-dozen times in the first years of the war), but most of those blogs made the mistake of focusing on Klein's habitual factual inaccuracy, instead of the larger issue here.

A few years ago, I remember reading a Klein article about the Kerry-Bush debates in which he praised the Bush team's "flip-flop" attacks against Kerry:

Some [of Bush's campaign strategy] has been quite brilliant: the "flip-flop" assault inflated Kerry's most annoying trait -- his nuance-addled hedging of political bets...

At the same time, Klein ripped Bush for deriding Kerry for being on the "far left bank":

Bush's epithet-slinging was a flop in all three debates. Not because the nation has taken a lurch to the left -- Kennedy remains the anachronistic embodiment of a welfare-state liberalism long discarded by the American public. No, it was more likely that the president had overdosed on invective during the long, long course of this election year and the public has become inured to it.

So it's okay for Joe Klein to rip his critics for being "leftists," but it's not okay for George Bush to do it to John Kerry. It's okay for John McCain to be a flip-flopper, and it's okay for Klein himself to be one; but when John Kerry does it, it's "annoying."

I think they're all full of shit -- Klein, McCain, Kerry, all of them. But especially Klein. He is the living, breathing incarnation of American "conventional wisdom" -- and what American "conventional wisdom" is is a spineless, slavish, power-worshipping watcher of polls who has no problem whatsoever denying today what he said yesterday, and is mostly interested in making sure he still has invitations to the right Beltway parties.

The war, you might have noticed, has not budged very many of these people from their places. Many of them now claim to be against the war. But they're the same people they were three or four years ago, and they're still quite openly sneering at the people who really were right all along. They seem to hate us even more, now that we've so obviously been proven right.

Which tells us: if they're going to end this Iraq thing, they're going to try to do it without admitting either that they were wrong or we were right. And we'll take that, I guess -- but Jesus, is it infuriating.

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