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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