What a friggin' moron!

Stealing from Jack O'Tool and from Crooked Timber's Ted, we read that Andrew Sullivan has written the following: (emphasis added)

SPOT THE MISSING PIECE: Josh Marshall has written an engaging and artful essay about the notion of an American empire for the liberal New Yorker magazine. I read it yesterday and then re-read it. Josh manages to write about the Clinton era "soft-imperialism" and the Bush era "hard imperialism" with nary a mention of a certain even that occurred on September 11, 2001. Maybe I missed something. I doubt if his editors noticed the lacuna. Why should they? For the Clintonites, 9/11 didn't really happen. Everything the Bush administration has tried to do in foreign policy is perverse, neocon imperialism - despite the fact that Bush ran as less interventionist than Al Gore in 2000. It doesn't seem to have occurred to them that this administration's hard line against terror-sponsoring regimes and those developing WMDs was not some ideological plot - but a reaction to events. It's important to remember that Marshall isn't some namby-pamby dove. In contrast to many Democrats, he takes national security issues seriously, and is not averse to the use of force. At one point, he even seemed to favor action against Saddam, until it appeared it couldn't be accomplished under perfect and optimal circumstances. After that, he deferred to president Jacques Chirac. So if Marshall hasn't noticed 9/11, what chance is there that the rest of the Democratic foreign policy establishment has? Look, I know I've been critical of the president's domestic shortcomings recently. But in the larger choice in this war there really isn't a choice. It's self-defense or winging it. When the consequences of winging it could be a biological/chemical/nuclear catastrophe in one of our cities, I'm not sure we have any real option but Bush.
- 12:13:48 AM

Josh Marshall wrote in his essay:

After September 11th, a left-wing accusation became a right-wing aspiration: conservatives increasingly began to espouse a world view that was unapologetically imperialist.

We've often checked stories for specific words, and to be sure of our facts we will search the text when appropriate. Sullivan apparently didn't have the time to do the following: (with Microsoft's Internet Explorer, but other browsers have similar capabilities)

Edit / Find on this page / "11" / Find Next

Which would have resulted in this:

Re Sullivan's "Maybe I missed something.":

Maybe you're a partisan hack. Maybe you insert qualifiers so that you can slime somebody, yet have an out should you be called to account.

posted by Quiddity at 1/29/2004 01:57:00 PM