Wank Away

Matt has more on today's wanker, though I think he lets him off a bit easy. He's right that Hiatt is slowly following the course of Peter Beinart and others who after it was apparent that the Iraq war was a disaster felt the need to distance themselves from those dirty fucking hippies by constructing "even if they were right they were wrong" kinds of arguments. I think Petey has largely left this behind, but Hiatt's still laboring under the delusion that anyone who opposed the Iraq war did so because they were Buchananite nativists who reject all contact with the outside world instead of people who just thought the Iraq war was a disastrously stupid idea.

But aside from that, Hiatt engages in a bit more mendacity. He writes:

Strikingly, both want to reinvigorate existing multilateral alliances and to create new ones. Both point to flaws in the United Nations but say the United States should work to cure them rather than pull out. Both want renewed attention to securing loose nukes around the world.

Each of their calls for change carries criticism of the Bush administration, implicit in Romney's case, explicit -- and eloquent -- in Obama's. The United States cannot promote its values abroad unless it lives by them at home, Obama says, pledging an end to secret prisons and other abuse of detainees. A president cannot sell an active foreign policy, he says, unless he "can restore the American people's trust" at home.

What does Hiatt leave out? That Obama's "twin" Mitt Romney wants to double the size of Gitmo, presumably because he has a list of terrorist names, addresses, and their evil deeds in his pocket who President Romney would capture and imprison indefinitely without charge if only there wasn't a "no vacancy" sign there. Not only does Hiatt obscure this fact, in the context of the rest of the article it actually suggests this is yet another similarity between Obama and Willard Mitt.