Author: Jonathan Schwarz

Here’s Judith Miller last night on Frontline:

LOWELL BERGMAN: There’s definitely a group of people felt you were becoming a martyr [by going to jail rather than reveal her conversations with Scooter Libby], that you were doing this to make up for the problems with the WMD coverage.

JUDITH MILLER: …I didn’t feel I had anything to apologize for with my WMD coverage.

Here’s Seymour Hersh on the same program:

HERSH: I still think that those reporters who do things I find heinous believe they’re doing the right thing.

In the wake of the John Edwards blogger “scandal,” many have wondered whether regular bloggers will ever be able to work for political campaigns. (Well, Democratic political campaigns. Anything whatsoever remains OKIYAR.)

Fortunately, Dennis Perrin is riding to the rescue with an easy solution—blame him:

Look — there’s no way in hell that a serious Democratic campaign is going to hire the likes of me. Not only is my contempt for this corrupt, archaic political system open for all to see, my public opinions have bordered on slander and oftentimes read like a lunatic’s screams. When it comes to mainstream political discussion, I’m toxic, damaged goods. But that doesn’t mean you have to suffer the same marginalization. So instead of quitting a campaign under pressure, why not Blame Me! for your previous outbursts!

For an affordable, privately-negotiated fee, I’ll allow you to insert my name in your blog archives, making me the source of any or all hostile opinions you may have typed in the heat of the moment. When your political enemies are searching for something that can embarrass your candidate, instead of finding this:

The crypto-fascist Christers are trying to shove their blood-stained crucifix up our collective ass.

They’ll see this:

‘The crypto-fascist Christers are trying to shove their blood-stained crucifix up our collective ass,’ said Dennis Perrin, discussing the GOP’s 2008 campaign strategy.

The rest.

Don’t miss this Tomdispatch piece by former National Security Council staffer Roger Morris about the career of Donald Rumsfeld. I know you already think Rumsfeld was bad, but you likely have no idea.

And this is only Part I. Part II is coming Thursday.

Ken Silverstein of Harper’s is running a three-part series of discussions with experts on the likelihood of a U.S. attack on Iran. The first part is up here.

Arthur Silber has written another installment in his “Dominion Over the World” series. And he’s rightfully pissed off at the failings of many nice liberal writers:

I will frankly admit that one of my ongoing and often severe disappointments with regard to some of even the most intelligent of liberal-progressive writers and bloggers is their seeming inability to appreciate the continuity and uniformity of American foreign policy over the last century, and particularly since World War II. It appears that their determination to turn virtually every episode in our national life, no matter how disastrous, into an opportunity for partisan advantage and electoral victory overcomes analytic abilities which can often be very insightful on more limited questions…

To put it another way, and this is the issue that mere Democratic partisans adamantly refuse to acknowledge: Bush would not have been possible but for the Democrats who had preceded him…As the inconceivable dangers of wider war, including possible nuclear exchanges, loom over us all, petty partisanship and party loyalty as the primary concern are morally distasteful at a minimum, and occasionally abhorrent in their worst manifestations, intellectually irresponsible, and immensely dangerous. Such an approach does nothing to decrease the continuing calamities that confront us, but only worsens them.

It should also be noted that, while many liberal-progressive writers and bloggers appear to imagine they are challenging “conventional wisdom,” this mode of analysis only strengthens that “wisdom” and ensures that the governing class will never be seriously challenge…In this manner, many liberal-progressive bloggers and writers have been entirely coopted by the establishment elites, certainly insofar as foreign policy is concerned. The elites know it; many liberals and progressives haven’t figured it out yet. I would say the joke’s on them, but for the fact that the stakes involved may literally be the future of the world itself.

Be sure to read the rest.

What’s weird about the blogosphere is that there are no material reasons for people to be partisan in this sense. (Unlike professional pundits, for whom there are real economic pressures to line up with one team or the other.) And yet both bloggers and blog readers usually do it anyway. We love our tribes, even when it’s killing us.