Sunday, May 09, 2004

Wanted to be Wrong

I spent a few minutes going over my archives to examine just what I wrote and when I wrote it regarding the Iraq adventure. I was surprised by something -- I clearly remembered being against this thing, but I was surprised by how sure I was that the whole justification was crap early on. I think I've heard too many people say something along the lines of "well, everyone thought he had WMD!" Apparently, I didn't.

There's no joy in being right about this administration's current and inevitable future failure in Iraq. I wrote as much many times - PLEASE LET ME BE WRONG. The truth is, I was wrong, but in the other direction. Even this partisan hack Bush-hater had absolutely no clue just how incompetent the people in charge could be. I had little expectations of their competence, but I had no idea that my worst nightmares would morph into my most optimistic dreams.

Today, I have to say the people I'm still angry at were those "serious centrists" who contributed to the effort to marginalize all anti-war voices by labelling them as the fringe. Exhibit A in all of this was Salon's Michelle Goldberg, who in her most recent article finds someone to continue to perpetuate this basic idea -- those who were against the war were fringe nutters. -- even as polls showed majority opposition to this war, one without UN approval at least, proved that idea wrong.

I'm a partisan hack, but I'm basically just an angry centrist. There are few if any issues I would consider myself to be on the "fringe" of. People like Goldberg did their best to portray the anti-war movement as a bunch of loonies. Screw them.


...okay,okay, to be fair to Goldberg (And correct) - I misread. The person is talking about people calling for removal of troops now thus far having been the fringe left and right. But, look, even that isn't correct. I'll agree that up until recently that wasn't exactly mainstream opinion, but nor was it an opinion which solely came from people who otherwise identified with the political fringe.