From The Chicago Sun-Times:
by Patrick J. Buchanan
Posted Jan 09, 2007
Murcer asks longtime fansCopyright 2007 Newsday Inc.
From Human Events:What's Worse Than Open Borders?
by Mac Johnson
Posted Jan 10, 2007
STRIPPER LIED ... WHITE BOYS FRIED
Gwynn-win situation in Hall voting 
From The Boston GlobeBALTIMORE -- There are still scars here, nearly 23 years after the Colts left Baltimore for Indianapolis. Diehards will always bleed blue and white.
"They did us dirty," said Manny Spanomanolis, owner of Club 4100 in the blue-collar Brooklyn Park section.
With Sinatra on the jukebox and Unitas on the walls, it's always 1958 here. Seniors sit in the same booths under the same sepia-toned Baltimore Colts pictures and talk about plays hiked when Ike was President.
"Unitas used to sit right there drinking Schlitz," said white-haired Bob Francis, pointing to a corner table. Francis said he was a Colts season ticket-holder from 1957 until team owner Robert Irsay sneaked the team out of Baltimore in the middle of the night in 1984.
"Nobody bothered him when he came in here; he could relax," said Francis. "He was friends with everybody. If you were here Sept. 11, 2002, at roughly 4:30 p.m. -- the day that [Unitas] died -- you would not have seen a dry eye in the place. I hate to say it's a shrine, but it is."
Baltimore is still Unitastown, and for most people, that horseshoe on the helmet is really a capital U. There's the bigger-than-life Unitas statue in Unitas Plaza outside M&T Bank Stadium, where the Ravens will host the returning Colts in a divisional playoff game Saturday. It's a local custom that fans streaming into the stadium rub Johnny U's famous black hightops for luck. They've been rubbed so much that the bronze shows through.
There's a Johnny Unitas Stadium at Towson University. Unitas bobblehead dolls outsell such icons as the Baltimore-born Babe Ruth and working-class hero Cal Ripken at the Sports Legends at Camden Yards museum, which features the Johnny Unitas collection -- including the bed he was born in.
But it's the old haunts where the blue and white come to life.
Tom Matte, the Baltimore Colts halfback, walks into Club 4100 greeting everybody by name, just as he's done for the last 40 years. He's been a color announcer the last 10 years for the Ravens, who arrived in 1996 after cameo appearances by the United States Football League's Baltimore Stars and the Canadian Football League's Baltimore Stallions earlier in the decade.
Matte said covering a Ravens-Colts game was difficult.
"I made a couple of mistakes and started rooting for the Colts again because that was such an integral part of my life," he said. "It's that horseshoe. The Super Bowl championship ring we have on from 1970 is the horseshoe. Hey, I wish [Indianapolis quarterback] Peyton Manning well -- he's a great guy; I know his father well -- but as far as that franchise, we're not part of it. We don't need to have our records up there."
Matte is best remembered for taking over at quarterback when Unitas and Gary Cuozzo were hurt prior to the NFL Western Conference championship against Vince Lombardi's Green Bay Packers Dec. 26, 1965. With the plays scrawled on his vinyl wristband, he forced overtime before a questionable field goal gave the Packers a 13-10 victory. The wristband wound up in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio.
"The only thing I wish they would've done was left the name Baltimore Colts here," said Matte. "Take a look at all the memorabilia that's in the Hall of Fame -- it's under Indianapolis Colts. John Unitas was called an Indianapolis Colt. John Unitas was a Baltimore Colt.
"Indianapolis has not considered us alumni. They have not kept in touch with us. They haven't even sent us mailers of what's going on."
Madge Stanley has been a 4100 Club waitress for the last 40 years. She remembers that on Sundays, three buses of fans would depart for the games.
"It was wild, a real Colts bar," said Stanley. "If they lost, the fans would drink more. There was a whole lot of players, they'd eat together. They were very approachable. You could walk up to them at any time and they'd talk to you. They were very much into the community. Now I root for the Ravens and against the Colts. The only thing that bothers me is that horseshoe on the helmet. That bothers me."
George Mills, a retired television technician, was one of the very few on scene in suburban Owings Mills when the vans rolled.
"It was heartbreaking," he said. "Irsay promised to stay in Baltimore just a week before. There were no people there. It was 3 o'clock in the morning. I'm 75 years old, so I can't get emotional. It's a business world.
"What disturbs me is that we went to Canton to see John Mackey inducted into the Hall of Fame, I got my camera up there and I'm shooting all the statues and it says 'Indianapolis Colts' on the bottom. I made some comment, and there's a guy standing next to me and he says, 'I think that's terrible, son.' It was Gale Sayers."
At Sports Legends, Unitas gets his own section. Visitors can view his shoulder pads, No. 19 jersey, and helmet, and see the football he used for his last Colts pass, a touchdown to wide receiver Eddie Hinton.
They can also listen to a miked Unitas actually calling a play. Hovering over everyone is a huge blow-up of the Sports Illustrated cover with Unitas and the headline, "The Best There Ever Was." The bow-legged, crew-cut icon threw at least one touchdown pass in 47 consecutive games, won the MVP three times, and was the first quarterback to throw for 40,000 yards.
John Unitas Jr. was a ballboy on his father's team. He loved training camp.
"Back then, they played for fun," he said. "The trainer used to walk around with a flashlight at 11 at night, and I'd walk around with him. The players used to be out drinking and they'd put pillows stuffed in their beds. They'd all be smoking Camels with no filters, drinking beer, and having the best time of their lives. If they had a busted-up foot, they'd still play.
"They were just down-to-earth guys. My dad couldn't believe how great the fans were. He was astounded that at intrasquad scrimmages, they would have 40,000 fans. What's missing today is players come into town, they don't live there. People don't put their roots down."
Unitas soured on the Colts' management in 1972 when he wasn't allowed to finish his career in Baltimore.
"A reporter friend called and said, 'John, [you've been] traded to San Diego,' " said his wife, Sandra. "It was so inconsiderate, so horrible for fans."
Colt Hall of Fame halfback Lenny Moore says he was mistreated by the Indianapolis Colts as well. He was working for the Baltimore Colts in community relations when they abruptly left town. "I was temporarily laid off, and that's the last I ever heard from them at all," he said. "Not a letter. Nothing."
An old Colt never forgets. Finding an Indianapolis Colts fan in Baltimore is as hard as finding someone who thought Ripken was a slacker.
When the Colts left town, many fans started rooting for the Washington Redskins and Philadelphia Eagles until the NFL returned with the Ravens. The Ravens, they love to point out here, have already captured the Super Bowl. Indianapolis has not.
Rooting against all things Indianapolis is a civic duty.
The Colts offices and practice fields in Owings Mills are now part of Villa Julie College. The Ravens built a state-of-the-art facility a few miles away in Owings Mills on 32 acres in October 2004.
The Hollywood Diner -- the same one used in the movie "Diner" -- has been moved near City Hall. The 1982 Barry Levinson comedy featured a group of Baltimore Colt-obsessed fans in 1959.
Tracy Hunt, the diner cashier, remembers the night the Colts left. "I was about 9," she said. "My mom woke me up and said, 'The Colts are gone.' She was upset. She was saying, 'It's not right.' I was happy -- it was snowing, and we got the next day off."
Hunt says she lives near M&T Bank Stadium and can hear the public address announcer from her living room. "The day they put the John Unitas statue there, I couldn't even get to my house," she said. "There was so much traffic."
Although the Ravens beat the New York Giants in Super Bowl XXXV in 2001, it wasn't the same as in 1958, when Unitas led the Colts 80 yards in an overtime victory against the Giants in what has been called "the greatest game ever played."
The Pro Football Hall of Fame credits the game with sparking the NFL's popularity.
"[It] finally gave Baltimore pride," said John Ziemann, deputy director of Sports Legends at Camden Yards. "Before Unitas, people said, 'Let's face it, we're nothing more than a whistle-stop between Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.' Then when we won the '58 championship game, we finally had something to cheer about, and Johnny Unitas and the Baltimore Colts did that."
Ziemann also added several questions for the famous quiz Steve Guttenberg's character, Eddie, gives to his fiancee in "Diner," including, "What were the Colts' original colors?" The answer: Green and white. Ernie Accorsi, retiring general manager of the Giants and a Colt fanatic growing up, wrote most of the questions.
Ziemann had been a member of the Baltimore Colt marching band since 1962 and now is president of the Ravens Marching Band. He and Unitas became friends early on.
"It's not like it is now," he said. "In 1963, my appendix exploded. I was in bad shape in the hospital. One of the nurses came in and said, 'Johnny U is going to see you. And I said, 'So is the queen of England.' He came in and said, 'What the hell did you do now?' and stayed three hours.
"They were part of the community."
Moving trucks arrived at the suburban offices when nobody was around.
"I hate Indiana Mayflower," said Ziemann. "Baltimore Mayflower didn't know anything about it.
"But the Civil War is over. I got closure. We beat 'em to a Super Bowl championship and we got a better stadium."
Unitas used to show up at Ravens games against the Colts wearing a Lithuanian baseball cap, his son said. He never forgave Bob Irsay for moving the team.
"John owned a restaurant called the Golden Arm and he had a Bob Irsay room -- the bathroom," said Ziemann. "That's what John thought of him." 
By Thomas Boswell
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Perhaps Cal Ripken epitomizes essential human values, like fidelity to a code of duty and honor. Or maybe he's just a decent guy who showed up for work every day, signed a lot of autographs and didn't cheat -- a very low hurdle for sainthood. Either way, Ripken always has been exactly what baseball needed, especially in its darkest times.
From his first day in the big leagues in 1981 until he was voted into the Hall of Fame yesterday with the third-highest percentage ever, Ripken always has been baseball's perfect answer -- even before the sport knew the ugly question. Yes, he's at it again. In an age when jocks show up at midnight in a white Hummer limo, Ripken will ride into Cooperstown in July on a white horse at high noon.
As Barry Bonds stalks Hank Aaron all summer, like Rambo on Bambi's trail, Ripken is positioned to steal the stage: the accidental antidote, the hero by happenstance. In '95, after the sewage spill of a canceled World Series, baseball needed a stench-free symbol of dependability, a hometown boy who understood responsibility and an adult who grasped that players simply were custodians of a game owned by its fans.
The sport got all those things, as the Orioles shortstop broke Lou Gehrig's record for consecutive games played. Now history is seeking him out again. The steroid-soaked stage is set. Baseball's need for a man with a simple sense of honor is profoundly obvious. Cue Cal. Now we realize that all those years when it never crossed Cal's mind to skip even a single game, something else never crossed his mind either -- cheating. Now, his 431 home runs look larger as the totals of others seem smaller. And we know why Cal never hit a ball 475 feet in his life. "I don't think my numbers are deflated because some other numbers may be inflated," Ripken told me last week.
Just as Mark McGwire brought more unwelcome headlines to the sport yesterday -- by receiving a dismal 23.5 percent of the Hall vote -- Ripken's election immediately helped the cleanup process. There to aid him was Tony Gwynn, the eight-time batting champ who led the league in smiles for 20 straight years.
How does baseball catch these undeserved breaks? For much of the last 20 years, baseball's bosses, owners and union have tacitly condoned and virtually encouraged an epidemic of illegal and dangerous performance-enhancing drugs. And the two superstars of the last quarter century who are least likely to have cheated -- who, if anything, were nagged for not having quite enough "power" -- arrive right on schedule. On an occasion when he was universally contrasted with Too Big Mac and Balco Barry, Ripken tried to make one point perfectly clear -- in his mind, at least, virtue had nothing to do with it. "To me there was no fork in the road. There was no choice. Those things scare me to death," Ripken said last week when asked about playing clean.
Lest he get too much credit for mere honesty, he adds: "I never had the options. The Orioles were thought of as a bunch of goody-two-shoes. After those guys in Kansas City had [cocaine] problems, our team voluntarily agreed to have drug testing. Eddie [Murray] said, 'Just go along with it.'
"When I came into the big leagues [in 1982, his first full season], the locker room had ashtrays, spittoons and candy bars," adds Ripken, chuckling at a lifestyle little changed since the days of the Babe. "Then the blenders for the protein mixes replaced them. Maybe I had the old-school naive view. People think I had this nutritional regimen. Yeah, my regimen was the four food groups."
Ripken may know plenty about the use of performance enhancers in baseball. What veteran star player wouldn't? "The truth has started to come out. But only parts have come out to this point. The overall thing just saddens me. But it's reality. It is what it is," Ripken said. "I don't resent being asked about it. It's all part of the process of cleaning up. The truth will be known. Unfortunately, all the stories probably haven't come out yet. I'm for the stories being told."
But don't expect to hear them from him. "I don't think it's my place to judge," he said.
However, the day of his election to Cooperstown was the proper time for Ripken to put the primary moments of his career in perspective. Making the Hall ranked only third.
"Catching the liner for the last out of the '83 World Series was my best moment as a player because you have the joy of completion. But taking that spontaneous lap in '95 was my best human moment," Ripken said.
Playing in his 2,131st consecutive game on Sept. 6 that season, Ripken circled the Camden Yards warning track, shaking the hands of countless fans, many of whom already had his autograph under glass back home. Or did they all? If they did, they probably received that souvenir near midnight in a darkened ballpark with just enough light left to allow the line snaking beside the Oriole dugout to find its way to Cal's indefatigable pen.
"I didn't want to delay the game," Ripken said. "But Bobby [Bonilla] and Raffy [Palmeiro] pushed me out of the dugout. They said, 'If you don't take a lap, we'll never get this game started again.' At the end of the lap I could care less if they started the game or not."
"We need each other in this life," said Ripken, referring to the bond between players and fans, which baseball constantly seems to stretch to the breaking point. "Taking the lap helped to pull the experience together. I was the beneficiary."
Ripken always feels like he's the beneficiary. And he usually is. To a point, his good luck -- his knack of being in the right place at the right time to fall into a bed of roses -- even embarrasses him. But other people, and baseball, always seem to be getting even more in these sappy Ripken love-fests. Is the simple life the win-win life?
These days, Ripken builds baseball at the grass-roots level by teaching the game to kids and owning minor league teams. It's work he loves and it suits him. "When you're a player, the good seasons go by fast. The bad ones seem to take forever," Ripken said. "The last five years have seemed like the fastest of my life."
To summarize what he does these days and how people should imagine his various projects, Ripken puts his fingers a fraction of an inch apart. "This many can be major leaguers," he said. Then he spreads his arms as wide as he can and grins. "This many can love the game."
January 9, 2007
By David Marin (202)225-5074
Washington, D.C. – Oversight and Government Reform Committee Ranking Member Tom Davis (R-VA) released the following statement today on a committee report that sheds important new light on Sandy Berger’s theft of classified documents from the National Archives. The report makes it clear that the full extent of Mr. Berger’s document removal can never be known, and consequently the Department of Justice could not assure the 9/11 Commission that it received all responsive documents to which Mr. Berger had access.
“My staff’s investigation reveals that President Clinton’s former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger compromised national security much more than originally disclosed,” Davis said. “It is now also clear that Mr. Berger was willing to go to extraordinary lengths to compromise national security, apparently for his own convenience.
From Newsday.com:
From The American Conservative:The pundits who sold the Iraq War change their tune
and bury their records.
by Glenn Greenwald
When political leaders make drastic mistakes, accountability is delivered in the form of elections. That occurred in November when voters removed the party principally responsible for the war in Iraq. But the invasion would not have occurred had Americans not been persuaded of its wisdom and necessity, and leading that charge was a stable of pundits and media analysts who glorified President Bush’s policies and disseminated all sorts of false information and baseless assurances.
Yet there seems to be no accountability for these pro-war pundits. On the contrary, they continue to pose as wise, responsible experts and have suffered no lost credibility, prominence, or influence. They have accomplished this feat largely by evading responsibility for their prior opinions, pretending that they were right all along or, in the most extreme cases, denying that they ever supported the war.
Michael Ledeen, a Freedom Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor to National Review, chose the boldest option. In response to a Vanity Fair article about the swarms of neoconservatives abandoning the administration and the war as both become increasingly unpopular, Ledeen emphatically denied that he backed the invasion in the first place. Writing on National Review’s blog, The Corner, Ledeen claimed, “I do not feel ‘remorseful,’ since I had and have no involvement with our Iraq policy. I opposed the military invasion of Iraq before it took place.”
It is difficult to overstate the audacity—and the mendacity—of Ledeen’s claim. In August 2002, he wrote a scathing article in National Review following an appearance by Brent Scowcroft on “Face the Nation,” in which the former national security adviser argued against the invasion. Ledeen devoted his entire column to mocking Scowcroft’s concerns:
It’s always reassuring to hear Brent Scowcroft attack one’s cherished convictions; it makes one cherish them all the more. … So it’s good news when Scowcroft comes out against the desperately-needed and long overdue war against Saddam Hussein and the rest of the terror masters.
Declaring that “Saddam is actively supporting al Qaeda, and Abu Nidal, and Hezbollah,” Ledeen wrote, “the Palestinian question can only be addressed effectively once the war against Saddam and his ilk has been won.” In response to Scowcroft’s concern that invading Iraq could “turn the whole region into a caldron and destroy the War on Terror,” Ledeen retorted, “One can only hope that we turn the region into a cauldron, and faster, please. If ever there were a region that richly deserved being cauldronized, it is the Middle East today.”
On countless occasions, Ledeen called for the invasion to start as soon as possible. In an August 2002 interview with FrontPage Magazine, when Jamie Glazov asked when the war should begin. Ledeen answered, “Yesterday.”
He appeared on MSNBC’s “Hardball” on Aug. 19 to complain again that the war had not started: “I think that if President Bush is to be faulted for anything in this so far, it’s that he’s taken much too long to get on with it, much too long.”
The following month, in the Wall Street Journal, Ledeen wrote, “Saddam Hussein is a terrible evil, and President Bush is entirely right in vowing to end his reign of terror. If we come to Baghdad, Damascus and Tehran as liberators, we can expect overwhelming popular support. [I]t is impossible to imagine that the Iranian people would tolerate tyranny in their own country once freedom had come to Iraq. Syria would follow in short order.”
While it is difficult to be more dishonest than Ledeen, it is difficult to be more wrong than Charles Krauthammer. Prior to the invasion, Krauthammer used his various media platforms—his column at the Washington Post and his almost daily appearances on Fox News—to warn that Iraq was rapidly building up its WMD capabilities and that the U.S. risked running out of time if it did not invade immediately. He assured Americans that the war would pay for itself with oil revenues and that Iraqis would greet Americans as liberators.
In an Aug. 26, 2002 Time column, Krauthammer crystallized the issue at the heart of the Iraq discussion: “The growing debate on invading Iraq hinges on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction.” In his Washington Post column of Oct. 7, Krauthammer argued, “Hawks favor war on the grounds that Saddam Hussein is reckless, tyrannical and instinctively aggressive, and that if he comes into possession of nuclear weapons in addition to the weapons of mass destruction he already has, he is likely to use them or share them with terrorists.”
According to Krauthammer, the WMD threat was so imminent that, as he argued on Fox News on Nov. 8, 2002, waiting a matter of months could mean that Saddam obtained nuclear capability: “Under this Resolution, if Blix does not have to report back to the Security Council for 105 days, do the math. That’s the 21st of February. That is a very long time away. And it could be at the end of our window to attack.” In his Nov. 15, Post column, Krauthammer rang the alarm yet again: “We’ve been given time, but so has Hussein. Time to hide his weapons. Time even to distribute them through Iraqi agents—aka diplomats using diplomatic pouches—into the heart of the enemy. (We still don’t know where last year’s anthrax came from.) Time to give the stuff to terrorists who, as Osama bin Laden’s tape suggests, are now prepared to make common cause with Hussein.”
Now, as the war he demanded lies in ruins, Krauthammer uses his Post column to revise his record: “Our objectives in Iraq were twofold and always simple: Depose Saddam Hussein and replace his murderous regime with a self-sustaining, democratic government.” His hysterical obsession with WMD has been whitewashed from his pundit history, and in its place is a goal that Krauthammer barely mentioned prior to the war.
As recently as Oct. 28, 2005, he mocked foreign-policy realists for their belief that democracy could not take root in Iraqi culture, insisting that “the overwhelming majority of Iraq’s people have repeatedly given every indication of valuing their newfound freedom.” But now, Krauthammer claims that the war he urged is failing because Iraqis are incapable of understanding what freedom is about:
[T]he problem here is Iraq’s particular political culture, raped and ruined by 30 years of Hussein’s totalitarianism. Is this America’s fault? No. It is a result of Iraq’s first democratic election. It was never certain whether the long-oppressed Shiites would have enough sense of nation and sense of compromise to govern rather than rule. The answer is now clear: United in a dominating coalition, they do not.
That the failed war is the Iraqis’ fault has become a leading neoconservative excuse. On Nov. 3, Paul Mirgenoff of the Powerline blog blamed the Iraqis for electing the wrong prime minister— “The Iraqis voted in the Shia-militia-friendly Maliki government, thereby making it difficult, if not impossible, for the U.S. to work with the current government to curb sectarian violence.” But in April, Mirgenoff lavished the Iraqis with praise for that very choice, with his “acknowledgement that the selection of Jawad al-Maliki to be Iraq’s prime minister is good news” because Iraqis were “resisting Iranian pressure to back Ibrahim al-Jafari” and thus “stood up for a unified Iraq.”
This is common practice in the world of punditry: most war advocates continue to parade around as foreign-policy experts even though, with the rarest exception—an Andrew Sullivan here or there—virtually none has acknowledged his error.
The dynamic is also evident among former Bush supporters now trying to distance themselves from the unpopular president. Many who loyally supported and even venerated Bush when he was riding high now pretend to have recognized his flaws all along.
In her Oct. 26, 2006 Wall Street Journal column, Peggy Noonan tried to demonstrate how intellectually honest she is by claiming that well-connected Republicans thought the GOP deserved to lose the midterm election. For the party’s woes, she blamed the president: “They want to fire Congress because they can’t fire President Bush.” Trying to explain Republican dissatisfaction, she wrote:
Republican political veterans go easy on ideology, but they’re tough on incompetence. They see Mr. Bush through the eyes of experience and maturity. They hate a lack of care. They see Mr. Bush as careless, and on more than Iraq—careless with old alliances, disrespectful of the opinion of mankind. ‘He never listens,’ an elected official who is a Bush supporter said with a shrug some months ago.
Along the way the president’s men and women confused the necessary and legitimate disciplining of a coalition with weird and excessive attempts to silence Republican critics. They have lived in a closed system. They now want to open it but don’t know how. Listening is a habit; theirs has long been to suppress.
But in early 2004, when arguing for President Bush’s re-election, Noonan employed her trademark effusiveness to glorify the president’s character and pay homage to his humility and great sense of responsibility:
Mr. Bush is the triumph of the seemingly average American man. He’s normal. He thinks in a sort of common-sense way. He speaks the language of business and sports and politics. You know him. He’s not exotic. But if there’s a fire on the block, he’ll run out and help. He’ll help direct the rig to the right house and count the kids coming out and say, ‘Where’s Sally?’
He’s responsible. He’s not an intellectual. Intellectuals start all the trouble in the world. And then when the fire comes they say, ‘I warned Joe about that furnace.’ And, ‘Does Joe have children?’ And ‘I saw a fire once’ ...
Bush ain’t that guy. Republicans love the guy who ain’t that guy. Americans love the guy who ain’t that guy
So in just over two years, Bush went from being a diligent Everyman to a know-it-all tyrant who listens to no one, stamps out dissent, and is irresponsible with his duties. Noonan now depicts Bush in this way while pretending that she never oozed praise.
But her reversal isn’t as brazen as the pro-war, pro-Bush pundits who have begun advocating the very views they spent the last three years demonizing. Ever since the U.S. invaded, those who pointed out that we were achieving little more than mass death, destruction of American credibility, conversions of moderate Muslims into extremists, and a serious weakening of our military were vilified as America-hating terrorist allies who wanted us to lose. Those who simply pointed out that the war effort wasn’t going according to promise were derided as cut-and-run “defeatocrats” who lacked the intestinal fortitude to fight.
Yet pundits who equated dissent with treason are now declaring the war to be a failure and are advocating withdrawal without bothering to reconcile their current views with their previous allegations.
New York Post columnist Ralph Peters wrote in November 2005 that a failure to see the mission through to completion would tell the world that “Americans are cowards who can be attacked with impunity.” He further argued that “a U.S. surrender would turn al Qaeda into an Islamic superpower” and that “[i]f we run away from our enemies overseas, our enemies will make their way to us. Quit Iraq, and far more than 2,000 Americans are going to die.”
But on Nov. 2, 2006, Peters wrote a column in USA Today announcing, “Iraq is failing. No honest observer can conclude otherwise. If they continue to revel in fratricidal slaughter, we must leave.” The same columnist who warned just a year ago in the most alarmist tone that withdrawal would gravely endanger the U.S., now claims that “Contrary to the prophets of doom, the United States wouldn’t be weakened by our withdrawal, should it come to that.”
All of these self-proclaimed super-patriots who spent the last three years shrieking that anyone who criticizes the war is a friend of the terrorists are now being forced to admit that the war is unwinnable. But rather than acknowledging their reversal, they seek to erase the public record, both to salvage their reputations and to obscure the intensity of their attacks against those who were right. Such vitriol against critics muted debate in the first place and ensured that we stayed in Iraq, pretending all along that things were going great.
There is nothing wrong with acknowledging one’s errors and changing one’s mind. When genuine, this should be encouraged. But these pundits are not doing that. They know that they were on the wrong side of the most vital issue of the last decade, and in trying to reverse their predictions reveal themselves to be deeply flawed not only in judgment but also in character. 
_______________________________
Glenn Greenwald is author of How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values From the Bush Administration.
