Recommended Reading

There was an exceptionally gasbaggy essay in the New York Times Magazine on Sunday by academic/pundit/politician Michael Ignatieff, purportedly on why and how he got the Iraq War wrong (turns out it was a bad idea -- who could have guessed!), but mostly it turned out to be just about how intellectuals and politicians have to get things wrong because they live on a different plane, and, oh, a bunch of junk like that. What it didn't say was that Bush and Co. pretty transparently lied about the connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda and 9/11 from the get-go, which is why I and many of my friends were skeptical of the whole misadventure from the start.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Well, maybe it's there. The reason I bring this up is because the ever-dependable David Rees, who is usually found on the letters page over at Rolling Stone writing his comic strip "Get Your War On," has a devastatingly hilarious takedown of Ignatieff over at the Huffington Post, which is kind of a sister blog to OPC:

Ignatieff's latest essay is what Latin people call a "mea culpa," which is Greek for "Attention publishers: I am ready to write a book about the huge colossal mistake I made." I imagine the book will be about a man struggling to do the right thing-- a man who thinks with his heart and dares, with a dream in each fist, to reach for the stars. It's about a journey: a journey from idealistic, starry-eyed academic to wizened, war-weary politician. (Ignatieff used to work at Harvard's Kennedy School; now he's Prime Chancellor of Canada's Liberal Delegate or whatever kind of wack-ass, kumbaya government they've got up there.)

I encourage you to read the whole thing. It's all that good.