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If You Please

No one will confuse me with a fan of Kevin Drum, but I share his annoyance at this response to this post.  Responding to an observation about rising opposition to the war despite changing opinions about the fortunes in the war, the NYT Opinionator’s Tobin Harsaw said: It’s a good point, but I suspect some […]

No one will confuse me with a fan of Kevin Drum, but I share his annoyance at this response to this post.  Responding to an observation about rising opposition to the war despite changing opinions about the fortunes in the war, the NYT Opinionator’s Tobin Harsaw said:

It’s a good point, but I suspect some will feel Mr. Drum shows a bit too much pleasure in making it.

Drum objects, rightly, to the roundabout, weaselly invocation of “some” as the move of someone who refuses to take ownership of his own words and claims, and rejects the claim that he was showing any pleasure in making the observation.  He was, in fact, making an observation about polling trends that he found interesting because they were, well, interesting and noteworthy.  It actually is interesting that opposition to the war is going up despite “improved” attitudes about progress in the war, because it seems to show that public opinion is not so easily swayed by a few months of positive trends after years of catastrophic mismanagement.  That’s a compliment to the American public, if you ask me. 

There is, of course, also the implication that war opponents must never derive satisfaction of any kind from the overwhelming support of the public for their position, but must always cower in the shadow of respectable elite opinion that says that war must go on indefinitely no matter what.  “Some” might call this view obnoxious, and I would be one of them.

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