There is something truly sad/pathetic about a man like the DLC's Will Marshall. He spent the last decade telling Democrats how they should go about supporting a war in Iraq and how that would be a good political and national security strategy. Now, I kid you not, he is out there with a perfectly straight face proposing "strategy" for Democrats to go about opposing the war in Iraq (you will notice most of his article is telling them how to look like they oppose the war without actually opposing the war). You would think that after pushing such a monumentally failed strategy of supporting the war for so long would make a person like Marshall stop pretending publicly to be a "strategist" like he still does. I mean, the American Heritage Dictionary defines the word "strategist" as "one who is skilled in strategy" - and I'm sorry, but someone who told Democrats to support the Iraq War - either for national security reasons or for political reasons - is not someone who "is skilled in strategy" in either area.
Clearly, a person like Marshall had no sense of self-awareness - this is a man who after all of this, is actually entitling his articles "strategy memos" and continuing to pretend to know what he's talking about - as if he didn't get his area of "expertise" totally, completely and wildly wrong in the worst most public way; as if, in fact, no one should even think for a moment that he was anything but an amazingly strategic expert. It's as comedic/sad as if the captain of the Exxon Valdez had walked off the ship immediately after the disaster and started flacking himself to magazine edtiors and cable talk show bookers as the nation's leading expert on oceanic navigation.
Of course, there are always going to be truly insane people like Marshall - people who have utterly lost all touch with reality (these people tend to need teams of doctors working around the clock in mental institutions to get them back to Earth - but in politics they are called "strategists" and "experts" and rewarded with six-figure salaries). But you would think, at the absolute minimum, publications would stop printing this kind of person's rants and newspapers would stop quoting him as an "expert" because empirically he has no credibility at all.
But then if you thought any of these normal thoughts, you would forget about the class of professional elites in Washington - a circle of people who seem to sense not even the slightest pang of self-doubt when they publicly embarrass themselves and damage this country in the process. These people are superhuman in the sense that they can make complete fools of themselves and then turn right around and, with a straight face, tell everyone what an expert they are. And for this, they are actually rewarded with riches, both financial and political. As Radar Magazine shows, they are kept on the payrolls of think tanks and newspaper op-ed pages, they appear as Serious Guests on cable television shows, and they are given a glossy home by the New Republic - a magazine which seems willing to exclusively reward middle-aged writers who never served in the military and yet who are devoted to demanding the reckless deployment of our military for ideological pursuits a la Iraq.
Really - logic would dictate think that after what we've been through in the last four years a bloviator like Marshall - who is literally paid ONLY to be an "expert" and a "strategist" - would be busy looking for work in a different profession, because he had clearly been so intellectually unable to actually perform the most basic functions of an actual "expert" or a "strategist." Similarly, you would think organizations like the DLC would be shutting down and magazines like the New Republic would be boarded up, too embarrassed to continue spewing their drivel.
But sadly, logic is not in abundance in our nation's capital these days. That's exactly why we got into the Iraq War in the first place, and it is exactly why our country faces such enormous challenges today: because our government is seated in the place where logic no longer exists.