The Pathetic Left

http://www.visualthesaurus.com/

Pathetic, as in:

"For green groups, President Barack Obama’s retreat on ozone standards is another reason to question how aggressively they want to support his reelection in 2012.  Even more bruising: the realization that they may not have much choice.

“We have no place else left to go but home,” said one official at a major environmental group, speaking on background Friday. “So the enviros come out looking weak once again because of today and we’re all screaming bloody murder.

“But you know what,” the official said. “At the end of the day, I don’t think the White House is unhappy to hear us complain.”

Thus the "environmental Left" is just as pitiable and pathetic as any other segment of the Left, for the same root causes:  

• The Left self-identifies as an abused hostage of the Democratic Party--one that has "no place else to go"; 
• Even while "screaming bloody murder" about its abuse at the hands of the Democrats, environmentalists and other segments of the Left clearly, repeatedly and loyally state their support for the party in the next election--thus guaranteeing that the abuse continues, because of; 
• The Democratic leadership's calculus that they gain political benefits from kicking their base in the teeth from time to time, and that no harm will ever come to them from doing so.

Until the Left identifies some way to effectively change their own behavior, none of this will change, regardless of how many branches of Govt. the Democrats control, or who the party leadership is.  This "I'm mad as hell at the Democrats but will always remain completely loyal to them" tactic is clearly not working.

Fareed Zakaria's Call for US Intervention in Libya

"If there is one lesson for U.S. foreign policy from the past 10 years" Fareed Zakaria recently wrote, "it is surely that military intervention can seem simple but is in fact a complex affair with the potential for unintended consequences."

Zakaria's article, "The Libyan Conundrum" appears to take precious little time to consider those possible consequences.   Instead, he uses the essay to urge Obama to take aggressive action. Left on its own, Zakaria argued, the Libyan opposition might well turn into an al Qaeda "area of strength."  His reasoning behind why Libya would be more or less vulnerable to al Qaeda influence than a host of other relevant countries including Tunisia, Sudan, Egypt, Yemen or Bahrain is not provided.

Zakaria should be familiar with unintended consequences. Here he is in 2003, just prior to the Iraq War, in an article sometimes cited as evidence of his journalistic "willingness to call out our government's missteps in Iraq:"

"In one respect, I believe that the Bush administration is right: this war will look better when it is over. The military campaign will probably be less difficult than many of Washington's opponents think. Most important, it will reveal the nature of Saddam's barbarous regime. Prisoners and political dissidents will tell stories of atrocities. Horrific documents will come to light. Weapons of mass destruction will be found. If done right, years from now people will remember above all that America helped rid Iraq of a totalitarian dictator."

All the above indeed did come to light, except for the WMDs of course.  But Zakaria expected those revelations to stem from Sadam's abuses.  Instead, they were our own, and are now too numerous, persistent and diverse to quantify.  Indeed, Nir Rosen recently guessed that the mountains of dead from our Iraq "missteps" will likely never be adequately documented.

But how about Zakaria's  missteps?  If the US government can be fairly accused of  screwing up Iraq beyond all recognition (which few would dispute), how can we possibly decouple that same damning assessment from journalists like Fareed Zakaria, who justified and approved that war?  And above all else, how can the American public and American policymakers continue to listen to pundits like Zakaria without remembering how badly wrong they were last time, just a few short years ago?