I’ve been fairly hard on Anne Applebaum over the past few years, finding her if not actually neo-con then certainly neo-con-ish, tending to treat all foreign policy issues as a matter of toughness and will. “If we just stand up to the Russians/Taliban/Iranians/etc. then we’ll win!” The question of whether it’s worth traveling half-way around the world to spend half a trillion dollars to rain murder and destruction on our fellow human beings, alienating and enraging the survivors in the process, just to prove that we’re “right” never seems to come up.
But in today’s Wash Post Anne gives poor John McCain a well-measured and well-deserved beatdown for his painful deterioration in the pursuit of power over the past year. Unlike Anne, I was never a McCain fan, who, to my mind, was more devoted to his press clippings than the First Amendment, but Anne chronicles his long-term decline with merciless accuracy. She also points out, as many do not, the massive hypocrisy of small-town gal Sarah Palin, who promises both lower taxes and bigger subsidies.
Meanwhile, Anne’s right-hand page neighbor, Richard Cohen, lowers the beam on Beltway Palinites William Kristol, Fred Barnes, Rich Lowry, Dick Morris and “my Post colleague” Michael Gerson. I won’t bother to quote Cohen’s column, because it deserves to be read in toto. Journalists love to stick it to their colleagues and Cohen here wields the stilleto with perfect punctilio. And just a couple of months ago I said the guy had no penis!
