No matter how many times Establishment pundits and politicians contradict themselves and push policy prescriptions that then fall flat on their face, the sheer audacity of these people to continue puffing out their chests as "experts" never ceases to amaze. It's positively incredible, really -- only in politics (and perhaps economics) can someone embrace brazen hypocrisy, make high-profile predictions that end up being wildly off the mark and then not only keep their job, but continue to be billed -- and to bill themselves -- as a guru.
The most high-profile example of this these days is Peter Beinart of the New Republic. He is running around promoting himself as the Democratic Party's visionary leader on foreign policy -- sententiously berating the Democratic Party for not telling America "what their vision is" on foreign policy.
Beinart, you may recall, is one of the Washington pundits who most loudly echoed the Bush administration's push for war in Iraq. "If the Democratic Party becomes the anti-war-with-Iraq party...we really will no longer have a 50-50 nation, we'll have a 60-40 Republican nation," Beinart declared on Fox News in 2002. "The Democrats will be in a kind of McGovernite wilderness for a generation." He was, of course, about as far off the mark as one can get. Today, polls consistently show that Iraq has been a major factor in the decimation of President Bush's approval ratings. And it is no secret that one of the major reasons Democrats haven't done a better job of capitalizing on those poor numbers is because they have refused to support getting us out of Iraq.
But bad predictions are nothing when Beinart's subsequent attacks came. The Washington Post wrote the month before the invasion in 2003 that "Beinart is a full-fledged, talon-baring hawk on Iraq, a stance that has led him to assail, among others, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.)." Beinart specifically "chided Kerry for making anti-war noises after voting to support action against Saddam Hussein, saying Kerry's presidential candidacy 'is doomed to fail if Kerry keeps speaking so dishonestly about Iraq.'" In the New Republic, Beinart attacked Kerry for "think[ing] he can have it both ways on the war."
Beinart, of course, was certainly right that Kerry's equivocation on the war hurt him in 2004. And in that same New Republic piece, he rightly said that Democrats need "clarity and direction" on foreign policy -- with us expected to believe that Beinart provides that.
Yet, as Beinart now uses his new book to champion himself as a voice of clarity on foreign policy, we are expected to forget that the media voice that has most aggressively tried to "have it both ways" on the war and who has peddled the most poisonous duplicity when it comes to foreign policy is none other than Peter Beinart.
Here's what the Atlantic Monthly now reports, essentially stripping Beinart naked and proclaiming "The Emperor has no clothes":
"Like many Democrats of his ilk, Beinart initially supported the intervention in Iraq, believing that bringing down a WMD-wielding, genocidal dictator was in the tradition of liberal interventionism. He has since changed his mind, however."
Let's review this one more time just to understand what kind of chutzpah is really at work here -- a chutzpah so laughable in its egotism that it's almost hard to fathom. The very same pundit who is running around with a new book promoting himself as a model if intellectual integrity/courage and demanding Democrats reflexively embrace neoconservative hawkisness in the name of having a "vision" is the same guy who led the charge for war in Iraq, berated Democrats who criticized the war, yet now has quietly decided to change his mind on the whole affair, joining in criticizing the Bush administration for the war in Iraq that he himself originally promoted. I would say this is as ridiculous as a kleptomaniac telling people not to steal -- but that would be an insult to criminals, as the brazenness of Beinart's behavior is even more disgusting.
And yet, incredibly, Beinart's hypocrisy doesn't stop at the war. In his New York Times piece this weekend, Beinart says liberals must make their international policy "a struggle not merely for democracy but for economic opportunity as well, in the belief that the former required the latter to survived." Again, he's not wrong -- but this is coming from a guy who has used his perch at the New Republic to aggressively attack progressives who have long been making this exact point.
As just one example, in 2001 Beinart used the 9/11 disaster as an excuse to attack those who were considering protesting the IMF's wealth-stratifying policies at the IMF's meetings in Washington. Beinart said that if folks followed through on their planned marches, they will "have joined the terrorists in a united front" (This came from the same Beinart who a few years later piously wrote that a decent person should "not accuse his opponent of assisting terrorists"). He claimed that protestors against corporate-written trade and international economic policies were anti-American, and that they should simply shut their mouths because "domestic political dissent is immoral without a prior statement of national solidarity." Now, though, we're simply expected to believe that Beinart is a visionary leader pushing for fairer international economic policies.
Beinart continues to be promoted by the Beltway media as a "centrist" -- despite the fact that his well-documented positions have long been way outside the mainstream of public opinion. That's not surprising -- he is a creature of the out-of-touch elites whose favor he seeks and a mouthpiece for the insulated Establishment whose acceptance he craves. Put another way, he is a baby Tom Friedman -- a person so full of himself, so unconcerned with actual facts, so disdainful of the public's intellect and so personally disconnected from the bullet-torn, blood-splattered consequences of the zombie-ish hawkishness that he preaches that he has positively no problem contradicting himself and then recontradicting himself -- all while demanding consistency, all while labeling himself an expert, and all while pushing clearly misguided foreign policy snake oil.
You want to know why Americans feel so disconnected from the political discourse in their country (and also why the New Republic's circulation has dropped precipitously in recent years)? It is because the media Establishment gives people like Peter Beinart such a loud megaphone, regardless of how totally out of touch he is. Similarly, you want to know why Democrats have lost elections on foreign policy issues? It is because many high-profile Washington Democrats have ignored the hard facts, their constituents and real convictions and instead used the hypocrisy of Peter Beinart as a political roadmap rather than a laugh-out-loud punchline. And no matter how much revisionism Beinart now engages in to try to promote himself and mask his embarrasing record, the facts are clear: Peter Beinart has no clothes.