MORE RE: PRE-WAR INTELLIGENCE

I think the debate about the Iraq war is the most telling regarding the state of politics today. I saw the movie Capote last week in which Phillip Seymour Hoffman did a brilliant job recreating the famous writer and author of In Cold Blood, which I am now reading. The movie made me think that, here's this man who had become this gay New York writer living during a war era in 1960 and is clearly on you know what side of the fence. The political fence, that is. But how much would he have in common with today's leftists such as George Soros, Michael Moore, Barbara Boxer or Markos Mitsouksis?

Granted, Capote lived in a pre-Kennedy, pre-Watergate age, before the butterfly had been crushed upon the wheel. But, liberalism used to be about idealism and racial tolernce. Liberalism of this day and age is about brutality and pummelling anyone who refuses to sip when the cup is placed before them.

This is all borne out in the debate over the Iraq War, because liberals today assume the worst about the opposition: the evidence, even to someone like myself who's never been a big proponent of this war, shows, at best, that there was conflicting information regarding whether Saddam had WMD, but certainly enough to make a rational conclusion at the time that Saddam had WMD. But that's a far cry from saying that there was clearly no WMD evidence, which is the basis for the Left's droning cry that "Bush lied." Plenty of other wars have historically been based upon a mistake of fact. However, rationality on the Left is a forgotten virtue, left behind in Capote's era.