The Non-Epiphany Epiphany

Thomas Sowell gets off the bus. A reader comments:

I generally like Thomas Sowell and find a great deal of well and simply stated wisdom in his columns. He has now joined the ranks of the Peggy Noonan types, who have quietly but decisively changed their tune without really acknowledging their complicity in the recent pro-war fervor. The linked column below, had it been written in February 2003 would confirm his conservative bona fides, but in September 2007?!? Where are the mea culpas? Where is the sense that he was wrong?  The detached, inclusive way the column is written ("we" this, "we" that: don't the "we" include people he would have labelled wackos or even traitors only months ago?), betrays an ongoing blindness that "we" are to blame and have indeed lost a great deal of credibility by not espousing these views not in 2007 but almost five years ago. 

Very few conservatives should write this kind of column today: George Will, yes; Pat Buchanan, obviously; Jeffrey Hart, certainly; Andrew Sullivan, yes because we have been able to follow his painful journey from fellow-Kool-aid imbiber to bruised, disillusioned and wiser Burkean; but Sowell, who has been part of the echo chamber on Iraq since the beginning without any sign of a slow journey to (self-)awareness. Hard to swallow.

I've given up hoping for intellectual accountability from most on the right. Taking responsibility for one's past views and actions is not apparently in the current conservative book of virtues.