Robert Wright

It's a paradoxical conception of sin: though it originates in a fire-and-brimstone mentality, it can actually lead to a certain kind of tolerance of, or at least sympathy for, wrongdoers. In fact, I think it could lead people who ponder it to be more sympathetic toward Edwards.

You might call this view of sin the "slippery slope" view. According to the southern Baptist doctrine that prevailed when I was a kid, it was wrong to do even modestly adventurous things like go to a dance or drink a drop of alcohol (though my father had the occasional beer and my sisters went to high school dances). The logic was that, harmless as something like dancing might seem, one thing leads to another. Dancing leads to intimate contact between unmarried people, and--especially if alcohol gets mixed in--the next thing you know the unmarried people are doing something they're not supposed to do.

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More than 20 interviews conducted in Yemen by the Post--with government officials, tribal leaders, and others--revealed "a strong shift in sentiment toward militants affiliated with the transnational network's most active wing, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula or AQAP." Since 2009, when Obama is first known to have authorized drone strikes in Yemen, the number of core AQAP members has more than doubled, growing from around 300 to at least 700. That's not the direction in which the drone strikes were supposed to move the numbers.

A Yemeni human rights worker described the dynamic at play: "The drones are killing al-Qaeda leaders, but they are also turning them into heroes."

The New York Times piece--a long, deeply reported, and somewhat unsettling article about how the Obama administration decides who to kill via drone--concurred with the Post on the value al Qaeda recruiters are getting out of drone strikes, and also answered the riddle this poses: If the strikes have such a big downside, why has President Obama accelerated their use, first in Pakistan, then in Yemen?

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Actually, to say Hayes was "criticized" is to make the blowback sound more cerebral than it was. Ann Coulter tweeted, "Chris Hayes 'Uncomfortable' Calling Fallen Military 'Heroes' -- Marines respond by protecting his right to menstruate." Kurt Schlicter at Breitbart.com said Hayes "sounds like one of my commie grad students trying to impress credulous freshman girls."

Hayes said he was sorry, which was no doubt a wiser course than mounting a defense of his remarks. But I think the point he was making deserves its day in court.

Before I present a (qualified) defense of it, I want to say that my father was a career army officer, so I grew up amid military culture and have true affection for it and great respect for people who make military service their career. If anything I say below seems not to reflect those attitudes, I can only say that my goal is to decrease the number of soldiers who die needlessly in the future.

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