The Sweet Taste of Straw

Here's a good one. Leon Wieseltier takes on liberals who've been misinterpreting Reinhold Niebuhr and manages to offer quotations from zero lliberals who actually adhere to the misinterpretation that's alleged at hand. Names of said liberals? No.

I mean, seriously, is there anybody out there who thinks that the problem with Bush's foreign policy is that he has a bad domestic policy? Wieseltier's quite right to term that an odd point of view to take up, and not a very sound reading of Neibuhr, but it's such an odd point of view that nobody adheres to it. At any rate, I certainly grow tired of these incessant efforts to wield Brent Scowcroft as a bludgeon against liberal hawks' liberal critics. To be sure, there were problems with Scowcroft's approach to world affairs, to wit a seeming indifference to the suffering of foreigners. That said, when you see liberals say something nice about Scowcroft or Scowcroftish ideas they're clearly talking about his ideas on a different subject, namely the inadvisability of launching unilateral preventative wars and the availability of alternative methods of coping with medium-sized hostile states.