All right, time for a little remedial blogging. It's for the integrity of the Archives--if August was a complete black hole, it would ruin the symmetry of things.

In the current issue of the American Prospect, Harold Meyerson looks at five major pundits (Hitchens, Friedman, Kristol, Krauthammer, Hanson) and tallies up their sins against reason, common sense, and journalistic integrity with respect to Iraq. It seems almost cruel, but if our political culture is going to survive and gain (regain?) some sense of health, then this is a needed addition to the record. And here is an excellent statement of how our elite opinion-meisters let us down:

They refused to hold the administration’s conduct of the war and the occupation to the ideals that they themselves professed, or simply to the standard of common sense. They abdicated their responsibilities as political intellectuals -- and, more elementally, as reliable empiricists.

Neglecting facts or rules of evidence is a grave offense in a writer. Holding that Truth is a false ideal and the facts are whatever Power wants them to be--that is the worst kind of nihilism. And that's what Republicans in the Bush era, and at least some of their enablers in the press, are guilty of.