A number of people were outraged over Jonah Goldberg's column calling for the CIA to assassinate Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange, but Glenn Greenwald has it right in that what makes the column even more reprehensible is that Goldberg actually stops short of doing so. He doesn't have the courage to actually call for Assange's death; he merely fantasizes about it occurring and suggests he wouldn't mind if it happened. As Greenwald writes, "tough-guy neocons love to beat their chest and demand action without having the courage to specify what they mean," almost as much as they enjoy defending torture and then splitting hairs over whether or not certain torture techniques qualify as torture -- the point being that monstrous acts are more easy to defend if one only alludes to them by implication and denies advocating for them in the first place.
Supposed centrist David Broder gave us another example of how to suggest something monstrous without actually taking responsibility for doing so in his Sunday column suggesting the U.S. threaten war with Iran to help the economy recover:
With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran's ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs. This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve.
He then says that's not what he's saying at all:
I am not suggesting, of course, that the president incite a war to get reelected. But the nation will rally around Obama because Iran is the greatest threat to the world in the young century. If he can confront this threat and contain Iran's nuclear ambitions, he will have made the world safer and may be regarded as one of the most successful presidents in history.
So after suggesting Obama use the threat of war with Iran to revive the U.S. economy and his own political fortunes, Broder denies doing it. He denies doing so because arbitrarily exploiting the potential death and suffering of thousands for political and economic gain is indefensible on its face, and he lacks the courage to defend it, so he tells you not to believe your lying eyes.
Why a third war would revive the economy where two have failed isn't a question Broder addresses, because he's led by his own ideological "centrism" to grope mindlessly for whatever partisan compromise is possible under the circumstances. The implication here is that Republicans can't actually be expected to take active measures to improve the economy, but the anti-partisan Broder simply can't bring himself to criticize them for this. Better to suggest a potential compromise that, while it could lead to untold suffering, has the benefit of forging a possible agreement between two American political parties.
I'm hard-pressed to think of a more dramatic recent example of how blind ideological commitment can lead to moral cretinism, but it's worth remembering for the next time someone suggests mere bipartisanship makes a political act worthwhile.
