Blogging on the March

OK, so I've just come across Matt Yglesias' TAPPED piece on the back-and-forth over the march, and it doesn't change my mind at all (boy, that may just be the perfect blog sentence right there). As I wrote below, it seems to me that those who oppose the march object more to its character than its content. So sure enough, Matt calls it a "shindig," to make sure everyone's smelling patchouli, and he points out that hawkish New Republicans criticize the march to sidestep criticisms of their own position.

But of course, there's nothing anti-Iraq war Americans can do to change TNR's mind. TNR believes in this war (verb chosen carefully) just as surely as Powerline and Rush. TNR will use any event, including afternoon rain, to argue that their position on Iraq was and is right, and that the other side consists of unreconstructed hippies and antisemites. Wake me up when Marty Peretz retires.

The one sound point in Matt's piece is that conservatives and hawks like the Cato and Hudson Institutes are starting to change position, and we on the anti-war side need to make those links. And we do. But if he thinks that a joint press conference of Juan Cole and Larry Odom is going to dominate a news cycle, well, maybe he needs to talk to someone who doesn't work for a political weekly.