Anyone who supported or cheered on this Iraq war or any of the administration's excesses should never be forgiven, even if they are sorry now. These are not dumb people. They are cunning people. They saw early on that the Presidential winds were blowing in favor of Democrats and so they decided to change tune and went against the war when it became convenient to do so.

And Ill tell you why we cant forgive these people: Vietnam. All these lessons were supposed to have been learned from Vietnam. They were to have been learned by everyone from the politicians to the journalists to the military leadership. Falsely going to war, playing the media, trumpeting false information, questioning the protesters patriotism etc. We forgave them back then. There should have been no excuse this time. How many more countries will have to be pillaged by us before people like Joel Klein decide enough is enough?

There will always be very few mea culpas. The establishment media worships power, and they will play to the power that rules at any given moment.

Glenn, do you remember when the Republicans took over congress after 40 years of Democratic rule and there was a few months were the media had trouble knowing how to act? They had not seen Republicans in power in congress and did not have their names in the old Rolodex. They learned fast; way too fast.

As it was then, so it is now. They will turn in to Democrat supporting lap doggies in no time. It is the job as they see it.

If the media are the "public memory", then we the public have a severe memory deficit disorder, which is exceedingly strange in this Age of Google, when anyone, including Joe Klein, can easily, without a visit to the library and poring through microfiche, can pull up what Joe Klein wrote four years ago.

I think perhaps part of the problem is the confusion (in Joe Klein's mind) about what he thinks, about what he thinks the public thinks, and what the public actually thinks. So e.g., he was impressed by Bush's "Mission Accomplished", he projected that thought on the public in 2003, and now he thinks the public thinks differently, and is representing that.

To add to the confusion (in Joe Klein's mind) is what he thinks his bosses want him to think.

Glenn: you are asking too much. These people rely on short institutional and human memories. The line up of people who knew all along that Bush was going to be a disaster has just grown so long that the queue is now extended behind the building. Only Mark Halperin is beating a drum for the Great Woodbrush Cutter. We all knew Bush was going to be a disaster.

Don't these people know they would get far more credibility from admitting they were wrong than from trying to obfuscate? When they don't, they just keep displaying their likeness to George W. Bush--attempting to get by on cluelessness, bluffing, and false or deluded certitude.

It's time to think about more than personal standing. Lack of accountability has eroded trust in politics, in media, and now in the economic sector. The only good that can come out of it--one hopes--is that the general public will no longer by the Friedman ideology that the unregulated market magically rewards the most competent and assigns equitable value to "talent." The rationale for outrageous compensation for CEOs and CFOs was that these individuals alone had the exceptional qualities to produce wealth and were taking the risks. In reality they were guided by wish and fantasy, mixed in with a heaping of bad faith.

For me I thought Bill Pullman, fixing his steely gaze on the objecting general and saying "I'm also a fighter pilot!" was the weakest shit I ever saw! The aliens were more believable than the human acting in that movie. But I guess what made me guffaw, spewing popcorn at the pure blatant cheesiness of it, made Joe Klein think it was really cool. So obviously his judgment is deeply flawed.

People who regret their mistakes and learn from them should be welcomed and encouraged. But a vital aspect of what happened over the last eight years is the role the media -- our leading media stars -- played in glorifying and venerating George Bush, and that can't be re-written or forgotten.

Truly learning from one's mistakes -- as opposed to wet-finger-in-the-air abandoment of previously revered leaders when they are revealed as failures and lose their power -- requires, at the very least, an acknowledgment of one's own role in what happened.

On the first thread yesterday, I mentioned that I thought that current American culture seems too easily to buy into the myth of redemption. As Glenn points out above, there are indeed contributions to be made by those who make mistakes, learn from them, and then go on to incorporate the lesson in moving ahead.

Competing with the ability to accomplish a true Southern Baptist style "re-dedication" is that George W. Bush himself perfected the art form of refusing to acknowledge errors. Again, as Glenn points out, in the rush to venerate Bush after the fall of Baghdad, the media took on many of his worst attributes. Joe Klein has completely incorporated Bush's inability to recognize error. It's too bad for him (as Amity would say) that he couldn't scrub those pesky internets of his earlier, now inoperative, writings.

Klein would have earned a significant amount of respect by digging out the passages Glenn highlights and saying something to the effect of "Boy was I a buffoon to think that! Please forgive me for getting caught up in the moment and I will try to have a bit more perspective as I move ahead." He then could have put forward his current observations on Bush without claiming to have always felt that way.

Two points,

To try and give Klien the benefit of the doubt; surely the image on the day it happened was very powerful and meant one thing, but as the weeks and months and eventually years rolled by the image became another thing and frankly absurd.

In other words, the image is affected by the perspective of time...

Second point - many journalists simply haven't adjusted to the fact we all have a complete and instantly accessible cuttings library now. It means their old evasions and reinterpretations of history are much easier to expose. in turn this means they are being brought down several pegs, and it's only human to dislike that, and perhaps be in denial about it.