The mother of invention

Faced with an unending flood of nonsense and partisan hackery from Weekly Standard blogger Michael Goldfarb, Julian Sanchez has contrived an ingenious labor-saving device: Goldfarb’s hackiest post of the day will be henceforth recognized with a link in the form of a photo of a horse-drawn Hackney cab, sans commentary. I’m tempted to come up with some sort of similar visual shorthand for whenever I link to something involving Sean Hannity, but none of the images that came to mind had the nostalgic charm of the Hackney cab, and most of them would probably violate Blogger's terms of service.

The post Sanchez links to is primarily about Barrack Obama. In criticizing Obama’s domestic agenda, Goldfarb remarks:

Again, Obama believes government can do anything...except secure victory, stability, and democracy in Iraq.

It's amusing how Goldfarb (rightly) faults Obama for his faith in the state to solve all sorts of problems at home, in a peaceful and prosperous country- and then immediately expresses his own faith in that same state to solve all sorts of even bigger problems in an impoverished, violence-wracked foreign culture on the other side of the planet. A lot of ideologies require some degree of doublethink to accept, but it's not usually this blatant. It's a miracle that the cognitive dissonance hasn't caused some sort of Scanners-style cranial explosion yet.