Bipartisan support? Who cares?

“In Washington, sometimes it’s preferable to be wrong in a group than to be right alone. Nothing demonstrates the triumph of this truism better than the release... of the final Iraq Study Group report. The commission’s chairman, James A. Baker III, could not have been more obvious if he had used hand puppets to illustrate what he thought was most important about this supposedly momentous occasion: the fact that all the report’s authors actually agree with its contents. Their product, Baker gushed, is ‘the only recommended approach that will enjoy, in our opinion, complete bipartisan support, at least from the 10 people that you see up here.’ Whoop-de-do. No one in the media was sufficiently motivated to ask the emperors why they had no clothes on, or to raise the simple question, ‘Who cares?’ Instead, viewers at home (all three broadcast networks broke in to cover the ‘news’ live) watched as one commission member after another grew misty-eyed over their own statesmanship. Former Clinton Chief of Staff Leon Panetta waxed lyrical about how this document represented ‘one last chance at unifying this country on this war.’ Heads sagely nodded at the relentless self-adulation of commissioners who put their ‘partisan differences’ behind them in the spirit of unanimity, unity, bipartisanship, comity, handholding and all around mutual respect and love."

-- Jonah Goldberg