Punditry and Anti-Punditry

Ah, the New York Times. The only material in the entire universe that can withstand the massive release of energy caused when punditry and anti-punditry collide. It's like the dilithium crystal of newsprint. Today's example is Bob Herbert's column:

You can run through all the wildly varying rationales for this [Iraq] war: the weapons of mass destruction (that were never found), the need to remove the unmitigated evil of Saddam (whom we had once cozied up to), the connection to Al Qaeda (which was bogus), and one of President Bush's favorites, the need to fight the terrorists "over there" so we won't have to fight them here at home.

All the rationales have to genuflect before "The Prize," which was the title of Mr. Yergin's Pulitzer-Prize-winning book.

It's the oil, stupid.

Holy hell!! To see such virulent anti-Americanism on the pages of the Paper of Record, no less! Meanwhile, of course, Tom Friedman has (since the beginning of this sorry catastrophe) maintained that the war had nothing to do with oil. Both share the same space (the NYT op-ed page) and yet, miraculously, the streets of New York are not a smoking crater from what should be a case of mutual annihilation. I'm sure that particle physicists from all over the world will be streaming in to New York to investigate this phenomenon.

More importantly, it's really nice to see the mainstream media acknowledge what the sentient have known for three years - any way with Iraq was going to be at least partly about oil.