SALON

Andrew Sullivan

Friday, Mar 7, 2003 11:34 PM UTC

Idiocy of the week

What do you call a major U.S. newspaper columnist who admits pandering to her readers? Hint: It's not "journalist."

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No one should criticize a columnist who changes his or her mind. It’s a sign of intellectual strength to be able to correct oneself, to say where one got it wrong and why. If you write a column every week — let alone a thousand words daily on a blog — the chances that you will get things wrong, regret some things you wrote, or simply change your mind in the slipstream of current events are extremely high. But what Mary McGrory has just done in the Washington Post is something quite different.

A month ago, she avowed that she had been finally convinced by Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations that Saddam had to be stopped. She was impressed, as we all were, by the mountain of evidence of Saddam’s duplicity and malevolence. “I don’t know how the United Nations felt about Colin Powell’s ‘J’accuse’ speech against Saddam Hussein,” she wrote. “I can only say that he persuaded me, and I was as tough as France to convince.” She concluded: “I wasn’t so sure about the al Qaeda connection. But I had heard enough to know that Saddam Hussein, with his stockpiles of nerve gas and death-dealing chemicals, is more of a menace than I had thought. I’m not ready for war yet. But Colin Powell has convinced me that it might be the only way to stop a fiend, and that if we do go, there is reason.”

But now she says she’s changed her mind.

Why? You can read her column closely and still not see the reason. She now says: “I did not make it clear enough that while I believed what Colin Powell told me about Saddam Hussein’s poison collection, I was not convinced that war was the answer. I guess I took it for granted that you would know what I meant.” That makes no sense. She wrote clearly in her first column that “I’m not ready for war yet.” How difficult is that to misinterpret? She then explains that “I did not have the benefit of the informed criticism that followed. The Post’s Walter Pincus wrote a summation of the weakest link in Powell’s speech, the al Qaeda connection. Lately, the coming conflict is presented seamlessly as ‘a war against Iraq and terrorism.’” Again this makes no sense. In her original column, she specifically stayed skeptical about the Qaida-Iraq connection. And the administration’s current pro-war position is almost entirely based on U.N. Resolution 1441.

And then she tells us the real reason: “I did something that George Bush never does: I offended my base. You see how sorry I am. I hope now that all is forgiven and that I can come home again.” In other words, the reason she has changed her mind about whether Saddam really is in violation of Resolution 1441 is that she offended her loyal left-liberal readership.

This must be one of the most astonishing admissions by an opinion journalist in a very long time. She is not, she tells us, a free-thinker, trying to make sense of the world around her as best she can. She isn’t a writer devoted to her own principles and applying them to the chaotic scene of world politics. She is a political hack with a constituency she has to please. Deviation from giving her “base” what it wants is “failure” in her journalism. It’s useful, I guess, to see the real motives behind someone claiming to be a writer. But McGrory has just declared that she isn’t a writer — she is in fact the antithesis of one: an apparatchik, a phony and a propagandist.

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  • Lisa Montgomery embraces her nephew Thursday after a tornado tore apart her home in Cleburne, Texas. The twister killed six people and destroyed entire swaths of the North Texas town.
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  • Jack McMahon, the defense attorney for abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell, speaks outside the Criminal Justice Center in Philadelphia Tuesday. His client was convicted of killing three babies in his clinic, and will serve multiple life sentences.
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  • Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., flanked by a grouper-eyed Michele Bachmann, addresses the IRS' admission that it targeted Tea Party groups in advance of the 2012 election. In an op-ed for CNN Thursday, the Kentucky senator slammed the president for his faux outrage.
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  • Ousted IRS chief Steven Miller is sworn in on Capitol Hill Friday. Miller testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on the extra scrutiny the agency gave conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status.
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  • Attorney General Eric Holder pauses as he testifies on Capitol Hill before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday. Holder is under fire, among other things, for the Justice Department's gathering of phone records at the Associated Press.
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  • Major Tom to ground control: On Sunday astronaut Chris Hadfield recorded the first music video from space, a cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity."
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  • When it rains it pours. President Barack Obama speaks during a news conference Thursday with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, inexplicably inspiring an #umbrellagate Twitter meme.
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