PrintMarch 19, 2013
World Opinion: Getting it Wrong
Before he became a China scholar, our friend Steve Mosher was an engineer. He likes to say that if you are an engineer whose bridges collapse or whose highways break up, you're likely to lose your Professional Engineer's license. But if you are a social scientist, or a history professor and all your ideas collapse under the weight of evidence, you get tenure. And if you are a liberal journalist who gets it all spectacularly wrong, you get promoted.
Andrew Sullivan is a case in point. He waxed lyrical about the Advent of Barack Obama. Even better than the Age of Aquarius, the Age of Obama would stop terrorists dead in their tracks. Here's a famous paragraph of Andrew Sullivan in full gush mode:
Consider this hypothetical. It's November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man -- Barack Hussein Obama -- is the new face of America. In one simple image, America's soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose...(Read Full Article)
