let the Beltway games begin

Andrew Sullivan is nostalgic for the McCarthy years, and he thinks William Kristol should be the first one made to account for his errors:

But when you’re this prominent a war-backer and you get things this wrong on a subject this important, don’t you think a smidgen of self-criticism or self-analysis could be in order? (I’m omitting the fact that the WMD casus belli Kristol also asserted as fact was a total chimera, but given the number of Kristol’s errors, this now seems small beer). …

It seems to me that we demand accountability from our politicians and we should demand accountability from our intellectuals. Not that they always get things right - but that they give a full accounting when they are wrong. Instead we reward and celebrate those who not only get things wrong - Kristol and Rove now have prominent columns in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal - but those who have never taken personal responsibility for their own mistakes. Until we purge all these tendencies from Washington, we will not learn from history and we will keep repeating it.

Somehow I doubt that Sullivan’s idea to put the neocons to the screws will get very far. But the urge to purge, to punish, to flay the evil-doers in our midst, to exorcise the demons, reminds me of this movie.

Here’s something Sullivan ought to ponder—that some of those who were purged in this country didn’t weep for themselves; they took it on the chin:

In spite of the subsequent loss of Trumbo’s livelihood and stature (”He probably was the best writer of that time,” Kirk Douglas offers, not inaccurately, in an interview), not to mention the aftereffects of a seminomadic existence with his family and the injustice of seeing his work produced under assumed names, “Trumbo” clearly proves that, if nothing else, its subject endured the deprivations of the blacklist with more wit than any of the rest of the writers in the original Hollywood Ten.

“Get ready to become nobody” is how Trumbo describes the process of divestiture that followed his HUAC adventure.

But since he’s the punitive sort and because the stakes are so very high, perhaps Sullivan has more exquisite tortures in mind for his neocon victims, ways to force them to recant and repent? Waterboarding, perhaps? I hear it’s all the rage.