The Omniscience of Hindsight

What a strange argument Glenn Greewald makes.

The predominant attribute of American elites is a refusal to take responsibility for any failures. The favored tactic for accomplishing this evasion is the "nobody-could-have-known" excuse. Each time something awful occurs -- the 9/11 attack, the Iraq War, the financial crisis, the breaking of levees in New Orleans, the general ineptitude and lawlessness of the Bush administration -- one is subjected to an endless stream of excuse-making from those responsible, insisting that there was no way they "could have known" what was to happen: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile," Condoleezza Rice infamously said on May 16, 2002, despite multiple FBI and intelligence documents warning of exactly that. One finds identical excuses for each contemporary American disaster. Robert Gibbs just invoked the same false excuse: that "nobody" knew the depth of the financial and unemployment crisis early last year.

Note that nowhere does he claim that he or any of his fellow lefties knew any of these things, nor does he mention the lapse of the Clinton administration to do anything serious about Al Qaeda, despite an escalating series of acts of war against American troops, embassies and the USS Cole.

The point here is that a lot of people were worried about further attacks by bin Laden's organization. A lot of people predicted the current disastrous results of the last 18 months of irresponsible spending and expansions of government, as evidenced the rise of the Tea Party movement motivated by that exact fear. While Greenwald and his cohorts have denied, mocked and spewed bile and accusations, the ranks of the movement grew and the administration and Congress ignored the rising opposition to their overweening agenda. Who could have known it would lead to this debacle? Certainly not Greenwald.

Recriminations like this are natural, but his litany goes back over the past decade. At some point, mature people, particularly those focused on dealing with problems rather than litigating them ad infinitum, have to act based on the facts as they are. Part of governing and politics is the fact that there will always be alternate claims about what happened, why, what could or should have been done to prevent it and most importantly, what should be done about it now. The decision our founders made is to leave these decisions to the political process. It's endlessly frustrating when you're sure the people are making a big mistake, but as Kipling wrote,

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

you might have grown up and become a decent leader.