The Rolling Stone piece by Michael Hastings has some excellent color about McChrystal’s interactions with the troops and the rocket-fuel of those controversial quotes. Otherwise, it’s pretty lackluster and very anti-war. This is hilarious over-writing about McChrystal: “His slate-blue eyes have the unsettling ability to drill down when they lock on you. If you’ve f—-ed up or disappointed him, they can destroy your soul without the need for him to raise his voice.” Destroy your soul?

It takes a special brand of shamelessness to accuse someone of “over-writing” after having just seconds before described a series of significant quotes as “rocket-fuel.” This is doubly true when the shameless writer in question is perhaps best known for the following passage, which may qualify as the most worthless bit of commentary from the very 2008 election news cycle that so disgusted Hastings:

Palin too projects through the screen like crazy. I’m sure I’m not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, “Hey, I think she just winked at me.” And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can’t be learned; it’s either something you have or you don’t, and man, she’s got it.”

Incidentally, this telling bit of zeta-male-ish output was interspersed with several years of objections from Lowry and his associates to the effect that Obama’s fans were merely “starstruck” by a telegenic empty suit. More telling is Lowry’s dismissal of an extraordinarily important article as “anti-war.” I look forward to the point at which National Review, which remains an exceedingly Catholic entity, realizes that the Pope is also “anti-war” in this and most other contexts and thereby concludes that it would be shameful to continue to cast aspersions on others for holding views they tolerate in their beloved representative of God on Earth. I also look forward to being made Pope myself. I am a tremendous optimist for someone who has grown up amid the twilight of American competence. But now I am engaging in a bit of over-writing myself, for which I apologize to Mr. Lowry, fond admirer of little starbursts.

Now I shall retract my apology in the face of the following statement, delivered after Lowry had finally deigned to read the silly magazine that scooped his own:

I’ve now read the piece which—as you might expect—is very defeatist.

One might expect that any article which puts forth the plain facts of what is happening in a war that National Review and even a great many liberal pundits declared to have ended in victory some seven years ago might appear defeatist to the very people who have since been proven not just wrong, but ludicrously and repeatedly wrong, time and time again, on this very subject. It sounds defeatist because it describes a situation that has evolved into a slow and almost inevitable defeat by the initial standards of the very people who demanded it.

Speaking of “defeatism”—so clearly the exclusive province of radical liberals who wish to see the U.S. fail in its failed expeditions—let us, for no particular reason, take a look back at something National Review founder William Buckley wrote a few years ago:

One can’t doubt that the American objective in Iraq has failed.

Clearly this long-haired Buckley fellow is a defeatist and ought to be ignored. Perhaps he submitted the essay in question to Rolling Stone before running it in his own magazine? At any rate, this pronouncement that no one can doubt our failure in Iraq is rather strange, coming at a time when several of Buckley’s own writers remained amusingly hopeful that real victory was still attainable—as many of them still do today—but then the late fellow can be forgiven for not having at that point been in the habit of reading his own magazine. I myself am a subscriber and find myself constantly distracted by the ads, many of which are written to look like articles and which routinely conjure up dubious global financial entities in order to convince the publication’s readers to buy coins in exchange for some unspecified number of payments in order that they might also receive a free safe. Advertisers know their audience, naturally. But let me attempt to refute two more of Lowry’s commonplace objections without this time stopping to insult thousands of other people in the process: