As you may know, a while back I cowrote an article with my colleague Sam Rosenfeld called "The Incompetence Dodge." The subject was folks who supported the Iraq War, then came to recognize it was a disaster, and then came to blame its disastrous nature on the ineptitude of the Bush administration. This, we argue, is a mistake -- a dodge -- an effort to avoid culpability for the fact that the basic concept and premises of the war were mistaken.

As several readers have pointed out, we seem to be seeing a new variant of this as Israelis sour on Ehud Olmert in the wake of the Lebanon War. In this instance, I think the case against the "incompetence" theory is even clearer. Lots of people around the world suggested that Israel's campaign was ill-advised. And, to the best of my knowledge, absolutely none of us who said that made any reference to Olmert's competence or lack thereof in framing our critiques. Then the war turned out more-or-less exactly as the skeptics predicted . . . skeptics who had nothing to draw on but a general analysis of the situation.

Hey...so...my guest blogging at the TPM mothership is temporarily done, but I'll actually be back working that portfolio next week. Over the weekend, any blogging I get done will be here. The sad fact of the matter, however, is that I need to pack tomorrow and move on Sunday so posting may be pretty light in the scheme of things.

Is naming a restaurant Hitler's Cross worse than naming a bar KGB Bar? Discuss amongst yourselves.

Josh Bivens correctly notes that the extent to which public policy plays a role in pre-tax income inequality is probably going to have something to do with which sort of inequality we're talking about -- the top ten percent diverging from the bottom ninety, or the top 0.1 percent diverging from the bottom 99.9 percent. Meanwhile, I was sad to read this comment from Andrew Samwick on my theory that tax policy affects pre-tax income distribution:

I hadn't fully appreciated that a progressive tax system might be used to give lower-income workers a leg up in competing for the marginal unit of production. It remains an empirical question as to how important this might be over the last 25 years. I would have thought the effect to be small, compared to things like increasing global competition in product markets.

I would have thought that lots of people would have thought of that already. It doesn't seem like it should be too hard to model, right? Indeed, at first I thought I should be able to model it myself but actually I can't. Some of what I'm thinking, though, goes below.

This Richard Cohen column reads almost like a joke. It's 1938! It's 1938! Appeasement! Appeasement! Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer, at a minimum, pull this schtick off with a certain rhetorical flair. Cohen doesn't even seem to be paying attention. In-depth diavlogging discussion of the use and abuse of historical analogies here.

In general, I'm against these kinds of analogies. Marx and Hegel aside history does not, in fact, repeat. Analogies to 1938 are especially pernicious. Adolf Hitler is, obviously, a very noteworthy historical figure and WWII a noteworthy period in world history. This is precisely because the things that happened during them time were extreme, weird, and largely unprecedented they idea that they're constantly recurring or likely to recur is odd.

Iran is set to make a proposal on the nuclear front today, while I believe it's become popular in the wingnutosphere to believe that we'll see a massive Iran-backed terrorist attack today. A more reasonable -- though quite pessimistic -- take on US-Iranian relations is provided by Brian Ulrich's review of Ali Ansari's Confronting Iran.

Alan Brinkley's review of a new book on Lyndon Johnson touches, of course, on the ever-present "two Johnsons" theme -- "At his best, Lyndon Johnson was one of the greatest of all American presidents . . . [b]ut Johnson was not always at his best . . . [h]e was, paradoxically, at once one of America’s most successful presidents and one of its most conspicuous failures."

My friend, sometime colleague, etc. Mark Goldberg has a smart post up on the UN Dispatch blog about Darfur, and a last-ditch idea from Kofi Annan that might do some good if member states would back it.

Jay Matthews is writing about a very specific issue in the education policy field, but as Andrew Rotherham points out there's a general phenomenon here. Lots of journalism in America is done by and essentially for a very narrow socioeconomic slice of the country. That results in a lot of trend-style reporting which focuses exclusively on the goings-on of the sort of people likely to read the publication. That's okay, so far as it goes. Naturally, people who read Time are going to be disproportionately interested in the things that the sort of people who read Time are doing.

The trouble comes when attitudes and ideas shaped by that sort of reporting get displaced onto discussions about politics and public policy.