PRESTOPUNDIT -- "It's a team sport, baby!"

Here's what I thought after listening to the Chris Hedges' commencement address

such a speech needs to persuade. It needs to draw the audience close, make eye contact. Crack a joke, wax colloquial, opine a bit, then bring it all back to the grads. Pat them on the back, remind them that the process of learning has just begun, warn them against cant of any sort, and give them a closing that wraps this extraordinary day up in one sweet smart line they can take with them for the hard years to come.

What did he do? He cracked the mike, and said I have come to talk about war, and empire. You could just hear the shoulders sag: oh man. It's Mr. Big Wet Pillow fingering his Vietnamese worry-beads. As if we haven't heard this for the last four years.

As I've been saying for months here: it's not the dissent that bothers me - please! Dissent! Carp, snipe, poke, hammer away; that's essential. But there's a difference between "our failure to find WMD raises troubling questions about our prewar intelligence" and "Chimpy lied to get his hands on the oiiiilll." Hedges appeared to be one of those critics who presumed that everyone in the audience was an uncritical victim of cable-TV agitprop, and no one had ever paused to consider that war was harsh work. Everyone needed 50 ccs of RAW TRUTH, STAT to wake them from their comfy comas.

It's LILEKS - The Bleat of course, but that's what I thought too. Honest.

Posted by Greg Ransom