Here’s the thing: I’ve met Michael Barone. I know that he’s smart. Frighteningly so, in fact. And I know that he pays attention to details, in ways that usually startle the living life out of people who aren’t used to it. In other words, this is an aware guy that we’re talking about.

So why the surprise, here?

All of which brings to mind the report of a conservative blogger who watched George W. Bush’s 2005 inaugural speech with a group of liberals. Every time Bush called for spreading freedom and democracy around the world, the crowd guffawed and groaned and jeered. For them, evidently, Bush was a figure of fun, and his calls for democracy and human rights laughable. The same people who decried his supposed authoritarian rule at home had nothing but contempt for his call for freedom and democracy abroad.

Beneath this stated contempt is, I think, something in the nature of secret guilt. Or rather, anger at the notion that Bush had stolen the issues of human rights and democracy from the liberals.

The desire to oppose the Iraq war root and branch, to denounce every aspect of it, imposed a duty to dismiss as laughable Bush’s stated objective — set out eloquently before the decision to take military action as well as after it — of advancing democracy in the Middle East. A duty to side with those, like the National Intelligence Council nominee, who have long held that governance in the style of Saudi Arabia or Syria is the best that can be hoped for in that region, and the best for all concerned. A duty to dismiss with contempt, or simply to ignore, the rather remarkable strides of the Iraqis themselves made after enduring decades of brutal tyranny.

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The quote is from Spider Robinson’s short story “Unnatural Causes” (found in his first Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon story collection, known as, well, Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon), and we’ll be revisiting it in a moment. But first: pro-torture pro-Obama bloggers Glenn Greenwald and Andrew Sullivan have decided that they are very unhappy about Obama’s decision to maintain the Bush administration’s policy of “asserting a broad “state secrets” privilege to shield from disclosure information related to the CIA’s rendition program.” You may find a link to Greenwald’s table-pounding via Glenn Reynolds, and one to Sullivan’s via Ace of Spades: no offense to either Glenn or Ace, but I’d rather not track the filth that they linked to directly into my nice, clean website.

And it is filth, because if you look at either pro-torture pro-Obama blogger, you’ll see that neither has done anything except pound on the table. And they won’t, either. Their outrage is rather finely tuned.

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