First Matt Yglesias suggests that any conservative who uses quotes from Ken Pollack’s piece in the Atlantic about intelligence failures almost surely must be doing so because of talking points received by the White House (For the record I think last week’s column was the third or fourth time I’ve used items from Pollacks article over the last couple years — because it’s a good article and Democrats keep coming back to the same cheap charges so it stays relevant).

He then quotes Pollack as saying:

For the most part, the problems discussed so far have more to do with the methods of Administration officials than with their motives, which were often misguided and dangerous, but were essentially well-intentioned. The one action for which I cannot hold Administration officials blameless is their distortion of intelligence estimates when making the public case for going to war.

And then Yglesias concludes:

Now look. Maybe you want to argue that Pollack doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Maybe the administration’s actions weren’t “misguided and dangerous.” Maybe they didn’t engage in “distortion of intelligence estimates” (or, in layman’s terms, “lying”) when talking to the public. But surely if there’s any justice on earth we can all agree that you can’t cite an article that calls Bush a liar as evidence that he did nothing wrong.

[Italics his]

Me: Now look. We could quibble and parse about whether or not Pollack actually calls Bush a ‘liar” in this piece or not. Pollack concedes that “none” of Bush’s statements were in fact “untrue” in the same article. But that’s beside the point, since I think a fair reading of the article does show that Pollack thinks Bush misled the country — as any fair-minded person would and could say about Pollack himself since his book on the war was the definitive brief in favor of invasion. But, everyone rightly assumes good faith on Pollack’s part while assumes maximum evil on Bush’s.

But what really bothers me is this hysteria about not being allowed to quote from the Pollack piece. Surely the existence of “any justice on earth” does not require me to agree with the opinions of an author merely because I am enlightened by some of the facts he offers. If Yglesias gets a statistic from one of my columns that he then uses in one of his own articles does the quantum level of justice on this planet fluctuate one way or another if he declines to agree with my conclusions? Is this really something we must all agree on? Come on. If you’re going to raise phantasms of White House driven conspiracies and charges of bad faith on part of conservative writers come up with something better than this.