Slate editor Jacob Weisberg got a test run in today’s New York Times Sunday Book Review. That makes two Slate writers now, Dahlia Lithwick and Weisberg, who’ve gotten pre-purchase tryouts from Slate’s leading suitor.

I swear on the enticing prospect of George W. Bush*’s political grave that I will quit reading both Slate and the Times if the latter give Mickey Kauss a tryout. Weisberg’s reviews aren’t bad, exactly, but he commits two unpardonable sins: dredging up what can only be an implanted memory that something akin to a real debate about invading Iraq occurred prior to the invasion rather than six months after it, and describing Andy Sullivan, Mickey Kaus and Tom Friedman — who is now recuperating in a rest home for shell-shocked pundits, thus providing Lithwick with her temporary Times op-ed page spot — as “shrewder commentators” than, among others, Eric Alterman.

Let’s face it: Kaus offers a mixture of Maureen Dowd’s tact and Bill Safire’s prescience. He’s wrong about shit all the time, and he’s wrong with an attitude. He was even wrong about the market for the Honda Element, basing his demographic analysis entirely on an epidemic of second childhoods among his neighbors.

Friedman’s shrewd commentary on the invasion devolved fairly rapidly from “we have to because it’ll liberate the Iraqis and transform the middle east” to “we have to because we have to smash something to show we’re a manly man among nations,” and ended with the plaintive statement that he was taking some time off to “step back and construct a better framework for myself to explain what’s going on out there,” which is another way of saying that his shrewd commentary was originating from a parallel universe. And Sullivan’s shrewd commentary is to be found only in the code secreted among his daily ramblings.

What all these shrewd guys have in common is that, along with Weisberg, they shrewdly supported the worst foreign policy blunder in US history while the hapless Alterman somehow managed to arrive at the correct conclusion that invading Iraq would be a really, really stupid thing to do. His sin, and that of the others Weisberg slams, isn’t a lack of shrewdness but rather being right about the invasion when all the honor roll kids were wrong.

The not-so-sub text of that conceit is that the guys who were wrong arrived at the wrong conclusion by virtue of their superior intellect, and are thus excused from any obligation to apologize for their superior stupidity, while people such as Alterman just guessed and therefore owe a debt to society for being right.

There is actually a third sin committed by Weisberg in his piece. He begins with the statement, “[A] YEAR ago, it was still possible to debate whether the phenomenon of Bush hating had taken on the virulent dimensions of Clinton loathing in the 1990′s. On the eve of the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, there’s no longer any argument. By any measure, Bush bashing is bigger.”

Ah, so it’s true: liberals have succumbed to the very brand of spittle-flecked, irrational hatred of Bush* that we so deplored in Clinton-haters.

Well, not exactly: after conflating the two behaviors up front, Weisberg repudiates his own lede a few hundred words later.

The right’s Clinton hating was largely personality-driven. Conservatives objected to the previous administration’s policies, to be sure, but what brought their blood to a low simmer was the sight of a man they deemed immoral, dishonest and manipulative (much in the way the left reacted to Nixon and Lyndon Johnson). Clinton’s success as president only made his enemies madder.

Bush’s opponents, by comparison, despise the substance of his presidency. They may light on such irritants as the President’s smirk, his sense of entitlement, his laziness, his verbal incoherence** or his righteous dunderheadness. But these are largely stand-ins for their opposition to the Bush administration’s catastrophically unplanned occupation of Iraq, its self-defeating alienation of allies, its favoritism toward the rich and the energy industry, its hostility to the environment and civil liberties, and the qualified legitimacy of the 2000 election. Bush’s critics get lathered up denouncing his misdeeds, his plutocratic backers and his lame appointees. But they often admit that they, well, kinda like the guy personally.

In other words, his lede was pure chum and he can’t bring himself to carry it forward throughout the piece.

What we have here is a classic case of pandering, first to the god of faux objectivity — people hated Clinton and people hated Bush*, therefore they’re equivalent — and then to the god of self-image — these critics of the invasion were right and I was wrong but it’s okay that I was wrong because my wrongness was the result of an honest, well-reasoned error while their rightness was, to be kind, pure dumb hate-driven luck.

The sad thing is that the false memory of a pre-invasion debate and that self-righteous justification for being wrong dovetails perfectly with the phony mea culpas of the mainstream press in regard to Iraq; far from receiving demerits for his little exercise in self- and reader deception, Weisberg has probably earned himself a boatload of brownie points. In fact, he’s probably kindled renewed interest in purchasing Slate on the Washington Post’s part because of how neatly his vision of demented stenographic shrewdness coincides with Post executive editor Len Downie’s.

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*if that’s his real name

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**Hi, mom! It’s me, Jake!

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