Billmon: Looking for a Scapegoat

Before I poked fun yesterday at Tom Friedman's latest attempt to fish his journalistic reputation out of the Iraq War toilet, I probably should have paused to consider the significance of his casual slur

about liberals who "deep down" want to see Bush fail.

Why? Because it bore such an uncanny resemblance to this poisonous 2003 comment from National Review contributor Stanley Kurtz:

A house divided against itself cannot stand. A nation where the political opposition stands against our foreign policy, and even secretly (and not so secretly) hopes for its failure, cannot reform a region as recalcitrant as the Middle East. (emphasis added)

As I mentioned at the time, Kurtz's version of the stabbed-in-the-back theory eerily echoed the original, as expounded by the leader of an extreme nationalist party in a certain central European country in the grim years following World War I.

I'd mention their names, but I don't want to sound "shrill."