A Most Pompous Warmonger
By Scocca’s take on the odious Michael Kelly is strongly recommended:
War is stupid. War kills people. War kills people in stupid ways, and in unanticipated ways, and in multiples. These are not complicated facts, but they were too complicated for Michael Kelly. They were too complicated for a lot of people, 10 years ago and, despite everything, remain so even now. Kelly’s wrongness about war, though, was loud and it was authoritative, and it is still out there being received as wisdom—the wisdom possibly of a saint, martyred to the cause of journalism.
[…]
It’s not simply that Kelly was wrong, nor that he was wrong about important things. It’s that he was aggressively, manipulatively, and smugly wrong: deep, subtle, and clever…pontificated…we live in reality again.