Since midnight, the front page of National Review’s site has featured a scathing column by Jonah Goldberg. Headlined, “Stand By for Slaughter,” it explains why President Obama is allowing the slaughter of Yazidi in northern Iraq.
The column builds to this indignant conclusion:
You have to give Obama points for consistency. He remains as blasé about mass slaughter today as he was in 2007. Back then he presented our options as a choice between doing nothing and “deploying unilaterally” to put American troops in harm’s way. He plays the same rhetorical games today, insisting that critics who want to provide military aid to, say, the Kurds or the Ukrainians are really proposing war. And since no one wants war, we should accept our new role as bystander to slaughter.
It’s quite a legacy you’re working on there, Mr. President.
Fortunately for the Yazidi, but unfortunately for Goldberg, Obama announced a plan to aid the Yazidi and launch air strikes against ISIL last night at 9:30, two and a half hours before the the column appeared.
Goldberg tells me he filed the column mid-afternoon yesterday, then was out of pocket for the rest of the day. Deadline tragedies can strike any of us in this cruel opinion journalism business. At 7:31, he tweeted:
Yes, some.
The best thing is the column’s commenters, who — unlike Goldberg — had the benefit of reading banner news headlines announcing Obama’s decision to do the thing Goldberg castigated him for refusing to do, and decided to castigate Obama anyway. Such as:
And:
And this guy, who read the news and already moved on to the new talking point:
