Actually, two Washington Post Op-Eds. Yet we can dispense with one as not worthy of attention: one columnist continues his self-contradictory campaign of earlier pieces to arm the “moderates” among the rebels in the particular case of Syria in order to keep that conflict from getting even worse. (The rest of the regular Tuesday lineup is filled out with making fun of the recent CPAC conference, and calling for legislation to forbid food stamp purchases of “junk foods.” Big issues, these.)

But let’s get serious. On March 19, 2003, U.S. troops invaded Iraq to inaugurate a conflict that would cost over 4000 American and untold numbers of Iraqi lives and at least a trillion dollars of U.S. taxpayers’ money.

If Frum actually thinks the threat of legal action is an effective parenting tool on this issue, the current marijuana legalization efforts won’t change that. I have yet to meet any serious reform activist pushing for legalization without any age limits. For example, both the new Colorado and Washington State laws set the age limit for marijuana use at 21. Marijuana would still be illegal for his kids. If Frum really thinks this tactic works, he can still tell his children not to use marijuana because doing so would be illegal for them.

As someone who believes that marijuana prohibition has done significantly more harm than good, I would love to have a serious data-driven national debate about legalization. But unfortunately that is not possible when prohibitionists think it is acceptable to simply make up facts.

This anti-legalization article in The Daily Beast by David Frum is an egregious recent example of that phenomenon.

I must say, I’m getting tired of the hand-wringing on the left about how unreasonable Republicans are being and how “strong” Obama was yesterday. Of course Republicans are being unreasonable: they’re threatening to blow up the global economy rather than raise taxes on rich people in an era of historically-low taxes for rich people. Does anyone expect crazy people to act any other way but crazy?

“Centrism”has long been the the tag that corporatists like to affix to their morally inert brand of politics. “For sale” might be a better label. The only thing they stand in the center of is K-Street. Idealists on both ends of the political spectrum inspire voter loyalty, whereas Evan Bayh, Joe Lieberman, Arlen Specter and Blanche Lincoln inspire lobbyists to write big checks in exchange for their votes.

A while back Jake McIntyre wrote an interesting post (for which he was widely pilloried) noting that the same people who supported this bill were those who supported the Iraq war. Not a coincidence. The health care bill is a neoliberal victory, just as the Iraq war represented a neoliberal triumph. As willyloman said in a Seminal diary yesterday, neoliberalism is now being rebranded as populism, with the President acting as chief salesman. But in emails like this, and Nancy Pelosi’s trumpeting of the bill’s Heritage Foundation roots, it’s clear that the Democrats know what they’ve done. They have no intention of reversing themselves now. And they are consciously punching the progressive hippies whose messaging and ideals brought them their majorities in the first place.

Noted left-wing activist Bruce Bartlett read David Frum’s recent survey of a bunch of Teabaggers, and finds their grasp of the issues, erm, lacking.