“What is striking,” sagely observes Charles Krauthammer, “is how much of the debate in Washington about Iraq has to do not with the war but with the words.” In reality, the most striking thing is that Charles Krauthammer, America’s Worst Columnist, continues to be published weekly in The Washington Post. Take, for example, this feeble effort at a gotcha. He notes that the Senate unanimously confirmed David Petraeus and then asks, “If you really oppose the surge, how can you not oppose the appointment of the man whose very mission is to carry it out?”

I promise that Jonah Goldberg could do better than this in his sleep. After a cup of coffee he’d probably even find a way to paint surge opponents as Nazi sympathizers.

To answer Krauthammer’s question, nobody opposed Petraeus’s appointment because there was no reason to oppose it. The “surge” is the president’s plan and whichever general was in command in Iraq would be ordered to carry it out; someone has to be in command of the troops in Iraq even if the troops’ mission is to withdraw; and just about everyone seems to think Petraeus is a good general. What’s more, the president is always granted very broad deference in these kind of decisions.

What’s striking is that Krauthammer obviously knows all of this and is just using his column as an opportunity to write in bad faith. The president is extremely unpopular since at this point everyone knows that he’s inept, lazy, corrupt, etc. Petraeus, by contrast, gets good press. So the idea is to paint this as Petraeus’s war rather than Bush’s. Hence, war opponents should oppose Petraeus’ appointment and the argument will be made even though it makes no sense.

Jonah Goldberg’s very, very indignant that someone would compare global warming denialists to Holocaust deniers. And, I tend to agree, it’s not really the same thing. Maybe Jonah would be happier if we just said that the denialists, much like Charles Lindbergh, seems complacent in the face of clearly gathering threats and have some strange ideas about conspiracies in the media.

After all, Lindbergh’s not as bad as people say.

What’s more, I hear that Hillary Clinton, like most modern liberals, is secretly a fascist. Recall Brendan Nyhan’s old compendium of Goldbergian disquiet about Nazi analogies.

“[I]t is impossible any more to call Vladimir Putin’s government ‘democratic,’” says Thomas Friedman, “given the way it has neutered the Russian Parliament, intimidated or taken over much of the Russian press, subordinated the judiciary and coercively extended its control over the country’s key energy companies.” And there’s certainly a clear enough sense of “democratic” for which this is true. Later, Friedman re-iterates that “The Yeltsin democratic experiment is over.”

This, though, is the question for America’s Putin-haters: What Yeltsin democratic experiment? Putin, after all, didn’t come out of nowhere. He was the handpicked successor of the Yeltsin regime, installed into office through some pretty dubious machinations. Putin didn’t neuter the Russian parliament, he inherited a neutered parliament from the architect of the modern Russian state — Boris Yeltsin. As nobody seems to remember, “in October 1993, President Boris Yeltsin chose a radical solution to settle his dispute with parliament: He called up tanks to shell the parliament building, blasting out his opponents.” Later he revised the constitution, creating the current one under which Putin has been enjoying the incredibly broad powers of the Russian presidency. Under Putin, the state directly controls the bulk of the mass media and used said control to prevent a meaningful challenge to Putin’s political authority. Under Yeltsin, by “contrast,” the media was under the control of a tiny number of close-to-the-regime “oligarchs” who’d benefitted financially from Yeltsin’s corruption and used their control over the press to prevent meaningful challenge to Yeltsin’s political authority.

What’s really changed since the Yeltsin era is the price of oil and gas. Russia under Yeltsin was a very weak country, reeling from decades of Communist mismanagement and a poorly-handled transition to a market economy. Yeltsin himself was heavily dependent on western countries and was unable to effectively challenge American or European strategic priorities. Putin, by contrast, has been enjoying an energy-led economic boom that’s allowed Russia to once again become a somewhat consequential player on the world stage, to refuse to cooperate with the United States on issues that are priorities to us. Once that happened, it suddenly dawned on everyone — hey! this isn’t much of a democracy! And it isn’t. But we should be spared the pretense that it ever was.