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The O’Hanlon Factor

Atrios takes us on a little Michael O’Hanlon memory tour. The noteworthy thing about this incident, though, is that it occurred at a congressional hearing convened by a Senate committee under Democratic control. A lot of things about the current media environment are both crappy and also very hard to alter. This, however, is easy to alter.

As things stand, the next time O’Hanlon publishes some liberal-bashing op-ed somewhere, the editor who published it can always say “but look, this is the expert the Democrats in the Senate turn to on Iraq.” But Democrats could just, you know, not turn to him. The first step in building a better “expert” class would be for the politicians and their staffs to take some time to actually think about who they want to be putting forward.

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