Surely you remember this part of James Lileks Bleat from Friday:

Hey, Salam? Fuck you. I know you’re the famous giggly blogger who gave us all a riveting view of the inner circle before the war, and thus know more about the situation than I do. Granted. But there’s a picture on the front page of my local paper today: third Minnesotan killed in Iraq. He died doing what you never had the stones to do: pick up a rifle and face the Ba’athists. You owe him.

Okay, to repeat. This was not about someone Standing Up and Dissenting. It was about the quality of the criticism. If you say that George Bush invaded Iraq because he is a bloodthirsty moron compensating for a penis the size of a sewing thimble, I'm free to conclude that you have nothing to add to the debate. If you say that the invasion was a grand mistake predicated on wretched intel and a misguided attempt to unilaterally transform regional politics, you've made an intelligent point, and we can argue about that. I wasn't criticizing Pax for being critical. It was his fatuous, smirky tone and insubstantial jibes. He had the tone of a Berlin cabaret MC who'd made Gestapo jokes in private and now was famous for making Eisenhower jokes in public. He sounded like someone amusing himself by dressing down a servant.