Andrew Sullivan uses Hitchens’s defection to the Obama camp as an excuse to repeat his own mea culpa over his early support for Bush and the invasion of Iraq.
I don’t regret my support for the president after 9/11.
In such a crisis, a president of any party deserves the benefit of the doubt. I do regret deeply and indelibly my subsequent backing of the Iraq war. It was a terrible mistake. Again, it was an honest judgment based on the evidence then provided me. But it was an intellectually lazy position and far too passionately held. I have tried to atone since: on the war, on spending (which I was whining about in 2001), on torture, on the constitution, on Christianism.
I think Andrew Sullivan has a new slogan:
Intellectually lazy positions. Passionately held.
