YOUNG REPUBLIC-ANS

Noam Scheiber is one of TNR's young turks, and today he's got a thoroughly defensible slight dissent from not-much-older editor Peter Beinart's cover story (which argues well that Democrats beyond the leadership need to take foreign policy seriously (this would seem obvious to me, but then I'm not a Democrat)). But then Scheiber goes and writes something that is rather distressing, especially to someone (me) who thinks the Democrats should take foreign policy seriously. Here it is:

Had John Kerry won in November, he would have eventually had to choose between opening firehouses in Baghdad and opening those firehouses in Detroit, and that decision could have provoked a nasty intramural fight.

No, no, no. Christopher Hitchens explained this fallacy (and ugliness) of this particular Kerry attack in July. For one, a better Iraq is in our best interest (and everyone else's but al-Qaeda's). For two -- though I'm not sure it's in Hitch's piece -- no such choice ever arises because fire departments are funded at the local level whereas nation-building is done by the federal government. For three, as Hitchens writes, it's short on principle:

So, why not just say that the Republicans are squandering "our" money on a bunch of foreigners? … Solidarity and internationalism, indeed, used to be the cement of the democratic Left.

Scheiber's wrong -- it was nasty already. And he also loses it elsewhere in the article, for entirely different reasons:

The sudden change in the dynamics of the primary race was probably best epitomized by the unofficial Kerry campaign slogan at the time: "Dated Dean, married Kerry." The flirtation with Dean had been a highly satisfying fling, but, when it came time to vote, Democrats wanted someone who could win, not someone who touched them in their Bush-hating erogenous zones.

Ick! What John Kerry does to you in your own home is none Meanwhile, Scheiber's fellow young Republic-an (yes, I realize how tortured a construction that is) Jon Chait is perfectly capable of stimulating his own anti-Bush erogenous zone in his own web piece, "Mad About Me," which you can already tell is masturbatory for yet another reason.

Oh, those crazy kids. At least they're not making up stories about Alan Greenspan investment bank cults and the First Church of George Herbert Walker Christ.