WHOOPS! BACK TO THE SLAUGHTERING BOARD! Five years ago the Fourth Estate gave all its respectful attention to people who thought the Iraq War was a great idea, and none to those who thought it a mistake. Now, the mainstream media are willing to consider that the war wasn't the no-brainer they'd assumed it was, but still won't listen to any but the same idiots who bamboozled them in the first place.

As Tbogg has pointed out, Megan McArdle has previously defended her own Iraq wrongness on the grounds that her heart and methodology were in the right place and her opponents are mean, and darned if she isn't doing it again. Give her credit, though: in her follow-up, she has actually found a way to make her argument simultaneously more abstract and more viscerally offensive:

My discussion of failure in the context of the Iraq discussion is part of my broader beliefs about innovation...

To succeed quickly, he said, what you want to do is fail. A lot. Failing eliminates wrong answers faster than any possible analysis. I was reminded of the famous Thomas Edison quote: asked how it felt to have failed to invent an electric lightbulb, Edison said "I haven't failed! I've discovered 10,000 filaments that don't work."

By this point McArdle has segued to the economy, but those of us who can remember two whole paragraphs back are thinking: did she just defend the death of 4,000+ Americans and countless Iraqis on a "try try again" basis?

Why, yes she did, and I'm sure she doesn't even know what's wrong with that, except that certain mean people may insist on making a big deal of it.

I've changed my mind about the First Amendment. I want to ban Ayn Rand. Let's not lose another generation. Our dorks should be fiddling with computers, not applying their hideously deformed ethics to matters of life and death.