This tidbit from E.J.Dionne’s latest illustrates a point we’ve been making for a while:

>The impatience of the administration’s critics is entirely understandable. But it would be a shame if impatience got in the way of a sensible long-term strategy to bring America’s engagement in this war to as decent an end as possible as quickly as possible — even if not as quickly as they’d like. The anti-surge resolution is a necessary first step, which is why those who are against a genuine change in our Iraq policy are fighting so hard to stop it.

There isn’t anything wrong with this as far as it goes (or as far as we could tell). But we’ve long complained that the “liberal” columnists differ as a group from the conservative ones. The most prominent conservative columnists make ideological combat the centerpiece of their writing, thinking perhaps that that’s what the op-ed page is for. I’d be inclined to agree with them. That’s how it should be. Outside of Krugman, however, the liberal columnists largely don’t argue in the way their conservative colleagues do. So, while people like Krauthammer and V.D.Hanson argue in forceful (but erroneous terms) for the position that the Iraq war has gone swimmingly (but for the Iraqis), Dionne takes it for granted that it’s been a disaster and talks instead about the parliamentary process of bringing it to an end. It’s not wrong that he does this. It’s just a poor match for his more strident conservative colleagues.