The American Spectator

Regular New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani doesn’t like folks who believe what they believe, especially if they aren’t liberal. That’s the clearest message in her review today of “The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost,” an examination by former student Molly Worthen, of the career of Yale professor Charles Hill and his geopolitical theories that have influenced two generations of what are now commonly lumped together as “neocons.”

As Powerline has pointed out, Kakutani’s biggest problem with Hill appears to be that Hill knows what he believes, teaches it, and stands by it, and the ideas endure.

In her review, Kakutani writes: “The problem with such certainty is that it can lead to the cherry-picking of evidence to support an idée fixe - as in the case of the decision to go to war against Iraq - and the dismissal of more inconvenient facts.”

Hmm. With Hill and others eschewing moral and real-world relativism is a flaw. But cherry-picking facts to attempt to, say, ram through a national health care plan, mislead multiple federal grand jury investigations, avoid making tough decisions on national security issues, misleading the American public on issues on everything from the environment to port security, is admirable?

Only a man of Charles Hill’s intellect could unspool this kind of thinking.