Two posts later, Yglesias takes a
ridiculously unfair shot at Stephen Hayes, who he accuses of
being a liar:
His first book, The Connection: How al Qaeda’s Collaboration
with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America was a deliberate
attempt to mislead the public about the subject at hand... To
the best of my knowledge, Hayes has never made a single good
analytic point on any subject, or introduced any useful new
information into the public debate. Nobody outside the deepest
recesses of the conservative cocoon has ever been impressed by a
Stephen F. Hayes article.
I don't think Peter Bergen qualifies as a conservative cocooner.
I once heard Bergen say that The Connection is a good
book that you should read, but that he disagreed with the
conclusion; Bergen doesn't think the links between Saddam and al
Qaeda that Hayes documents constituted a serious threat. Bergen
said this at the AEI panel that Matt wrote about in the article
he links back to; I was also there and mentioned it
here. At this point I could use Matt's own standard and call
him a liar, but instead I'll assume his memory for events that
he's charged with observing on behalf of his readers isn't very
good. Perhaps that's why he doesn't like reporting: He sucks at
it.