INSTATUNNELVISION

Glenn Reynolds links to a story on the electoral gains of the Serbian nationalist party, half-joking that this constitutes "a Balkan quagmire" and that

Obviously, the Clinton Administration failed to plan sufficiently for the postwar environment.

This is just plain stupid. Has the law professor from Tennessee looked around at Europe lately? There are a number of countries where oppressive, ultra-nationalist parties and candidates have made gains as of late, including France, Holland and Austria. So by Glenn's logic, the rise in support for the hard right in the Netherlands would mean that Truman and Eisenhower didn't plan sufficiently for the post-WWII environment.

This is one of Insty's tricks, the "really stupid and superficial analogy". You may remember an example of this which I pointed out a few months ago. Glenn linked to an article describing the discovery of a very old cache of chemical weapons discovered in China, dating back to the Japanese occupation in WWII. The Prof's enlightened commentary: This proves that weapons can stay hidden for a long time. [Nedra]When Glenn Reynolds makes this observation, he fails to inform his readers that nobody was looking for weapons in China[/Nedra]. Anyway, he's a dunce.