Patriotism is No Excuse for Stupidity

Patriotism is No Excuse for Stupidity

As reporters go, Seymour Hersh is not only famous but also pretty darn reliable. He won a Pulitzer Prize during the Vietnam War. He broke the story of the My Lai massacre. When he writes, people listen.

Recently, he and I were on a radio show together. I asked him about his latest piece for the New Yorker in which he reported that the first real U.S. commando effort in Afghanistan had gone badly and that the Taliban — thanks partly to an ill-advised, overly noisy U.S. effort — had fired upon a dozen of our elite soldiers, seriously wounding several of them.

Patriotism is No Excuse for Stupidity

DO PARENTS STILL HAVE ANY RIGHTS?

I was hit as a child. I was spanked and I was slapped. I was smacked in the face when I said something dirty, and I was chased up the stairs for a butt-whipping when I did something really wrong, which in our house meant insulting my mother. My father did the hitting...