One of the peculiar things about the Fox News Channel is that they actually do invite progressive guests onto some of the shows. Last night on the O'Reilly Factor (3/22/11), we saw Code Pink's Medea Benjamin talking about Libya. Of course, there's a political point O'Reilly is trying to make; in this case, he was contrasting Benjamin's anti-war position to the pro-war positions expressed by some Obama-friendly MSNBC hosts.

O'Reilly's got a point there. (This is not something I'm used to saying.) But never fear--he's still perfectly capable of making his own completely absurd arguments. Like this:

O'REILLY: They have succeeded in stopping a slaughter that would have happened had they not started the bombing. Correct?

BENJAMIN: Well, we don't know what would have happened. You can't tell.

O'REILLY: Well, come on, Medea, you've got to do the math. You know? You've got to do the math.

BENJAMIN: How you can know what would have happened?

O'REILLY: Based on history. Based on what had happened in the past.

BENJAMIN: Look what happened when we were going to overthrow another terrible dictator, Saddam Hussein.

O'REILLY: Yes. Look what happened? He couldn't kill anybody. We got him out of there.

BENJAMIN: We have Iraqis that....

O'REILLY: OK, that war didn't turn out well, but it did -- it did neutralize Saddam Hussein, and he couldn't murder anybody else. And that's why this action was taken.

BENJAMIN: And Iraqis now say they're worse off, with millions of them having fled the country. We unleashed...

O'REILLY: They're better off now than they were. Medea, they're much better off.

BENJAMIN: I don't think they are.

O'REILLY: You can go to Iraq and walk around. OK? You couldn't do that under Saddam Hussein.

BENJAMIN: You can't walk around very much right now.

O'REILLY: Let's get back to Libya.

If I were Bill O'Reilly, I think I'd probably want to avoid bringing up the Iraq War as a model for the Libya bombings.

The Washington Post's Dana Milbank (12/6/09) thinks there's something wrong with left-wing critics of Barack Obama. As his lead put it:

Some parishioners in the Church of Obama discovered last week that their spiritual leader is a false prophet.

 Milbank starts with Michael Moore, who wrote an open letter urging Obama not to escalate the Afghanistan war. This makes no sense to Milbank, since Obama never said he'd withdraw troops. Well, yes. I suspect many of Obama's critics--maybe even Michael Moore--are aware of that.  Moore also supports single-payer healthcare, and wishes Obama would too. Does that mean that continuing that advocacy with Obama in the White House is a waste of time? Or is the idea that no one should ever advocate for any political cause that upsets the power structure?

Maybe that'd be OK with Dana Milbank. As he put it,  Obama is an "incrementalist....  His Afghanistan policy, likewise, is above all a pragmatic, nonideological strategy." Opposing that policy, then, is ideological and anti-pragmatic.

Milbank closes with this:

You'd think his supporters might applaud this sort of thoughtful, methodical leadership as a repudiation of the Bush style of government by political theory. Instead, they're using words such as "O'Bomber" to describe the president. MoveOn.org launched a petition drive against the policy. Code Pink, the group that heckled Bush officials for years, heckled Obama advisers on Capitol Hill last week. The liberal Web publisher Arianna Huffington told Charlie Rose that the policy "puts into question his whole leadership."

Moveon's petition is not  "against the policy"--their petition, if anything, supports it, since it only calls on Congress "to push the Obama administration to outline firm benchmarks and a binding timeline."

Code Pink is against the war; the fact that they're still against is a sign of their consistency.  Milbank might see the process by which Obama decided to escalate the war "thoughtful," but if resulting policy is one you oppose, you continue to oppose it. 

Arianna Huffington, likewise, is saying she opposes Obama's decision, based on a variety of factors. Milbank's point, at face value, is that these people should have all been clear-eyed about Obama's position. That's obviously true--and some of them were. But one gets the sense that his real point is that those to the left of Obama should just leave him alone.