The best post in the world today is Daniel Larison, dismantling Ross Douthat. Douthat has whined in the times that the film The Green Zone condemns the Iraq occupation without appropriate "nuance." That's right. You read that correctly. Take it away, Dr. Larison:

If only Hollywood were better at portraying the depth and complexity of people who unleashed hell on a nation of 24 million people out of an absurd fear of a non-existent threat! Life is so unfair to warmongers, is it not? Then again, the reason our debates are so poisonous and our nation so divided might have something to do with the existence of utterly unaccountable members of the political class that can launch such a war, suffer no real consequences, and then reliably expect to be defended as “decent” and “well-intentioned” people who made understandable mistakes.

That's already got me ready to salute, but Larison takes it to the next level:

That said, I do agree that we should have a greater appreciation for ambiguity and complexity. Would that we had had more of this when the President was railing against an “axis of evil,” administration supporters were authoring absurdly-titled works called An End to Evil, and advocates of invasion were routinely claiming that anyone opposed to the war did not understand that evil existed in the world. Where was this discomfort with sharp “Manichean” divisons then? Where were the complaints against simplistic and naive “reductionism” of complex realities?

Perhaps more of a tragic sensibility would have held some of the delusions of war supporters in check. Perhaps they would have been less enthusiastic to start a war that did not have to happen. After all, the Iraq war was nothing if not a product of a comforting, false vision of a world cleanly divided into good and evil, in which “we” were liberators and “they” were villains, pure and simple. ... There is nothing quite like the relativism of universal moral standards!

I think I'm ready to carve that last sentence in marble somewhere. But it's worth reading the whole post.

The second-greatest post in the world today is, of course, by Wolfie. Signorina Cacciatore! Che bellissima!