DROPPED BALL AWARD NOMINEE - Glenn Reynolds’ Dropped Ball Awards wouldn’t be complete without including Robert Scheer, the resident Los Angeles crypto-defeatist whose columns in the LA Times have been as gloomy as they were wrong. I only have time to pull a couple of examples, but pick up just about anything he’s written since 9/11 for more.

On September 18, in a column titled Destined to Shadowbox With the Devil he wrote:

When is someone going to admit that the terrorists have already won, immobilizing the world’s greatest democracy and that much of what we are doing as a nation is simply stomping our feet in frustration? Instead, we need to learn to deal rationally with the mayhem that much of the world has long endured—some of it even inflicted by us.

Admit it, you poor deluded fools!

On October 8, in Dry Up the Pools of Discontent Scheer wrote:

The bombing part is easy. Not of course on the civilians, the “collateral damage” likely to be killed in unseemly large numbers, as they were during the Gulf War.

Of course, there were civilian casualties, and no one should ever make light of that. But from all accounts, US bombing has been much more accurate than people like Scheer (almost gleefully) predicted.

In the same article he writes:

…is the U.S. public prepared for the possibility of an endless and costly quagmire, along the lines of what the Soviets faced in the 1980s? By making an ally of the Taliban’s enemies in the Northern Alliance—which currently holds only about 10% of Afghanistan—we may be following the Soviet example of making a very bad situation even worse.

“My name is Robert Scheer, and I’m a quagmire abuser.”

By the way, I refer to Scheer as a crypto-defeatist because his viewpoints seem to shift unpredictably (while remaining unrelentingly gloomy), in one column seeming to advocate expanding the war to Iraq while in the next mocking the US’s authority to do so.