In Other News, Gandhi Just Got Into a Barfight

I'm a week late to notice it, but Mark Hatfield endorsed both Bush and the Iraq war in a piece for The Oregonian last Friday.

Why is that interesting? Because Hatfield was the most pacifist senator of the last half century. He opposed U.S. intervention in Vietnam, Central America, Iraq, and the Balkans, and never voted for a single military appropriations bill. In the early '70s, he even flirted with philosophical anarchism, reading one of Murray Rothbard's articles into the Congressional Record and rapturously reviewing Rothbard's Power and Market for The Individualist. His penchant for putting radical documents into the Record didn't stop there: He did the same thing for the Winter Soldier Investigation, recently famous for its association with the young John Kerry.

Hatfield offers an explanation for his change of heart, but it's pretty thin on details. The key phrase is probably this one: "our world changed on Sept. 11, 2001." Clearly it did.