Jonathan Chait: Right, if you imagine that the most important thing [Rumsfeld] did was a huge success rather than a huge failure, then he’s be remember [sic] as a huge success. Not as a huge failure. Likewise, if Lee Harvey Oswald had killed someone who was about to assassinate President Kennedy, rather than assassinating President Kennedy himself, he’d go down in history as a hero.
John Podhoretz: You can be sour about Rumsfeld’s tenure at the Defense Department all you like, and plenty of people are. But offering a cutesy analogy between Rumsfeld and Lee Harvey Oswald has lowered Chait to a base level of rhetorical crassness to which even his questionable standing as an exceptionally graceless writer and amazingly crude thinker had not yet fallen. Now it has. Congratulations.
Jonathan Chait: Podhoretz is betraying here a common confusion between comparisons and analogies. An analogy between A and B does not imply moral parity between A and B. So, for instance, the statement “John Podhoretz rules Commentary with the ruthless style of Kim Jong-il,” would be completely unfair. Kim Jong-il is responsible for the death and brutality of millions, whereas Podhoretz has only brutalized the English language. On the other hand, the statement, “John Podhoretz is to Norman Podhoretz and Kim Jong-il is to Kim il-Sung” would imply that John Podhoretz, like Kim Jong-il, acquired his job in nepotistic fashion and has performed miserably, without drawing any moral parallel between him and the North Korean dictator.