The wallflower

I found this blogpost from Eric Alterman very peculiar:

Though he was clearly the celebrity guest of the moment... Paul Wolfowitz was more whispered about than talked to last night.  So I felt bad for the guy when I saw him standing by himself and went over to see what cocktail party banter might yield in the way of global understanding.  (I began with, and remain committed to, the admittedly controversial hypothesis that Wolfowitz is a genuinely misguided idealist—perhaps the only one-- in the administration’s top echelon.)

I'll say that hypothesis is controversial. Remember, Wolfowitz is the same douchebag who made the following Congressional testimony:

In his testimony, Mr. Wolfowitz ticked off several reasons why he believed a much smaller coalition peacekeeping force than General Shinseki envisioned would be sufficient to police and rebuild postwar Iraq. He said there was no history of ethnic strife in Iraq, as there was in Bosnia or Kosovo. He said Iraqi civilians would welcome an American-led liberation force that "stayed as long as necessary but left as soon as possible," but would oppose a long-term occupation force. And he said that nations that oppose war with Iraq would likely sign up to help rebuild it. "I would expect that even countries like France will have a strong interest in assisting Iraq in reconstruction," Mr. Wolfowitz said. He added that many Iraqi expatriates would likely return home to help.

...Enlisting countries to help to pay for this war and its aftermath would take more time, he said. "I expect we will get a lot of mitigation, but it will be easier after the fact than before the fact," Mr. Wolfowitz said. Mr. Wolfowitz spent much of the hearing knocking down published estimates of the costs of war and rebuilding, saying the upper range of $95 billion was too high, and that the estimates were almost meaningless because of the variables. Moreover, he said such estimates, and speculation that postwar reconstruction costs could climb even higher, ignored the fact that Iraq is a wealthy country, with annual oil exports worth $15 billion to $20 billion. "To assume we're going to pay for it all is just wrong," he said. (emphasis mine)

Eric, please don't have any more pity for this jackass. He deserves to be hauled off to jail for lying in his Congressional testimony.