Catch of the Day

Can I call it a CotD if it catches something that hasn't quite happened yet? I don't see why not, especially if it's good enough, as this great Spencer Ackerman post certainly is. "The Post-Gadhafi Journalism You Will Read In The Next 72 Hours." I'll just give you a taste:

1. Why Gadhafi's Death Vindicates "Leading From Behind" (Tom Friedman)
2. Gadhafi's Death Shows The U.S. Was Never Really "Leading From Behind" (Anne-Marie Slaughter)
3. There Is Still More To Do In Libya (Any Washington Post op-ed)

Excellent fun; do click through for the rest. There is a relatively difficult challenge to all of this; while we certainly don't respect analysis that is never willing to admit mistakes, we also don't really want analysis that discards all previous claims as soon as new events show up. Of course, if one subscribes to big picture ideas that consistently produce bad predictions, one might want to modify or abandon those ideas; at the same time, getting one prediction wrong isn't (generally) a good reason to modify or abandon well-supported ideas.

Meanwhile, to get an excellent context for Libya written before today's events, I recommend Fred Kaplan's latest on "The New Interventionism." I think Kaplan is overly optimistic about how stable the stuff he describes really is -- he treats the current GOP candidates as some sort of odd quirk, but I think he undersells how much a hold Cheneyism still has on the party and may have in the future -- but otherwise it's good stuff.