“Inside the Beltway” was the column’s heading for Washington as a market in its own right. The piece filed here argues that the intervention in Libya was, for the American foreign policy establishment, the equivalent of the Dow at 6,500 — a moment when a consensus repriced. It is a piece about how a professional class revises its beliefs under pressure, written while the revision was happening.
The portal does not run a politics desk. Where it touches government, it is in policy and regulation, which reads statistics and rules that decide public money as mechanics: how a formula is written, who is obliged to publish what, and on what schedule. The archived piece keeps its original address and date; nothing in the text has been changed for the portal.
A piece written while an outcome was still open is a different document from one written after it closed, and that is the reason to keep it unedited. What it records is a professional consensus in the act of changing, including the parts that later looked wrong. The portal’s policy material handles government through its paperwork instead, on the grounds that a published formula can be checked by anyone. The entry below keeps its address, its date and its author’s name.
Every once in a while a pitch comes along that looks like the sweetest, juiciest, fattest pitch you are ever going to see. That is what you wait for.