BOY, WERE SOME FOLKS WRONG If you haven't seen them already, Andrew Sullivan has a fine selection of many nominees for his new Von Hoffman Award for embarrassingly unprescient pundits. It's named in honor of Nicholas von Hoffman, who published this gem in The New York Observer, several days after the fall of Kabul:

We are mapless, we are lost, and we are distracted by gusts of wishful thinking. That our high command could believe the Afghani peasantry or even the Taliban would change sides after a few weeks of bombing! This is fantasizing in high places. In the history of aerial bombardment, can you think of a single instance of the bombed embracing the bombers? Bombing always unites the bombees against the bombers, and-duh!-guess what the reaction has been in Afghanistan? You don't need to speak Urdu to figure it out, which is good since none of us does ... Moreover, as hellish as the Taliban are, it appears that the ordinary people of Afghanistan prefer them to the brigands and bandits with whom we've been trying to make common cause-and who, we've been hinting, will take part in a postwar government.