Here's Andrew Sullivan, on a recent New Yorker essay by Josh Marshall:

Josh Marshall has written an engaging and artful essay about the notion of an American empire for the liberal New Yorker magazine. I read it yesterday and then re-read it. Josh manages to write about the Clinton era "soft-imperialism" and the Bush era "hard imperialism" with nary a mention of a certain even that occurred on September 11, 2001. Maybe I missed something. I doubt if his editors noticed the lacuna. Why should they? For the Clintonites, 9/11 didn't really happen.

And here's the fifth paragraph of Josh's piece:

For leftist critics of America’s role in the world, it has long been a baleful article of faith that the United States is an agent of “neo-imperialism,” exerting its power through global capital and through organizations like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. After September 11th, a left-wing accusation became a right-wing aspiration: conservatives increasingly began to espouse a world view that was unapologetically imperialist. You could watch this happening in Washington’s think tanks. Over their lunchroom tables, in their seminar rooms, on the covers of their small magazines, the idea of empire got a thorough airing—particularly among ideologues close to the policymakers planning the war on terror. At a panel discussion in the middle of 2002, I first heard “Middle East reform”—as in making the Middle East democratic and bourgeois—spoken of the way people speak of welfare reform. As the military historian Max Boot wrote in The Weekly Standard, “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.” [Emph. added.]

Jesus. After a certain point, there's really nothing left to say, is there?