Burnt Orange Report

Yuuupiiii, now we, bloggers have our blog-toolbar - http://blogsearchengine.com/blog/index.php?p=123 !

"But the worst came with the final speaker, a woman by the name of Sherry Wolf, who is supposedly on the "editorial board of International Socialist Review." She talked, and talked, and talked; terms like "architects of the slaughter," "war criminal," and "Noam Chomsky" wafted about the room; and my eyes grew so bleary that I ceased taking notes. But then she brought up the insurgents in Iraq. Sure they were bad, she admitted: "No one cheers the beheading of journalists." But, she continued, they had a "right" to rebel against occupation. Then she read from a speech by the activist Arundhati Roy: "Of course, [the Iraqi resistance] is riddled with opportunism, local rivalry, demagoguery, and criminality. But if we were to only support pristine movements, then no resistance will be worthy of our purity." In sum, Wolf said, the choice boiled down to supporting occupation or resistance, and we had to support resistance.

So there it was. I even forgot about the Constitution Ball for a minute. Apparently, we were to view the people who set off bombs killing over 150 peaceful Shia worshippers in Baghdad and Karbala as "resistance" fighters. And the audience seemed entirely fine with this. These weren't harmless lefties. I didn't want Nancy Pelosi talking sense to them; I wanted John Ashcroft to come busting through the wall with a submachine gun to round everyone up for an immediate trip to Gitmo, with Charles Graner on hand for interrogation.

I left early (I couldn't stomach the question-answer session) and made my way to the Metro. In the station were people wearing fur coats and tuxedos and lovely gowns and shiny shoes. I assumed they were in town to celebrate Bush's reelection, and, for a moment, I wanted to join in. After my session with the ISO, they suddenly looked--well, so appealing.

Having attended college in New York City, I know what it's like to be confronted with some of the more irritating forms of campus leftism. Yet I never quite understood why, ultimately, such leftism should drive sensible people away from liberalism. But yesterday's display made it a little more understandable: Maybe sometimes you just want to be on the side of whoever is more likely to take a bunker buster to Arundhati Roy."

Great article, thanks for turning me on to it.

Why would you want to censure this? Don't you believe in a diversity of thought. Or is that diversity limited to our side? I guess people don't have free speech in your party. Must adhere to the party line.

Uh, excuse me, Peter, but your comment smacks of hypocrisy. You accuse Jim of not believing in free speech because he wants Tom Frank censured, yet you defend Frank's "great" article, which calls for imprisoning, torturing, and killing people who disagree with YOU. Hmmm . . .

I subscribed to TNR from 1990 till 2002, when I decided their war boosterism was too much for me to take. I was thinking of reupping recently, but now I only feel disgust. If I could persuade Stanley Kauffmann to move to another publication I would.

When people like Ann Coulter and Michael Savage call for violence their defenders insist that they're merely being entertainers, and that you shouldn't be so "uptight." I imagine your average TNR reader is far more educated than say, your average Michael Savage listener, but so what? How is this any different? Because the "intended audience" will understand it? Don't they know that the denizens of Free Republic and other dark places are also listening?