peter beinart – Moe Lane

#rsrh Benjamin Kerstein rhetorically punches Peter Beinart in the nose.

It’s about Peter Beinart’s relationship with Zionism, and anti-Zionism… look, the title is “House Jew, Field Jew.” With all of the historical connotations that such a title implies, and with Beinart being identified as being one of the former. It’s a harsh piece – and this is me saying that: I despise Beinart for casually and serially violating The New Republic over several years, all for the sake of a bankrupt antiwar ideology that nobody credible takes seriously*. Whether it’s a fair piece… up to the reader, really. Certainly there are things in Kerstein’s piece that I would have felt constrained not to write; whether that’s because they weren’t correct, or weren’t politically correct, for me to write is a surprisingly hard question to answer.

Assessing the impact of cultural taboos can be like that.

Moe Lane

*I nearly wrote ‘any more,’ but that would imply that credible people ever took the antiwar movement’s ideology seriously.

#rsrh This pious back-patting post about DSK…

[UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers.]

…by Peter Beinart – short version: the prosecutors are going to get blamed for any collapse in the case, despite the fact that they acted without regard to the social status of the accused, in good faith, and were open and forthcoming about details in the case, including the negative ones. All of which is true, by the way: but it’s a damned shame that Beinart can admit the truth of that, and not admit that pretty much the same can be truthfully said about the US military with regard to Abu Ghraib*(H/T: Instapundit). The difference is, of course, that spittle-flecked antiwar hatemongers like Beinart absolutely hate any suggestion that they should be denied their Special Time when it comes to duly designated Hate Objects. The US military counts; apparently, former IMF heads don’t.

Of course, I may be too harsh on the fellow. Based on Beinart’s prior musings on Abu Ghraib, it simply may be that he has structural problems in his brain that make the irony imperceptible to him**.

Moe Lane Continue reading #rsrh This pious back-patting post about DSK…

#rsrh Peter Beinart concedes 2010.

Not that he’d admit it, for his own pride’s sake. Typically speaking, you talk about the next Presidential election when you’re pretty much certain that the current midterm election is going down the drain for your side. Which is one reason why the Democrats were so eager to get us talking about 2012 early: they’re big believers in sympathetic magic over there, so they were hoping that we’d get into the habit of just conceding 2010 right off the bat*.

As t0 Beinart’s thesis (“defeated parties become more extreme”)… well. That argument assumes that Bob Dole was more extreme than George HW Bush: John Kerry was more extreme than either Al Gore or Bill Clinton; and, for that matter, that Bill Clinton was more extreme than Michael Dukakis. It also assumes that Beinart’s typical reader is sufficiently below the triple-digit IQ threshold that he or she won’t notice those minor little flaws in Beinart’s theory – but then, the man does write for the Daily Beast these days.

Moe Lane

PS: I haven’t removed the bookmark because I’m lazy, that’s why.

*There are times when I wish we had a socially acceptable emoticon to represent the Hawaiian good-luck symbol.