Not surprisingly the tireless lefty-baiters among us have responded to Weisberg's Slate article, with more to come I'm sure. I am a bit surprised at the near-hysterical tone of some of them. Matt Welch gives it his famous "straw man" treatment , as have the most of the weblog elite (Ken Layne, Steven den Beste, et al.) A. Sullivan appears to have retracted a bit of his initial fury, conceding that Weisberg has a point about the impotence of the Awards' recipients:
In retrospect, with regard to this war, these people turned out to be pretty irrelevant. But there was no way we could have predicted that at the time, and under the circumstances, I think we were right to take no chances.
The charge of "irrelevance" is more or less accurate, and has the bonus of being, I imagine, the description least coveted by such people. Still, as is well known by those of us who walk among them, there are some people who are not on the New Yorker's payroll who are susceptible to these attitudes, irrelevant or not. I think it's great to be able to sic Christopher Hitchens on them when necessary. And, as I said, the time may come when we may need to refute them with more urgency.
My favorite Weisberg-response so far is from Ron Radosh, who points to the Nation's coverage of the "peace movement:"
[Liza Featherstone] notes that for a short while, the peace movement could avoid attacking a popular war at home by concentrating on what she calls "the humanitarian focus;" and like Noam Chomsky, make the argument that the bombing was going to produce starvation and prevent humanitarian aid and food from getting into Afghanistan. But now, she writes, the argument that the bombing "made the situation even worse" is falling apart, since now there are "reports that more food aid was entering Afghanistan." The poor left-wing peace movement; just when they thought they got an argument, reality interfered with it and they are left back at the beginning. Indeed, she quotes one activist who tells her "now the United States is helping, and the situation is dramatically improving." It is hard, one can see from her writing, to continue to attack the United States and to resist being in its corner this time around. No wonder their new tactic is now to "turn their attention to the 'war' at home;" to avoid the actual fighting and to attack the administration for "racist scapegoating and the frightening assaults on civil liberties." The Left, as usual, is not concerned with the issue of the necessity of fighting the war against terrorism; its real goal is to oppose the United States, and to use any and all arguments to create an antiwar movement that will interfere with our necessary and just war.I have no idea whether this attempted interference will prove to be "irrelevant" or not, but it's best to be prepared. (And, if the brief snatches of NPR that I have recently heard are representative, the anti-Israel subtext, at least, of Sontag's remarks on 9/11 have not been repudiated as effectively as one might hope.) Posted by Dr. Frank at December 6, 2001 04:12 PM | TrackBack