File 911: Idiotarians
Note: The World Wide Web is, like the web of a spider, ephemeral. Links shown below may have blown away, but, before giving up on them, be sure to check whether the articles can be located elsewhere via Google or have been preserved in the amber of the Internet Wayback Machine.
Stephen F. Hayes, "Accuracy in Media" (10/26/01); "Sensitivity Now Redux" (11/5/01). In the name of "sensitivity", the Society of Professional Journalists urges the media to kowtow to Moslem extremists - and responds to criticism is a Clinton-like manner.
James S. Robbins, "Press vs. Military" (10/29/01). National Public Radio announces that it will spy for the Taliban. No one seems surprised.
Robert Carleson & Peter Ferrera, "For Liberty?" (12/21/01). The ACLU takes sides in the war - and not ours.
Brian C. Anderson, "The Ineducable Left" (Feb. 2002). A look at the emerging theoreticians of the radical Left.
Michael Walzer, "Can There Be a Decent Left?" (3/14/02). A liberal political philosopher analyzes why the Left makes absurd and "indecent" attacks on the world's only superpower.
Daniel Pipes, "U.S. Arabs' Firebrand" (3/25/02). A portrait of the American-Arab Antidiscrimination Committee's increasingly prominent communications director, who combines loony leftism with Islamofascist apologetics.
Rod Dreher, "The PLO's Man" (4/3/02). Jesse Jackson has a long history of buttering up, and being buttered by, Yasser Arafat and other Islamofascists.
James S. Robbins, "9/11 Denial" (4/9/02). A strange book spins a yarn about how the attack on the Pentagon was faked by President Bush - and is a best seller in France!
Jonah Goldberg, "Representative Awful" (4/12/02). It isn't easy to be the most despicable member of Congress, but Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga) has clinched the title. How awful is she? A friend defends her by calling her a liar.
Tim Blair, "Land of the Deaf" (4/12/02). A survey of how Australian left wingers reacted to 9/11.
Jonathan V. Last, "Polling for Islam" (4/16/02). A farcical pseudo-poll tells us a bit about the mentality of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley, "Al Qaeda's Alibi Armory" (5/9/02). "If the statements of Protestant clerics and denominational bureaucrats are any indication, the current sex scandal in the Catholic Church is far from the only church story that needs further investigation. Indeed, terrorism finds in these quarters a kind of theological public-relations agency."
Stanley Kurtz, "Anti-Americanism in the Classroom" (5/16/02). Since 9/11, federal tax dollars have poured out more lavishly than ever to subsidize the pro-terrorist "establishment" in Middle Eastern Studies.
David Corn, "The September 11 X-Files" (5/30/02). A rundown of 9/11 conspiracy theories (from The Nation, of all places, but quite sensible).
Debra J. Saunders, "Delusions of Suppression" (6/19/02). All that is worth saying about the "Not in Our Name" statement issued by sundry leftist crackpots.
Shahar Smooha, "Terror with an Olive Branch" (6/21/02). An analysis of how terrorist groups strive to soften their images via delusively peaceful Web sites.
Catherine Seipp, "You've Lost Your Way, Baby" (9/30/02). A round-up of the irrationalities of organized feminism, including its response to 9/11. ". . . no tragedy is too great, no issue too important, not to be reduced to the most simple-minded identity politics. Those 343 firemen who sacrificed themselves at the Twin Towers? NOW is upset that there were no women among them."
Jonathan V. Last, "Left Behind" (10/11/02). An amused look at a "Prominent Citizens Oppose War With Iraq" conference, where the "Peace Movement" looks threadbare and forlorn.
Michelle Goldberg, "View from the Left: Peace Kooks" (10/17/02). Portraits of the International Action Center, principal organizer of anti-war protests and vigorous opponent of "any action against Saddam,including containment", and the equally loony "Not In Our Name Project". The author, not at all a conservative, fears that extremists will discredit opposition to the war, but perhaps they merely carry it to its logical conclusion.
Christopher Hitchens, "So Long, Fellow Travelers" (10/19/02). The author continues his good-bye to the Idiotarian Left, pointing to the absurdity of its de facto preference for evils over "lesser evils".
Preston McConkie, "Leftist Lies About the War" (12/27/02). "Renouncing U.S. interests is an article of faith among war protesters, and if that means abandoning the victims of tyranny as well, then it's a question of tough priorities - and accepting whatever collateral damage it takes to give them a warm feeling of moral superiority inside."
Victor Davis Hanson, "It's Not the Money, Stupid!" (1/3/03). An analysis of Senator Patty's Murray's theory that Osama bin Laden has won popular backing by building schools, roads and day-care centers.
Lee Harris, "Marx Without the Realism" (1/15/03). An analysis of how contemporary Marxism has degenerated into a "fantasy ideology" whose essence is irrational attacks on America.
Michael Kelly, "Marching With Stalinists" (1/22/03). "The left has hardened itself around the core value of a furious, permanent, reactionary opposition to the devil-state America, which stands as the paramount evil of the world and the paramount threat to the world, and whose aims must be thwarted even at the cost of supporting fascists and tyrants. Those who could not stomach this have left the left -- a few publicly, as did Hitchens and Rosenbaum, and many more, I am sure, in the privacy of their consciences."
Byron York, "Reds Still" (1/23/03). "Many on the left are trying to will themselves to believe that there is a massive, grass-roots, centrist opposition to war in Iraq rising in the heartland - and finding its voice in rallies like the one on January 18. Perhaps that sounds plausible to people who weren't there. But not to anyone who was."
Thor Halvorssen, "Comandante Chavez's Friends" (3/11/03). Venezuela's would-be dictator has been an outspoken friend of Saddam Hussein, yet he still attracts support from U.S. Congressmen.
Daniel J. Flynn, "How Strange" (3/17/03). "Why should it surprise anyone that a movement run by the lunatic fringe of American politics would attract a generous share of crackpots? If the Ku Klux Klan or the skinheads organized a rally, no one would express shock if a collection of weirdoes and hate-mongers attended to show support. When the Workers World Party ? oops, I mean International ANSWER ? sponsors an event, the media largely bypasses an explanation of the group's origins and denies the massive presence of political radicals at the gathering. That doesn't mean the back-story's not there, though."
Ion Mihai Pacepa, "Seeing Red" (3/18/03). A former communist intelligence officer points out the ties between old Soviet fronts and contemporary "peace" protests.
George F. Will, "Addressing the Naysayers" (3/19/03). "So Daschle's position is: America is 'forced to war' because presidential diplomacy failed to produce a broader coalition for war. With that descent into absurdity, Daschle would have forfeited his reputation for seriousness, if he had one."
David Frum "Unpatriotic Conservatives" (3/19/03). "There is, however, a fringe attached to the conservative world that cannot overcome its despair and alienation. The resentments are too intense, the bitterness too unappeasable. Only the boldest of them as yet explicitly acknowledge their wish to see the United States defeated in the War on Terror. But they are thinking about defeat, and wishing for it, and they will take pleasure in it if it should happen. They began by hating the neoconservatives. They came to hate their party and this president. They have finished by hating their country."
Fred Barnes, "Pious Denunciations" (3/21/03). "Sanctimonious left-wing musings by the top bishop are a punishment we're forced to suffer as Episcopalians. The same is true for members of all the mainline Protestant churches, whose national leaders routinely inflict their left-of-center views on the captive audience in the pews."
Eliana Johnson & Jamie Kirchik, "Postwar Delusion at Yale" (4/11/03); Eliana Johnson, "The Degeneration of the Anti-War Movement at Yale" (4/14/03). "On the evening of the historic day that Baghdad fell, Yale held a forum of professorial invective against the statesmanship that brought it about. Without skipping a beat, Yale’s anti-war professors, who yesterday claimed to oppose war in the interests of the Iraqi people, have now moved on to expressing lunatic conspiracy theories."
Andrew Bolt, "They Were Wrong" (4/14/03). A recounting of what Australian idiotarians predicted would happen in Iraq. "It is time we held them accountable. No more must they lightly skip from one disreputable cause to another - preaching woe in the first Gulf War, disaster in Afghanistan, apocalypse in Iraq - and always warning of the catastrophic consequences of resisting evil."
Mark Goldblatt, "Willful Ignorance" (4/23/03). "Concede American benevolence - concede, in other words, what cannot be denied by a reasonable observer - and the epistemological underpinning of radical politics crumbles to dust. Can Gore Vidal continue to publish once that concession is made? Can Noam Chomsky continue to deliver speeches? Can Tim Robbins even go out in public? In such circles, it's become a matter of self-preservation to posit America's essential evil. To posit, in short, a condition contrary to fact. Precisely because our policies seem so well intended, and their outcomes so often benign, critics who operate on the assumption of American malignancy must turn to conspiracy theorizing in lieu of inductive logic."
