The Left
Pinter passes
Harold Pinter may have been an innovative playwright, but in death he is receiving accolades as a great moral force in politics as well. Pinter’s political views were in fact fanatical, irresponsible and utterly without nuance. (See my previous remarks here.) As Johann Hari reminds us, Pinter was an apologist for Serbian fascism and ultra-nationalism, going so far as to
Penn fallout
I don’t usually cite the New York Post‘s Page Six, but that’s where celebrity flaps are covered, and Sean Penn is nothing if not a celebrity. So it’s good to see someone pointing out James Kirchick’s entirely correct assessment of the recent Penn-Castro-Chávez affair in The Advocate. Says Kirchick: “Gay rights are human rights, as Milk said, and Penn discredits both
Ayers’s two cents
About as unconvincing as it gets. Under the guise of soul-searching, Ayers offers an exercise in self-flattery. He and his comrades in the Weather Underground, we’re to believe, were idealists, exquisitely concerned with the value of human life. No mention, of course, that they subscribed to an authoritarian ideology, Marxism-Leninism, and had outright contempt for the principles of liberal democracy.
Brains at the UN
Having written favorably during the campaign about Obama foreign policy adviser Susan Rice, I wanted to express my delight over her appointment as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Just as John Bolton represented the worst that America had to offer the organization, Rice represents the best. John Nichols of The Nation says otherwise and is bashing Rice already — this
Penn sucks up again
There’s little I can say about Sean Penn’s fluff “interview” with Hugo Chávez and Raúl Castro that Marc Cooper hasn’t said. Some have suggested that I tend to overstate the influence of actor-activists like Penn. If anything, I’ve understated it. Penn’s “journalism” is now being published on the cover of The Nation, right at the moment when audiences are swooning
Barack baiting
[Cross-posted at Z Word.] John Pilger, the ultra-left New Statesman columnist, infamously said, in regard to the 2004 Iraq insurgency, that “we cannot afford to be choosy” — i.e., that people of the left must support the Baath/jihadi assassins and bombers because they are arrayed against the forces of Empire. He was hardly alone in this view; Arundhati Roy and George
Power’s strengths
During primary season, Samantha Power said an unguarded thing about Hillary Clinton and had to step away from the Obama campaign. It’s too bad the American public knows her name thanks largely to this inconsequential episode. One can gauge Power’s caliber partly from the ignorant bile she’s attracted from the far right and the far left. During the campaign, Spectator
Chávez: another thing
A pro-Chávez commenter writes: Evil President Hugo Chavez is one of those scary Socialists Senator McCain warns you about – those who care more for the wretched than for the rich. This Washington Post report of a Miami criminal investigation tells us much about Chávez’s supposed concern for the poor: Transcripts of the taped conversations reveal intricate details of the collaboration