The Left
Hugo Chávez, thug
Jose Miguel Vivanco and Daniel Wilkinson of Human Rights Watch write about their experience being thrown out of Venezuela for the crime of criticizing the Chávez government. Here’s one lovely detail: [A] close Chávez ally in the legislature suggested on national TV that the two of us had been sharing a single hotel room where we were indulging our “weaknesses.”
Roy’s purity
Novelist and activist Arundhati Roy, easily one of the world’s most overrated political thinkers, has no problem supporting the Iraqi insurgency, Maoist thugs in jungles of India, and Pakistan-backed militants in Kashmir. But she cannot bring herself to support Barack Obama. Somehow, some way, the Obama campaign will crawl on without her help.
Ayers PS
Inevitably, a “Support Bill Ayers” website has sprung up, with over a thousand academics signing on to a statement that Ayers “participated passionately in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s, as did hundreds of thousands of Americans.” Matt Yglesias and Michael Tomasky strenuously object, and good for them. As I’ve already argued, Ayers and his comrades did
The Ayers issue at a glance
Sarah Palin, unable to make the case for her own fitness to hold high office, has kicked off the widely expected, 11th-hour smear campaign against Obama as a friend of terrorists, namely ex-Weather Underground leader William Ayers. On the trail Palin mentioned this NY Times piece by Scott Shane, ignoring of course Shane’s main conclusion: that the Obama-Ayers connection is tenuous
Nader’s casual racism
In June, Ralph Nader accused Barack Obama of wanting to “talk white.” Last Friday on Bill Maher, Nader played the racial condescension card once again while making the (defensible) case against sending additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal regions. Now, I’m really ashamed that someone from a third-world background like Barack Obama is so unbelievably insensitive about the history
Amateur hour at Tikkun
Tikkun magazine, for which I interned in the early ’90s, has published an article by the pseudonymous Israel Shamir, a notorious antisemite and arguably a neo-Nazi. The subject is terrorism, Israel and Palestine. This is sad, because Tikkun originated as a sane voice on the left, dedicated to getting beyond crude and demagogic thinking on the Middle East. Now they
Cohen on Palin
There’s been much to admire in Nick Cohen’s savaging of the George Galloway-John Pilger wing of the left in Britain. But to me, the point of all this, and the reason I launched this blog almost exactly three years ago, was to shore up liberalism and social-democratic politics against attacks from the know-nothing left and the know-nothing right. Cohen has
Rage Against … the Machine, Obama, whatever
David Carr reports on Rage Against the Machine’s protests at both the Republican and Democratic National Conventions. According to Rage and its delusional followers, there is no difference between Obama and McCain. I suppose they’re waiting around for the Democratic candidate to champion Che and Mumia and the writing of crackpots like William Blum, as Rage’s website does. Way to