The Left
Zinn’s legacy
“Dissent is the highest form of patriotism.” This was one of Howard Zinn’s famous bon mots, but heaven forbid that a liberal like me should dissent from the unanimous chorus of praise from the left in the wake of Zinn’s death last week. Michael Kazin’s withering 2004 critique of A People’s History of the United States, published in Dissent no
Mahathir Mohamed, from the heart
I think this qualifies as a remarkable statement: The Jews had always been a problem in European countries. They had to be confined to ghettoes and periodically massacred. But still they remained, they thrived and they held whole Governments to ransom. Even after their massacre by the Nazis of Germany, they survived to continue to be a source of even
Lerner on Obama
Josh Marshall and Marc Cooper make good sense on the Massachusetts aftermath, and although I remain a staunch Obama supporter, I can agree with this from Cooper: Obama conceded way too much power to a feckless and literally corrupt Congress. He pandered to such dolts as Baucus and Lieberman instead of going to the Hill early on and sternly warning
Haiti reflections
About 15 years ago, when the Clinton administration sent troops to Haiti to restore the democratically elected left-populist Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power, I joined a small group of hard-left demonstrators in a number of pitiful marches against the intervention. For the life of me, today I cannot tell you why. George Packer, writing in Dissent, supported the intervention, and soon
Judeosphere is back
After a two-year hiatus. Always a must-read on the myopia and frequent lunacy of activist anti-Zionism.
Afghan reality checks
From reading Robert Greenwald’s antiwar website Rethink Afghanistan, or the work of pacifist Derrick Crowe, one of RA’s house bloggers, you would think that Obama’s plan is to reenact the My Lai massacre on a regular basis and maybe drink the blood of the victims in ritualistic triumph. Crowe writes: I held my nose and voted for President Obama last
Kill the bill?
Um, no, says Nate Silver, one of the most keen and thorough minds in progressive American politics. More of Silver’s case here. And here. Rather than rehash his analysis I’ll just quote his conclusion: that the Senate health care bill, even with all its considerable shortcomings, could be “the largest social welfare program to be implemented since the Great Society.”
Obama’s Nobel lecture
Ta-Nehisi Coates nails it: I didn’t object to George Bush because he claimed that there was “evil” in the world. I objected to George Bush because there was so much evil that he didn’t see, and he was awful at prosecuting the evil he did see. I objected to George Bush’s foreign policy because it married a freshman’s view of