InstaMcCarthy: Yet Another Smear

Well, that didn’t take long. As predictably as the tides, via Greenwald I see that Glenn Reynolds has flat-out compared Mearsheimer and Walt to David Duke. Obviously, comparing scholars to a Grand Wizard of the Klan solely for publishing a paper whose conclusions you disagree with–with absolutely no evidence that either of them remotely share Duke’s fascist worldview–is beneath contempt, but par for the course where Reynolds is concerned. I can’t put it better than Dan Drezner, although I admittedly in this case I would put it in nastier form:

I didn’t say this explicitly in my last post, but let me do so here: Walt and Mearsheimer should not be criticized as anti-Semites, because that’s patently false. They should be criticized for doing piss-poor, monocausal social science.*

To repeat, the main empirical problems with the article are that :

A) They fail to demonstrate that Israel is a net strategic liability;

B) They ascribe U.S. foreign policy behavior almost exclusively to the activities of the “Israel Lobby”; and

C) They omit consideration of contradictory policies and countervailing foreign policy lobbies.

The paper is in many respects shoddy and tendentious, and should be criticized on its merits as vigorously one pleases. But to compare two distinguished scholars to a vicious racist and anti-Semite with no supporting evidence whatsoever is utterly reprehensible.

To further underscore Reynolds’ mendacity, let’s compare his reaction when Harvard’s President made, if anything, more ill-informed and tautological assertions about female inferiority to justify his awful record in the hiring and retention of female faculty. If you can put someone in the Klan for disagreeing with you about American foreign policy toward Israel, surely vigorous (but far less severe) criticism of Summers’ views by people who know far more about the subject than he does is acceptable, right? Nope: his reaction, of course, was to “indeed” a post whining about how unfairly poor Larry was being treated.

So to summarize Glenn Reynolds’ views on academic inquiry: if you agree with Glenn Reynolds, you should be insulated from any but the mildest criticism. If you disagree with Glenn Reynolds, you can be baselessly compared to David Duke. The usefulness of this standard I leave to your judgment.