The Unbearable Lightness of Wingnuttery

Perhaps the most striking thing about Marty Peretz’s unspeakably atrocious Wall Street Journal op-ed is how little actual content is in the thing. With its obsession with lineage and social status trivia (not to mention prose in which pomposity desperately seeks to fill in the holes left by vacuity of the ideas), it seems to have been parachuted in from the pre-meritocracy era of Harvard. But given that what little argument remains once you boil off the stuff about “high-born American Stalinists” consists of staggeringly dishonest cliches, he’s probably better off discussing family background:

The blogosphere Democrats, whose victory Mr. Lamont’s will be if Mr. Lamont wins, have made Iraq the litmus test for incumbents. There are many reasonable, and even correct, reproofs that one may have for the conduct of the war. They are, to be sure, all retrospective. But one fault cannot be attributed to the U.S., and that is that we are on the wrong side. We are at war in a just cause, to protect the vulnerable masses of the country from the helter-skelter ideological and religious mass-murderers in their midst. Our enemies are not progressive peasants as was imagined three and four decades ago.

Pretty much every word there is stupid, a malicious lie, or both. There is, first of all, no litmus test–the “blogosphere Democrats” actively support many candidates who supported and/or still support the Iraq war, and there is no systematic campaign against even blue-state war supporters. The idea that critiques of the war can only be “retrospective” is also a flagrant lie–many people in fact correctly predicted the Bush administration’s incompetence and unseriousness about reconstruction, and indeed the latter was the only plausible inference to be drawn from the administration’s policies and public statements–but also beside the point, since Lieberman argued in the same pages that Democrats should not be permitted even retrospective criticism of the President. The idea that the “fault cannot be attributed to the U.S.” is quite remarkable–I’ve never heard the theory that a country cannot be held responsible for the direct effects of its foreign policy before. The stuff about “progressive peasants” is simply a disgraceful smear by implication, suggestion that the only reason to oppose this disastrous war is active support of the theocratic forces in Iraq. I don’t believe that Peretz supports an Iranian-backed Shiite theocracy with limited capacity, even if this kind of Iraqi state is the virtually inevitable outcome of the policies he supports. And all of this is tied to a larger smear, with the discussions of 1972 intended to convey the message that the opposition to the Iraq War means opposition to virtually all uses of American force, although there is no evidence whatsoever that Lamont, or most liberal bloggers, hold such a view.

The distorting fog being blown by a small number reactionary nominal “Democrats” who devote most of their writings to attacking other Democrats–and the way in which right-wing bloggers, understanding full well its intention, celebrate Peretz’s op-ed–makes clear what’s really at stake here.

…Steve M. with more about Peretz’s theories of blood guilt.

…as MJD notes in comments, Lieberman (or at least his flunkies) is now claiming that when he said that Democrats criticize the President, oppose torture, etc., they do so at “the Nation’s peril,” he was really arguing that they were doing so at their political peril. Right.