An article written by an idiot, to an entire party of idiots.
Hey! Ho! The wicked Left is dead!
Paging Howard Dean...please pick up the red courtesy phone!
The title of this should be: "Vapid! Vapid! Vapid! Ministrating Homolies to Al Gore Zombies"
Hhhhhuuuuhhh????
I wonder if this guy got some comeuppance during the recent riots in France? It doesn't sound like they have much to feel superior about.
Poor left is even getting dissed by the French now.
Maybe the French creep hasnt heard from Susan Sontag (the execrable anti-Western anti-American female version of Noam Chomsky) because she recently died.
Or is he too busy fondling what remains of the American "left" to check the obituaries???
Much flurry, signifying nothing.
"Nothing made a more lasting impression during my journey through America than the semi-comatose state in which I found the American left."
Semi-Comatose American Left...
Will someone post the picture of the frog wearing a beret and puffing on a Gauloise?
Leftists are Americans? Who knew.
I might be mistaken, but it seems to me that a large part of the country is waiting for this.
I believe he is mistaken and the last few elections demonstrate this. But I hope the American left continues on.
"And how could one not yearn for a petition that would address our common nausea when faced with the spectacle of a diabetic, blind, nearly deaf old man, pushed in his wheelchair to the San Quentin execution chamber in California?"
And in typical leftist fashion, ignore the victim he brutally murdered.
Re what Frenchie said "What do such killjoys make of the Norman Mailer of the 1960s? Of the Arthur Miller of The Crucible?"
Here's some history The Nation will never publish ...
A Conference in New York
In March 1949, New York's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel played host to one of the strangest gatherings in American history. Less than four years after Allied troops had liberated Hitler's concentration camps, 800 prominent literary and artistic figures congregated in the Waldorf to call for peace at any price with Stalin, whose own gulag had just been restocked with victims of his latest purge. Americans, including Lillian Hellman, Aaron Copland, Arthur Miller, and a young Norman Mailer, joined with European and Soviet delegates to repudiate "US warmongering." Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich told the delegates that "a small clique of hatemongers" was preparing a global conflagration; he urged progressive artists to struggle against the new "Fascists'' who were seeking world domination. American panelists echoed the Russian composer's fear of a new conflict. Playwright Clifford Odets denounced the ``enemies of Man'' and claimed the United States had been agitated into ``a state of holy terror'' by fraudulent reports of Soviet aggression; composer Copland declared "the present policies of the American Government will lead inevitably into a third world war."
The Waldorf conference marked another step in the Communist Information Bureau's (Cominform) campaign to shape Western opinion. A series of Soviet-sponsored cultural conferences beginning in September 1948 called for world peace and denounced the policies of the Truman administration. The conference at the Waldorf-Astoria, however, was the first to convene in a Western country and, not coincidentally, was also the first to meet organized and articulate opposition.
The Cominform could hardly have picked a riskier place than New York City to stage a Stalinist peace conference. New York's large ethnic neighborhoods were filled with refugees from Communism, and its campuses and numerous cultural and political journals employed hundreds of politically left-leaning men and women who had fought in the ideological struggles over Stalinism that divided American labor unions, college faculties, and cultural organizations before World War II.
Stealing the Show
A handful of liberal and socialist writers, led by philosophy professor Sydney Hook, saw their chance to steal a little of the publicity expected for the Waldorf peace conference. A fierce ex-Communist himself, Hook was then teaching at New York University and editing a socialist magazine called The New Leader. Ten years earlier he and his mentor John Dewey had founded a controversial group called the Committee for Cultural Freedom, which attacked both Communism and Nazism. He now organized a similar committee to harass the peace conference in the Waldorf-Astoria.
And I cannot count how many times I was told there has never been an authentic "left" in the United States, in the European sense.
But at the end of the day, my progressive friends, you may coin ideas in whichever way you like. The fact is: You do have a right. This right, in large part thanks to its neoconservative battalion, has brought about an ideological transformation that is both substantial and striking.
No,we have a left and a center. </sarcasm>What we have, of course, is a left which calls itself "objective journalism," and what that left calls a "right" which would be entirely happy not having to concern itslef with such things as Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. And would now be able to do so, if not for the Jimmy Carter left which pulled the plug on the Shah of Iran and gave North Korea uranium.
"For a European intellectual used to the battlefield of ideas..."
The struggle between total communism and national socialism. That is his "battlefield of ideas". What a putz!
In the end, it comes across as a mildly poetic rant by a self-proclaimed "intellectual", filled with grandiose-sounding phrases, liberally sprinkled with the catch phrases most often found in the current Liberal talking points.
Like cotton-candy, it boils down to a small, sickenly-sweet morsel, that is nutritionally worthless, overpriced, and not really good for you anyway.