LITMIR.BIZ

       Lunacy on the left — and some sanity

       Sunday, October 21, 2001

      On any important issue, you can expect to hear a vigorous argument between liberals and conservatives. But when it comes to dealing with the Sept. 11 attacks, the most noteworthy debate is the one going on among people on the left and other people on the left.

      In that discussion, some commentators have shown a firm grasp of reality and unapologetic patriotism. Others, however, have been striving mightily to make themselves into national laughingstocks.

      There are plenty of conservatives, of course, who have used the opportunity to permanently disqualify themselves from ever being taken seriously again — including Ann Coulter, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. But for sheer volume of imbecility, it’s hard to outdo the blame-America-first crowd of mindless peaceniks and twitchy conspiracy theorists. The New Republic, a moderately liberal political weekly, has been running a regular feature called “Idiocy Watch,” highlighting particularly lamebrained comments, and the forum has so far been dominated by lefties.

      In the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorism, writer Susan Sontag found herself barraged with criticism for decrying the “self-righteous drivel and outright deception being peddled by public figures and TV commentators,” while assailing our “cowardly” approach to war.

      Weeks later, her bout of temporary insanity is beginning to look permanent. “I don’t like throwing biscuits and peanut butter and jam and napkins, little snack packages produced in a small city in Texas, so we can say, ‘Look, we’re doing something humanitarian,’ ” sneers Sontag in an interview with the online magazine Salon. She fears that the government is about to deport all Muslims and declare martial law, which is about as likely as Susan Sontag being appointed secretary of defense.

      Humorist Michael Moore, who made the anti-capitalist movie “Roger & Me,” finds reasons to yuk it up. “Finally, the bombs are raining down on Afghanistan, and as Martha Stewart says, that’s a good thing,” he brays on his Web site. “Yesiree, I say, BOMBS AWAY! Rockets red glare. We are all WHITE WITH FOAM!” I don’t know about you, but I laughed till my ribs hurt.

      Professional moviemaker and amateur paranoid Oliver Stone saw the terrorist attacks as the fault of the Republican Party. “Does anybody make a connection between the 2000 election and the events of Sept. 11?” he asked at a recent panel discussion in New York, which I take to mean that the terrorists were bitter that Al Gore didn’t win.

      Stone searched hard and found something good to say about Osama bin Laden and Co.: “The new world order is about order and control. This attack was pure chaos, and chaos is energy. All great changes have come from people or events that were initially misunderstood, and seemed frightening, like madmen.”

      Does it seem odd to you that Oliver Stone would feel affinity with madmen? Me neither.

      Fortunately, you can find plenty of left-of-center commentators who prefer their country and its ideals over those of the enemy. At the New York forum, writer Christopher Hitchens lambasted Stone as a “moral idiot, as well as an intellectual idiot.” The attack, he said, was “state-supported mass murder, using civilians as missiles.”

      The Nation magazine, perhaps the best-known organ of leftist thought, published a column by Katha Pollitt on why she refused to let her daughter decorate their living-room window with an American flag — which Mom regards as a symbol of “jingoism and vengeance and war.” (The daughter retorts that the flag “means standing together and honoring the dead and saying no to terrorism.” Where does she get such ideas?)

      But many other Nation contributors have taken a sharply different view from Pollitt’s. Writing in the latest issue, Princeton professor Richard Falk agrees with those who fault the U.S. as an imperialist power, but says that critique is “dangerously inappropriate in addressing the challenge posed by the massive crime against humanity committed on Sept. 11.” The American role in world affairs, he argues, “cannot be addressed so long as this movement of global terrorism is at large and prepared to carry on with its demonic work.”

      Nation columnist Eric Alterman has no charity toward those who feel no patriotism at a time like this. Some of them, he says, “really do hate their country. These leftists find nothing to admire in its magnificent Constitution; its fitful history of struggle toward greater freedom for women, minorities and other historically oppressed groups; and its values, however imperfectly or hypocritically manifested in everyday life.” For Alterman, “patriotism requires no apologies.”

      Those who feel differently — who can’t take their own country’s side when it is under attack by murderous foreign theocrats — should find themselves disgraced and ignored long after this struggle is over. In wartime, as leftists like Alterman understand, stupidity is not forgivable.

Should we use torture to stop terrorism?

       Thursday, November 1, 2001

      It’s the sort of question that, way back in spring semester, would have made for a good late-night bull session in a college dorm room: If an atomic bomb were about to be detonated in Manhattan, would police be justified in torturing the terrorist who planted it to learn its location and save the city? But today, the debates are starting up in the higher reaches of the federal government. And this time, the answers really matter.

      Last week, The Washington Post reported great frustration in the FBI and Justice Department over the stubborn silence of four suspected terrorists arrested after Sept. 11, including one who wanted lessons in steering a commercial aircraft but had no interest in taking off or landing. Unless they can administer truth serum or torture, law enforcement officials fear, they may never get information about planned attacks that still are in the works. American lives could therefore be lost.

      The question posed above is easy to answer. No one could possibly justify sacrificing millions of lives to spare a murderous psychopath a brief spell of intense pain, which he can end by his own choice. When the threat is so gigantic and the solution so simple, we are all in the camp of the Shakespeare character who said, “There is no virtue like necessity.”

      This indulgence of reality requires

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