Update 12:49 Or, y’know, go to Ezra’s and read the same conclusion without the whiny puppy-baby sniveling. Either way.
It’s getting to the point where receiving a crisp new copy of The New Republic in my mailbox is less fun than getting those “Have You Seen This Child?” flyers and the cable/electric bill combo that always comes at the same time, and checking their website is a weekly duty of impossible misery. The only way I can read the TNR blog at this point is to close my eyes and think of England, and now that I’ve said that, closing my eyes would probably make the reading a whole lot pleasanter.
Anyway, the latest offender is a ball-shatteringly offensive editorial from Friday (I told you I don’t read the thing regularly), in which the Darfur genocide is used as a tool to bash liberals. I, personally, support military intervention in Darfur, but I understand the reasons that cause some of my idelogical allies to withhold judgment. Frankly, TNR has reduced itself to a caricature of warmongers at this point, snarking implicitly against those of us who have always opposed the war in Iraq as being pussified bleeding-hearts (and make no mistake: to TNR, you can’t support action in Darfur if you opposed the Iraq war).
Which leads me to Jonathan Chait.
On Monday, he published an article bemoaning the blogosphere’s opposition to Joseph Lieberman. It’s a monumentally foolish piece, which as near as I can tell comes down to “I disagree with the ‘crazed, ignorant ideological cannibals’ on the left, and they oppose Lieberman, so I must support Lieberman.” That, or his fear that Lieberman losing means an end to Democrat hawkishness, which is I think one of the big appeals to most of us leftists.
I have seen elsewhere that this article launched a small war between Chait, Kos and Atrios. I’ll save you the gore, but here’s where it more or less ended:”
But the disposition of the left blogosphere toward TNR is suggestive of its paranoid mentality. They cannot see gradations. They cannot see differences between individuals within an institution. (This is the same problem with their unrelenting hostility toward the DLC, some of whose members are much more liberal than others.) The lefty blogosphere is simply unable to process the fact that TNR has published lots of extremely sharp attacks on Bush, and lots of genuinely liberal commentary, from the very beginning. That stuff is 80 percent of the political commentary we publish. They disagree with the other 20 percent, and they should. The problem is that they have no mental category for an institution that agrees with them 80 percent of the time.
“The would-be Grover Norquists of the left fashion themselves as shrewd political tacticians. In fact, the conservative activists have been able to move the political center toward them in large part because they understood the difference between someone who agrees with them 80 percent of the time and someone who agrees with them 0 percent of the time. To judge them solely on their issue platform misses this important point. This is what I meant when wrote that the new New Left is dangerous and fanatical.”
Except that TNR doesnt agree with us 80 percent of the time. There are entire issues of the magazine in which every article until the arts section is about foreign policy. And we on the New Left (should such a thing actually exist) regard the TNR view on foriegn policy as being misguided-unto-immoral. So yeah, I’m sorry if Duncan Black made you cry.