First Beinart. Then Anderson. Now Peretz.
I think the link to this article on Drudge took the New Republic site down for a few hours today.

I used to subscribe to the magazine. Discovering it in high school was an intellectually thrilling experience. I even read Stanley Kaufman's film reviews. To imagine what my parents must have thought I was doing when I would spend hours upon hours in the bathroom! Ah, youth.

If there were no internet, I'd probably still be subscribing to it. I guess it's not fair to call the writers/opinion makers at the magazine liberals, since they haven't really been in some time. But it's not a conservative magazine (though it once was considered the prime organ of the emerging neoconservative movement, when Sullivan ran it...hard magazine to pigeon-hole).

Now Marty Peretz jumps on the "liberals, let's take our medicine" bandwagon.

I know Simon said the stakes here at our blog are low. But maybe he's selling us short. Peretz is either reading this blog, because it looks like he's plagiarized Simon here, or this is common knowledge:

But he [Bush] may be the first president who apparently does not see individual people in racial categories or sex categories. White or black, woman or man, just as long as you're a conservative. That is also an expression of liberation from bias.

Regardless of how you feel about the rest of the piece, it contains a clear-eyed and important discussion about Dems, liberals and race.

Then Peretz comments on liberal sympathies for Castro and other revolutionaries. Peretz seems to be making a similar point vis a vis the questionable moral distinction between fascists and communists that I attempted to make in a little-noticed and hardly remarked upon post about an obscure right-wing propaganda website:

But let's face it: It's hard to get a candid conversation going about Cuba with one [a liberal]. The heavily documented evidence of Fidel Castro's tyranny notwithstanding, he still has a vestigial cachet among us. After all, he has survived Uncle Sam's hostility for more than 45 years. And, no, the Viet Cong didn't really exist. It was at once Ho Chi Minh's pickax and bludgeon in the south. Pose this question at an Upper West Side dinner party: What was worse, Nazism or Communism? Surely, the answer will be Nazism ... because Communism had an ideal of the good. This, despite the fact that communist revolutions and communist regimes murdered ever so many more millions of innocents and transformed the yearning of many idealists for equality into the brutal assertion of evil, a boot stamping on the human face forever.

His strongest words, with which he ends the piece:

It [complaining, gloomy predictions about Iraq] is a permanent affliction of the liberal mind. It is not a symptom; it is a condition. And it is a condition related to the desperate hopes liberals have vested in the United Nations. That is their lodestone. But the lodestone does not perform. It is not a magnet for the good. It performs the magic of the wicked. It is corrupt, it is pompous, it is shackled to tyrants and cynics. It does not recognize a genocide when the genocide is seen and understood by all. Liberalism now needs to be liberated from many of its own illusions and delusions. Let's hope we still have the strength.

Ouch. I share Peretz feelings about the United Nations as it exists today. It was when I first started really thinking about this execrable institution that I began to question liberal precepts about foreign policy.

Maybe after "beat up the liberals" week ends in the liberal press, next week will be "buy a beleaguered liberal a drink" week. So guys, what's your poison?
- posted by Anonymous @ Friday, February 18, 2005