Stop Me Before I Vote Again

... Judt, that is, not Blair, in the London Review:

Bush’s Useful Idiots
the Strange Death of Liberal America

Why have American liberals acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy? Why have they so little to say about Iraq, about Lebanon, or about reports of a planned attack on Iran? Why has the administration’s sustained attack on civil liberties and international law aroused so little opposition or anger from those who used to care most about these things?...

... the willingness of so many American pundits and commentators and essayists to roll over for Bush’s doctrine of preventive war; to abstain from criticising the disproportionate use of air power on civilian targets in both Iraq and Lebanon; and to stay coyly silent in the face of Condoleezza Rice’s enthusiasm for the bloody ‘birth pangs of a new Middle East’, makes more sense when one recalls their backing for Israel: a country which for fifty years has rested its entire national strategy on preventive wars, disproportionate retaliation, and efforts to redesign the map of the whole Middle East.

Now that's telling it like it is. I'll even forgive Tony his kind words for the likes of Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, and Felix Rohatyn -- Felix Rohatyn! -- who are described in passing as "the critical intellectual core, the steady moral centre of American public life." Blech! But as the poet says, aliquando bonus dormitat Homerus -- even good old Homer is sometimes asleep at the switch.