This, from novelist Annie Lamott on TPM Cafe, is one of the more jaw-dropping posts I've read on any blog on any subject:
"Back to the paranoia: I am able to believe, about half the time, that Bush and Rove would be capable of orchestrating a second terrorist attack on America, if and when they deem it necessary to instill martial law, which they will." The phrase "over the top" doesn't quite seem to do it justice.
I've been thinking in recent days that the Huffington Post, for its all its advance hype (including from me) about celebrity blogging, has emerged as a consistently liberal site (despite contributions from a small group of conservatives). Now comes HuffPoster Richard Bradley Bradley to defend the site against criticism from Andrew Sullivan "that 'The Huffington Post is full of part-time bloggers calling for negotiating with al Qaeda, withdrawing from Iraq, and generally laying the blame for the mass murder of innocents on George Bush and Tony Blair.'
"Strong stuff. Andrew's an old friend, but this drive-by slander points up one of his intellectual lapses; though in virtually every other way an intellectually rigorous thinker, he has a longstanding habit of caricaturing liberals, taking the most extreme examples of wacky radicals and lumping them together as 'the left in America.'
"Consider this quote from a September 16, 2001 column Andrew wrote in the London Sunday Times: 'The middle part of the country -- the great red zone that voted for Bush -- is clearly ready for war. The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead -- and may well mount a fifth column.'
"He was referring to the war in Afghanistan, about which there wasn't a huge amount of left-wing opposition. Even if there had been, that quote happens to suggest that people who opposed the war --the 'decadent left' -- are traitors, as if one could not be a patriot and be against the war. Would the same litmus test apply to Iraq?
"Now, I can't say that I've read everything on the Huffington Post, and sure, it tilts in the liberal direction. But I don't think I've seen anyone advocate negotiating with al Qaeda. . . .
"The larger point is that Andrew's portrait of HuffPo as a loony left-wing sandbox is an intellectually dishonest trick, performed by lumping together the most extreme examples and using them to characterize the entire site."
Andrew responds:
"Yes, there are some good posts on Huffington Post. In my cranky diss of the place, I cited one such by Irshad Manji. Anywhere Eugene Volokh contributes has something worthwhile in it. But even Rich B. has to concede that the place is dominated by paranoid Hollywood liberalism; and maybe it was reading guff like this, and this, and this on the day terrorists murdered dozens of Londoners that made me cranky. My claim that the blog is full of people in favor of 'withdrawing from Iraq, and generally laying the blame for the mass murder of innocents on George Bush and Tony Blair' is fully documented by those posts. As for negotiating with al Qaeda operatives, I concede hyperbole. Deepak Chopra just wants us to give them a hug."
