Two pieces serendipitously juxtaposed on the Op-Ed page today, Timothy Garton Ash’s restrained suggestion that liberals restore honor to their unjustly tarnished name, and Maureen Dowd’s mélange of ad-hominem attacks, irrelevant insults, and twisted logic that make her the Rush Limbaugh of the left, show why liberals have a hard time reclaiming their once-respected name.
Dowd, the superannuated sixties kid, ignores facts and shreds people she doesn’t like. Her trash can has equal room for the uncertain Patterson and the happily evil Blagojevich, as if there were no moral difference between Hamlet and Iago. It’s from the left, but hardly liberal. That’s one reason the right has been successful in trashing the name and why we dare not speak it.
This is the sneering, snarling, shouting-down legacy of the “new left” that not only doesn’t respect opposing points of view, but refuses to tolerate them. Until the left starts to act liberal again it doesn’t deserve the word.
