Bad Apples from Anne Applebaum

We were so busy yesterday that we didn't even have the opportunity to respond to the bizarrely twisted logic of Anne Applebaum's column in yesterday's Washington Post, a newspaper that's really been going out of its way lately to undermine the Bush Administration; give aid and comfort to the enemy; and eviscerate our intelligence gathering apparatus by joining with the NYTimes and a bunch of disgruntled spies, and ex-spies, and maybe even a U.S. Senator, to give away all the details of our efforts to Al Qaeda and anyone else who's interested.

Applebaum, playing the moral equivalency tune so favored by the Gramscian left, tries to equate the absolutely false story put out last year by Newsweek (owned by the Washington Post, BTW) concerning Korans allegedly flushed down the toilet by GI guards at Guantanamo with the current Cartoon-gate flap. Both, she reasons, were examples of freedom of the press causing Islamic rioting. But she questions why right-wing blogs essentially support the Danish cartoonists' right to free speech and freedom of expression while they trashed Newsweek for the same.

Or, as she puts it:

The moral is: We defend press freedom if it means Danish cartoonists' right to caricature Muhammad; we don't defend press freedom if it means the mainstream media's right to investigate the U.S. government.

In other words, right-wing blogs are hypocritical. Excuse us? We dumped on Newsweek for reporting a FACTUALLY WRONG allegation that led to the usual mullah-manufactured riots. Not for "investigating." (Which is for the media just a code word for manufacturing malicious gossip about the Bushies.) And that was bad?

Or as Power Line puts it:

So, were we more critical of false charges leveled by an American magazine against the American armed forces than of a dozen innocuous drawings in a Danish newspaper? Guilty as charged. We were.

Read Power Line's entire, excellent semi-fisking of Applebaum's nonsensical column here. The story includes a link to the original Applebaum column.

We have been amazed over the years at how almost any article, column, observation from the left on almost any topic eventually blames every single problem on the right side of the aisle. The Gramscian left seems to have lost its sophistication entirely when it comes to media manipulation. Leftist writers and journalists have successfully transformed political analysis into a non-stop assembly-line for manufacturing non sequiturs, spewing out wildly unfounded and unreasoned observations as fast as they can work a QWERTY keyboard. This is what happens to any political movement that walls itself off from serious debate with its opponents, and the intellectual rigor that such debating requires.

By extension, this is also why the academic left is very careful either to keep conservative speakers off campus, or guarantee that leftist goon squads will shout them down when they do manage to slip in. If students could actually sit and listen to any conservative for an uninterrupted half hour without the presence of infiltrating brown shirts, their weakly leftist certain certainties, fed to them continuously and unchallenged by leftist professors, would immediately begin to evaporate. The leftists know it which is why they keep the conservatives out.

The emperor had no clothes. The leftists have no case. It's a simple as that. Applebaum's improbable analogies are only the latest and most public example of this. And the public is gradually tuning this out. If the right is so bad and so wrong, the left needs to supply an alternative vision. But they can't because they don't have one. So it therefore must be the fault of the right. Right?