Your Liberal Media At Work
At some point the chattering classes will wake up and realize that the so-called liberal media has an awfully soft heart when it comes to neo-conservatives. One case in point is the Book Review section of the New York Times. This is supposedly an exemplary purview of the so-called liberals—a weekly rundown of important books by important authors and, of course, reviewed by important authors.
Two weeks ago, the Book Review ran a long, fawning review by Niall Ferguson of a book by Philip Bobbitt. This was the book featured on the cover of the Book Review section. Both Ferguson and Bobbitt are the sort who, when faced with a relatively small band of murderous thugs, would undo the niceties of modern democratic societies that distinguish them from societies run by tyrants and thugs—privacy, jury trials, limits on searches and seizures in criminal cases. Or, to put it another way, they would destroy much of what makes modern civilizations civilized in order to save them.
Now the Times is not completely in thrall to those who read Leviathan and consider it to be the alpha and omega for the powers of the sovereign. Indeed, Sunday's Book Review had this rejoinder:
There was a dark, even Strangelovian wit to your choice for the April 13 Book Review cover. You ran a review by a neoimperialist who praises a book by an "Atlantic man" (also a "Homo atlanticus redux") who is "dapper," related to Lyndon Baines Johnson, and whose book will be "read with pleasure by men of a certain age, class and education from Manhattan's Upper East Side to London's West End." And what does this "most profound book" recommend? Why, intensive surveillance and torture! This "superbly intelligent" volume is evidently a "manifesto for a new Atlanticism" that will be "garlanded with prizes." What rare entertainment on your part! Wickedly funny and marvelous stuff, really.
The writer of the letter is Richard Vallely, whose work on American politics, while hardly the stuff of a future Fifth International, is consistently well-informed and well-reasoned. In a sane polity, thinkers like Valelly would be getting publicity tours for their books and plum review assignments and op-ed slots for their other work, and bloody-minded sorts like Bobbitt and Ferguson would have to resort to pithy letters to the editor.
Labels: bloody-minded twits, New York Times Book Review, Niall Ferguson, Philip Bobbitt, Richard Valelly, so-called liberal media
