I really need to stop reading lefty British publications. It’s a bad, bad habit of mine.

Not that this naive American hasn’t learned all sorts of fascinating things
about the United States, the September 11 atrocity, and world politics.
Without the London Review of Books, I would have had
no idea that we had it coming.
Without The Guardian, I wouldn’t have known that we are
merely bullies
with a bloody nose, that
what goes
around comes around, that we need to
dare to damn Israel,
that the body
bags have already started coming home from this new Vietnam, and that unless we cease
the bombing immediately,
we will be
responsible for genocide in Afghanistan. Without
The Independent, I would never have understood
that we are
war criminals,
that we are
barbarians
and cowboys, and that we eschewed face-to-face combat because we thought our troops would be
decimated,
traumatized, and humiliated.

Oh, occasionally you run into
something worth reading.
But mostly it’s just knee-jerk defeatism, anti-Americanism, leavened with the occasional spasm of
virulent anti-Semitism. Huzzah for our closest allies!

I ran across the following G.K. Chesterson snippet a little while ago. I don’t usually quote
works that I haven’t read entirely, but this one just seems sums up the aforementioned writers so well.
I’ll bend the rules this time:

A man who says that no patriot should attack the Boer War until
it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good
son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it. But
there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men, and the
explanation of him is, I think, what I have suggested: he is the uncandid
candid friend; the man who says, ‘I am sorry to say we are ruined,’ and
is not sorry at all.

Anyway. I mostly fish through the lefty rags for the same reason I’m compelled to
listen to right-wing talk
radio. I’m looking for the really whacked out stuff. The caller who screams,
“Ya know what I think? I think we need internment camps for liberals!” You
know… something that helps me feel superior and clever.

It’s a counterproductive impulse, obviously. My goal is to
package the Right and the Left into safe little boxes.
See — those people are idiots! But of course that’s not true. For
every Robert Fisk there’s a Christopher Hitchens, or a Salman Rushdie.
For every Michael Savage, there’s a William Safire. For every Barbara Lee,
there’s… well, every other Democratic congressional representative.

The long and short of it is, I’ve found my New Year’s resolution. No more
British po-mo silliness. Or American silliness, for that matter. No more
tossing all liberals into the Idiot Lefty Box, or all conservatives into
the Frothing Right-winger Box. I should know better by now.