A liberal voice makes an important call

A call for intellectual honesty and moral clarity as regards the left and the right and the means by which we mutually attack. Kurt Anderson’s essay, When Good News Feels Bad is a really good read, folks, and I’m not saying simply because he writes this to his pals on the left:

And now the terrible business of judging the correct price [of Administration policies] requires as much empirical rigor and moral clarity as we can muster, the sort of careful, “reality-based” judgments that liberals pride themselves on being able to make better than loony Evangelicals and cunning neocon dreamers. It won’t do simply to default to our easy predispositions—against Bush, even against war. If partisanship makes us abandon intellectual honesty, if we oppose what our opponents say or do simply because they are the ones saying or doing it, we become mere political short-sellers, hoping for bad news because it’s good for our ideological investment.

He also writes this, and it’s good reading for all of us, on both sides:

One day during the U.S. election campaign, President Bush accidentally uttered a plain truth about the war on terror. “I don’t think you can ‘win’ it,” he said, which immediately provoked attacks from the Democrats. A month later, John Kerry inadvertently told the same truth—“We have to get back to the place . . . where terrorists are not the focus of our lives, but they’re a nuisance”—whereupon Bush pounced, saying he “couldn’t disagree more.” Later the same month, the president slipped and retold the same truth—“Whether or not we can be ever fully safe . . . is up in the air”—and Kerry, inevitably, replied: “You make me president [and] it’s not going to be up in the air.”

It was that kind of dishonest, automatic attack and counterattack that made me relieved, on November 3, when I was once again free to read and watch the news from Iraq without considering whether it was good or bad for Kerry’s chances.

He ends with this heartening question and disheartening answer: Is it too much to hope that the end of Crossfire could mark the beginning of the end of the age of Ann Coulter and Michael Moore? Probably.

You’ll want to read it all, though. Hattip: Donald Sensing