From December’s Atlantic Monthly, the suddenly indispensible Chris Hitchens proffers up another instructive nugget, polished with his usual wit and style. I’ll quote him at length here, ’cause I never get tired of reading this stuff — especially when it spills from the pen of a former Pink-ish Brit. Besides, it really cheeses off whole bunches of my academic buds (who still don’t see the irony in continuing to refer to themselves as “progressives,” even as they appeal to the UN, with it’s paper might and stern recriminations, to rise up and save the world):

The ancient Greeks were so impressed and terrified by the Furies that they re-baptized them the Eumenides — ‘the Kindly Ones’ — the better to adjust to them. Members of the left, along with the far larger number of squishy ‘progressives,’ have grossly failed to live up to their responsibility to think; rather, they are merely reacting, substituting tired slogans for thought. Then majority of those ‘progressives’ who take comfort from [Oliver] Stone and Chomsky are not committed, militant anti-imperialists or anti-capitalists. Nothing so muscular. They are of a sort who, discovering a viper in the bed of their child, would place the first call to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

I believe I can prove this by means of a brief rhetorical experiment. It runs as follows. Very well, I will stipulate that September 11 was revenge for past American crimes. Specifically, and with supporting detail, I will agree that it was revenge for the crime of past indifference to, and collusion with, the Taliban. May we now agree to cancel this crime by removing from the Taliban the power of enslavement that it exerts over Afgans, and which it hopes to extend? Dead silence from progressives. Couldn’t we talk about the ozone layer instead? In other words, all the learned and conscientious objections, as well as all the silly or sinister ones, boil down to this: Nothing will make us fight against an evil if that fight forces us to go to the same corner as our own government. (The words “our own” should of course be appropritately ironized, with the necessary quotation marks.) To do so would be a betrayal of the Cherokees.

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