“The Taliban Smear,” by The Weekly Standard’s Terry Eastland, highlights yet again the disturbing trend among liberal opinion makers of attempting to tar conservatives with the “Taliban Party” brush. This week’s culprit? The New York Times’ Bill Keller, who — in a story assessing the careers of Jesse Helms, Strom Thurmond, and Phil Gramm — writes “that they harnessed their collective century of seniority to the Taliban wing of the America right.”

Eastland responds:

Keller isn’t the first to speak of this wing, and I’ve been wondering just who’s in it. From what I can tell, the answer is that no one is, save the Maryland-born John Walker, now detained by U.S. forces, who told CNN that his ‘heart became attached to the Taliban’; and Wadih el Hage, the naturalized American (a Lebanon native) who served Osama bin Laden as his personal assistant and was sentenced for life for conspiring to bomb the U.S. embassy in Nairobi.

You’d think that to locate someone in some ‘Taliban wing’ would require close attention to the facts about that person, most of all whether the person understands the relationship of religion and politics in the same way as Osama bin Laden does. And bin Laden sees the two as inseparable. For him, a religion (Islam) is understood in extreme terms that require the subordination of the state to it–meaning that religion is to rule all. At his sentencing in a Manhattan courtroom three months ago, el Hage reflected his leader’s views on this matter when he said that Islam “has this complete set of rules and guidelines for a successful, prosperous and happy life on . . . earth.”

Associating American conservatives with the Taliban is done for obvious purpose–to cast the former into outer political darkness. But there is no basis for the association–bin Laden’s views have no resonance here, save for with the likes of a Walker or an el Hage. It is an ugly smear, and it ought not to be indulged.

Late last year, Jeff Jacoby wrote a Boston Globe column similar to Eastland’s, upon which protein wisdom felt compelled to comment. As early as October 2 of last year, Claudia Winkler declared that “the ‘Taliban’ slander is altogether out of fashion” — a pronouncement, sadly, that proved nothing more than wishful thinking. Old fashions have a way of sneaking back into the mainstream, Ms. Winkler, and Bill Keller, it seems, has decided its time again to strap on the platforms and play dress up…

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