You know, I started to write a post chiding Jonah Goldberg, who's always demanding that everyone else recognize that his arguments shouldn't be taken seriously or commented on, for completely misrepresenting an obvious satire arguing that we could end the War on Terrorism by converting to Islam. And then I deleted the post. It was a cheap shot. There was no real principle at work there. And I need to stop writing posts like that. I was also going to mention Dinesh D'Souza's completely serious book saying we could end the war by becoming more culturally repressive, which led me to Jonah's review of D'Souza. And I was about to close that window, because I didn't need it anymore, when this line caught my eye:
Particularly in the Cold War's early years, leftists and liberals alike argued that American racism at home was hurting our efforts to win hearts and minds abroad. (To be sure, leftists cared about civil rights, but they were also powerfully motivated by the desire to beat up on America and bolster the image of Communist regimes, many of which were scoring enormous public relations victories from Jim Crow.)
So says the guy employed by a magazine that opposed the Civil Rights Act. Wow.
