As you might have guessed, I don't in fact favor full right of return for Palestinians, and have never said anything even implying otherwise. Same goes for Alterman, Yglesias, and Ben-Ami. But this is why I long ago stopped arguing with Jamie Kirchick. You can't argue with someone who simply lies about your positions, or deceives readers about your writing, or traffics in guilt-by-association. Even so, I get the logic of the act. By being much more aggressively dishonest than the average unreconstructed neoconservative, and by writing in the pages of The New Republic, Kirchick has attained a sort of overnight infamy, which in this business, is indistinguishable from prominence. That is, in a way, success, and it would be odd to expect Kirchick to abandon a strategy that's working. What's more curious is his place at The New Republic. Eric Alterman, in particular, is concerned by this. He calls Kirchick "the return of Stephen Glass," and wonders why he's got "to do The New Republic's job for it" and fact-check Kirchick's assorted lies and misrepresentations.
