A little note to SDB:

One way to tell if someone is intellectually honest is if he's willing to admit when he's made a mistake. One way to identify an intellectually honest movement is when it will condemn its own for their stupidity or venality.

The left has been failing that test, and the only real conclusion that the rest of us can come to is that they reason they don't condemn the kinds of things that Pinter said is that deep down they actually agree with him at least in part.

A question, predictably, goes begging here. (And no, it's not whether or not his rank assertion about "intellectually honest movements" that he has demonstrated little ability to objectively critique). The question is this: is the left a "movement"? Hardly. It is actually notoriously not so. It is political position and actually a very, very wide one, stretching all the way from hard-core Marxians to center-left DLC types. There is absolutely no way in which it can be described as a movement and there is no pretension by anybody involved that it would do so.

Given that, the entire thing (vile slander that it is) is meaningless.

The Lott case is different, of course; first, because there are "movement conservatives" in a way that simply isn't found on the left (at least, yet) and second, because as a leading member of a political party his actions are tied to and reflect those of the party itself. If Pinter were a Democrat, it'd be different. He isn't. Hell, he isn't even an American.

Oh, and Steven? Raining down epithets upon your ideological opponents (like "inept", "unreasonable", "elitist", "utterly failed" and "pathological") is poor debating and, in fact, is in no way superior to that Pinter guy. As, for that matter, is trying to paint all your opponents as extremists by focusing on one extremist. Not only poor debating, but poor taste.