You Don't Say

Jonathan Chait on Journolist:

For people like me, the national debate mostly revolves around a liberal-moderate-conservative axis, and more hard-left or even traditional liberal views are fairly marginal. Journolist brought people like me into contact with a lot of those sort of liberals, and my main response was to realize that I'm a lot less liberal than I had thought.

No kidding!

Funny. I read material by—and interact with—people to the left of me all the time. It certainly hasn't made me "realize that I'm a lot less liberal than I had thought". If anything, it makes me recognize that they might have a point.

But, then again, I don't work for Marty Peretz, and I'm not drenched in every B.S. consensus that Washington has to offer. As one of Chait's commenters pointed out:

As the "senior editor" of a biweekly magazine Jonathan Chait presumable understands full well why Eric Alterman is arriving late in writing a story for The Nation. The sentence in Alterman's article that Chait really needs to take to heart is:
-- As a collective we held people's feet to the fire, encouraged excellence, bemoaned administration wimpiness and took numerous opportunities to remind New Republic editors and authors that they work for a reactionary racist lunatic.

A while back in one of these incidents where Chait yet again defends Martin Peretz from criticism Spencer Ackerman reminded us:

-- Everyone who works at TNR knows Marty is a racist.

But, hey, he signs the paychecks. Where You Stand, once again, Depends On Where You Sit. And since Chait sat with all the people who were cheering on Bush's Iraqi Adventure, is it any wonder that he got all uncomfortable when exposed to those disgusting Dirty F**king Hippies?