Amazing Gracelessness

Oh, mein Gott. Glenn Greenwald comments on a new column, by a Peggy Noonan, entitled "The Sounds of Silencing Why do Americans on the left think only they have the right to dissent?", in the Wall St. Journal . As he puts it, she is "lamenting the 'fact' that, unlike the right, 'the left' in America has no tolerance for dissenting views and does not understand the values of free speech or civility in political discourse."

Unlike the right? This almost enough to make a grown man cry (with laughter, frustration, amazement, whatever). It is of course a classic instance of right-wing projection.

After all the political bullying and secrecy and media manipulation and suppression of information and swift-boating and torture!

Her concluding paragraph is simply astonishing:

What is most missing from the left in America is an element of grace--of civic grace, democratic grace, the kind that assumes disagreements are part of the fabric, but we can make the fabric hold together. The Democratic Party hasn't had enough of this kind of thing since Bobby Kennedy died. What also seems missing is the courage to ask a question. Conservatives these days are asking themselves very many questions, but I wonder if the left could tolerate asking itself even a few. Such as: Why are we producing so many adherents who defy the old liberal virtues of free and open inquiry, free and open speech? Why are we producing so many bullies? And dim dullard ones, at that.

And here we have been complaining that the Democratic Party can't get its act together on a common message!

No, inquiry and discussion and dissent (and, yes, grace) are in fact what we stand for. However, the warmongering neo-Fascism of the right wing and its powerbase in the The Regime require active resistance. It is that resistance that Noonan wishes to squelch. Remember Jose Padilla.