Taranto gets carried away

I am a great admirer of James Taranto (I quote him here fairly often) and I certainly share his low opinion of the ineffable Andrew Sullivan. I have myself largely given up criticizing Sullivan because I think Taranto does a much better job of it than I can. But I think Taranto goes overboard in the following post:

"Andrew Sullivan (sorry, folks, but we think this one is shocking enough to highlight) is unhappy with New York Times columnist Bill Kristol for noting the similarity between Barack Obama's claim that small-town Pennsylvanians "cling" to religion because of economic stresses and Karl Marx's dictum that religion is "the opiate of the masses."

Sullivan asks: "Is [Obama's comment] indistinguishable from saying, along with Marx, that all religion is an obviously false consciousness caused by the alienation of the world-historical class struggle?" He answers: "No, it obviously isn't."

Well, one can argue this either way, but what's shocking about the Sullivan post is the way he characterizes Kristol at the end: "a non-Christian manipulator of Christianity." Kristol is Jewish, and Sullivan's slur is ugly. This is the kind of rhetoric Obama inspires in his supporters. Way to unify the country, Barack

Source

For a start it seems silly to me to blame Obama for Sullivan. Sullivan was a weeper long before Obama came along. And what is wrong with calling Kristol a non-Christian if he is? And why is Sullivan not entitled to believe that Kristol is a manipulator of Christians? Leftists (such as Obama) are constantly accusing Republicans of manipulating Christians so why is Kristol one conservative who must not be accused of that?

A partial answer is that traditional antisemitic conspiracy theories portray Jews as evil manipulators of the rest of us -- but there is no evidence that Sullivan is referring to such nonsense. And in any case Sullivan is surely not to be forbidden from saying what he thinks about somebody just because that somebody is Jewish.

Although I am a cast-iron supporter of Israel, I myself despise some Jews -- Jews who undermine Israel in particular. I would cheerfully see Richard Falk and Noam Chomsky burn in Gehenna, for instance. Why should I not be free to say so? Jews should be treated like any other people and judged on their individual merits -- or lack of same. Criticism of individual Jews is not a slur on Jews generally, though I understand that some Jews (Taranto is Jewish) can take it that way.

As a coda, I should perhaps acknowledge that Taranto is something of an ironist so it is possible that his comments above were not meant to be taken as literally as I have done.

He does have a tendency towards indirection and that does get him into trouble sometimes. On 14th., for instance, he made the reasonable if trivial point that both Ayn Rand and the Communists believe that the workers should be selfish. He expressed that in a rather allusive way, however, and, as we see on 15th., that got him attacked by Ayn Rand devotees who drew what I would regard as unjustified inferences from what he said.

Taranto then defends himself from the Randians by implying that he was only joking. And I agree that his comment about Rand was in fact light-hearted. For that reason I have considered -- and dismissed -- the possibility that his comment on Sullivan was ironically rather than seriously meant.