Tuesday, 06 January 2004

An Officer and a Scoundrel: On occasion I've read some thought-provoking articles by one Ralph Peters, a retired Army Intelligence officer. Peters has shown himself capable of intelligent, coherent debate on the subject of Mideast policy, for example; I don't always agree with everything he says (heck, I don't always agree with everything I say), but until now I respected him as a rational person whose insights were worth reading.

Until I read this lapse of judgement in today's New York Post, that is. In a paroxysm of rage and loathing, Peters has unloaded his bile ducts into a vile op-ed piece about the Howard Dean campaign: He compares Dean to Hitler, Dean's supporters to the Brownshirts, and Dean's Internet campaign to the Gestapo. Listen to this:

Dean was already practicing the Big Lie. Montreal was just a stop on his journey from Munich to Berlin. He was already looking around for his Leni Riefenstahl.

Listen to Dean's rhetoric, especially on security and international issues. He never offers specifics; it's all hocus-pocus. He knows how best to deal with terrorists. We voters from the humble Volk need to take it on trust.

This is not the stuff of which a rational argument is made. Nor, for that matter, does it contribute to a discussion of the various Presidential candidates and their merits. It is, in fact, exactly the sort of thing that Ralph Peters would condemn (while a chorus of Bill O'Reillys and Glenn Reynoldses tsked in outrage) if it showed up at, say, MoveOn.org in a homemade campaign commercial by some random nobody.

But apparently if the same odious comparisons are directed at a Democrat, and with the same lack of evidence to justify them, that's just fine and dandy. No problem there. Heck, we don't even need to assume that the author is some no-name minority of one: A paid columnist of the Post can compare Howard Dean to the Führer, and apparently no one will blink an eye.

If I took these same paragraphs, and changed one word in each…

Bush was already practicing the Big Lie. Montreal was just a stop on his journey from Munich to Berlin. He was already looking around for his Leni Riefenstahl.

Listen to Bush's rhetoric, especially on security and international issues. He never offers specifics; it's all hocus-pocus. He knows how best to deal with terrorists. We voters from the humble Volk need to take it on trust.

…the Right would be screaming to high Heaven. If Robert Fisk or Noam Chomsky or one of the Right's other whipping-boys had written the above, you'd have read about it by now in every blog from here to Tacitus and back.

You're a hypocrite and a scoundrel, Ralph Peters. You're a symptom of a larger problem, where the extreme Left and Right of our political spectrum have given up trying to work with—or even speak to—each other. Instead they trade charges of treason and fascism across the no-man's-land of the political center, turning our elections into winner-take-all contests that deny our democracy the free exchange of ideas. I had once thought Ralph Peters held to a higher standard than that, but in the future I'll regard his words with the same low esteem I give to Ann Coulter or Michael Moore: Just another clown in the demagogue circus; not to be taken seriously.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 1:33 am. comments.