"The sourpuss Left"

What happens when Kurdistan, "the other Iraq," decides to run an advertising campaign thanking the United States (and Great Britain) for freeing it from Saddam and bringing it democracy?

Well, what Judith at Kesher Talk predicts is that the "sourpuss Left" will say the Kurds are shills for Bush; they're inauthentic voices of the region; and so on. She ought to know. She spends her time on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Having lived there myself for four or five years, I have little doubt she's correct. That was back in the first half of the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was "hurling" the poor out onto the streets, as a National Pinko Radio commentator once observed. Then, our congressman, Ted Weiss was the only member of the House to vote against a bill restricting child pornography. I asked his campaign representative why he had voted against the bill, and the guy gave me some line about serious civil-liberties problems with the bill. I thought of asking why not a single colleague of his saw the same serious civil-liberties problems, but I realized the man was speaking a foreign language and might not have understood reality.

By the way, read the comments to Judith's post for more "dialogue" on the topic.