Moderation is overrated

In his transition from slavering commie to drooling death beast, there was one thing David Horowitz never bothered to change: his pranksterish tactics against his enemies. Not surprisingly, his FrontPagemag sometimes reflects this with its poor fact-checking, putrid (or no) copyediting, and exuberant, not to say reckless, stridency. Still, everybody reads it.

What usually draws me is the hope that FrontPage's managing editor, Jamie Glazov, has put together another of his wonderfully inflammatory symposia. Glazov, a Russian immigrant with a history Ph.D from somewhere and no anger-management certificate from anywhere, loves America, and hates commies and Islamists. So when he moderates a symposium that includes such folk, moderation is the last thing on his mind. Here he is moderating a certain well-known Trotskyite obscurantist with a tire iron:

The Left supported the Soviet empire over the U.S. precisely because it favors despotism over individual freedom; it hates capitalism and free choice and desires the submission of the individual to a supreme totality. It despises individual success and fulfillment. And it therefore hates George Bush because he represents these values without apology, and he unequivocally does what Ronald Reagan did: label the totalitarian enemy that the Left admires for what it is: an Evil Empire. And he is ready to go to war with it to protect the lives and freedom of millions.

That's the beginning of a question. This ain't Schieffer country, pard.

Glazov conducts these symposia by e-mail, of course, but it's fun to imagine him talking around a table with the participants. His voice gets louder and louder, his face gets redder and redder, until finally he leaps at some poor deluded leftist:

Glazov: Thanks Ms. Burkett. Let me intrude for a moment here, as I can’t remain silent if three members of this symposium base their commentary on the assumption that . . . 'U.S. foreign policy was an atrocious tangle of human rights violations, exploitation and oppression for most of the 20th century. And, certainly, neither by design nor by result did these policies liberate anyone.'

As a Russian émigré I can tell you: thank God for Ronald Reagan and the system that he represented for helping to liberate my people by design and by result. The Left can foam at the mouth at these words, but for the Russian people, aside from those masochists who crave the return of Stalinism and further abuse, Reagan’s aggressive anti-communism was a providential godsend because it helped fuel the collapse of a sadistic and vicious empire, and liberated millions of the suffering people under its yoke. I can speak for my whole family and for many of our relatives and friends in Russia, and say what a gift it was to have Reagan help push the Soviet tyranny toward collapse and allow a society to emerge, despite its many problems, where people are no longer terrified to say what is on their minds and do not have to fear the Gulag Archipelago for their views and beliefs.

Questions? We don't need no stinkin' etc. But he does ask one occasionally. Here he is during a symposium on the ancient mariner of anti-Americanism, Noam Chomsky:

We are obviously dealing with quite a sick and demented individual who can’t really be taken seriously. Who in their right mind would actually write a serious review of Chomsky’s work, unless it was a psychiatric diagnosis of some kind? Correct?

Uhhhh. Correct! Definitely! A little later:

So Mr. Scialabba [a lefty book critic for various publications], we can agree, then, that Chomsky’s works are not reviewed by academic journals basically for the same reason that . . . comic books or Danielle Steele novels aren’t reviewed by them either, right?

Right! But please stop shaking me! I actually do agree with Glazov, at least about Chomsky, but whether out of fear or conviction, I'm not sure anymore.