Ajami flies out to left
Prof. Fouad Ajami is interesting if often oddly wrong on foreign affairs, like thinking that invading Iraq was a dandy idea. On domestic politics, unfortunately, he is just plain odd. For example, he thinks President Obama is a leftist. The other day he revealed in the pages of the Wall Street Journal edit page piece ...
Prof. Fouad Ajami is interesting if often oddly wrong on foreign affairs, like thinking that invading Iraq was a dandy idea. On domestic politics, unfortunately, he is just plain odd. For example, he thinks President Obama is a leftist. The other day he revealed in the pages of the Wall Street Journal edit page piece that:
Prof. Fouad Ajami is interesting if often oddly wrong on foreign affairs, like thinking that invading Iraq was a dandy idea. On domestic politics, unfortunately, he is just plain odd. For example, he thinks President Obama is a leftist. The other day he revealed in the pages of the Wall Street Journal edit page piece that:
“the truth of the Obama presidency is laid bare: retrenchment abroad, and redistribution and the intrusive regulatory state at home. This is the genuine calling of Barack Obama, and of the ‘progressives’ holding him to account.”
Look, I know the professor’s article ran at the end of the year, so maybe the WSJ‘s editorial page elves were was just clearing inventory off the shelves during a week when readership lags. (Tale from my youth: A lot of the Journal‘s subscribers get their paper at work, and a lot of them have been on vacation, and so not reading the paper. When I worked there I always suspected that the editors dumped articles they didn’t much like into these “Death Valley Days” from Dec. 20 to Jan. 1.)
But even if this was just a backlog dump, Ajami’s article could have used a real live working editor who would have asked Prof. Ajami to address some basic questions. Like, for example, this: If the president is pursuing a “progressive” agenda, why are “progressives” so angry with him–about the failure to close Guantanamo, to lift the ban on being openly gay in the military and to apologize for the official use of torture, while at the same time agntagonizing the left by continuing the bailout of Wall Street fatcats, sending more troops to Afghanistan, and escalating drone attacks in Pakistan?
Hendrik Hertzberg of the New Yorker, who has a far better feel for the American left, notes in that magazine’s new issue that
“a nontrivial portion (though far from a majority) of the Democratic left, particularly its Internet cohort, feels alienated and disappointed, with the [health care] bill and with the President. . . . . And in the nether reaches of the left blogosphere, . . . Obama is a ‘sellout.’ He’s a ‘liar.’ He’s a ‘Judas,’ a ‘fraud,’ a ‘corrupt fool.'”
Who you gonna believe discussing the American left–Fouad Ajami or Norman Thomas’s godson?
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