The Discerning Texan

When taking his leave of The Nation in 2002, its longstanding columnist Christopher Hitchens remarked that the magazine was "becoming the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden". This was altogether too kind, I feel: the magazine has nothing like so reasoned a message.

Take The Nation's "Liberal Media" columnist, Eric Alterman, a professor of English and of Journalism. Readers of The Guardian's "Comment is Free" site can sometimes find Alterman commenting on American politics, as in his judgement a few months ago that:

Well, I think you have be some combination of crazy, ignorant, dishonest or ideologically obsessed to believe that Islamic fundamentalists want to kill us because of "who we are" rather than "what we do", but on their lists of grievances, the never-ending presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, coupled with US support for the Israeli occupation of the West Bank would rank one and two.

The never-ending presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia ended (barring a few training personnel) in 2003. The US continues to press for the creation of a sovereign Palestine. Osama bin Laden has hardly kept secret his assurance that "every Muslim, the minute he can start differentiating, carries hate toward Americans, Jew, and Christians: this is part of our ideology" ('Interview with Usama bin Laden’, December 1998, included in Anti-American Terrorism and the Middle East: A Documentary Reader, eds. Barry Rubin & Judith Colp Rubin, Oxford University Press, 2002, p. 156). And, by the way, "fundamentalism" is a term used properly only when discussing movements within Protestantism.

But Alterman outdoes himself when writing for a domestic audience. In his current Nation column he adduces, as an instance of media bias, a subject I fear I need to return to:

When Enola Gay pilot Paul Tibbets died November 1, the New York Times repeated Tibbets's contention that "It would have been morally wrong if we'd have had [the atomic bomb] and not used it and let a million more people die." That virtually no reputable historian would put the casualty figure for a US invasion of Japan anywhere near that high (leaving aside the question of whether an invasion would have been necessary) was not mentioned in the story.

What can you say? The most charitable explanation I can give is that Alterman is (unlike the late General Tibbets) sufficiently ethnocentric not to take into account the deaths of Japanese civilians that would have resulted from a conventional invasion and blockade of the home islands, sufficiently casual not to distinguish between deaths and casualties, and entirely unaware of research by American and Japanese historians published in the last 20 years concerning the conclusion of the Pacific War. I can name off the top of my head at least a dozen leading historians in this field who would concur with Tibbets's judgement, owing to their knowledge of Japanese military preparations on Kyushu, the Americans' experience of battle at Okinawa and Iwo Jima, the casualty estimates used by the Truman administration, the number of American medals struck in anticipation of the appalling costs of a conventional invasion, and other factors.

There is more; read the whole thing. Hell, anyone who watched Ken Burns' The War knows what an utter load of crap Alterman is peddling. But who is buying it?

For the Left to claim "media distortion" here--from the New York Times, no less--takes a level of utter gall and shamelessness which is to any reasonable person almost sociopathic. Alterman is now entering the Pantheon, right up there with Ward Churchill, the 9/11 Truthers and the Holocaust deniers. It becomes quite easy to see why the intellectually honest Hitchens, regardless of his left-leaning world view, would part company with Alterman and his comrades at The Nation. What is more difficult to fathom is how a publication like The Nation (or The New Republic, for that matter) continues to find gullible fools to actually read the drivel they put out.

It's almost an argument for IQ tests (AND citizenship verification...) before you're allowed to vote.