(updated for clarity; see below)

I may be confused about what, in 2007, we’re “allowed to” say about those who are different from us, but I’m pretty clear on what’s right and what’s wrong.

So is Bradley Burston. He agrees with me that suicide bombing is wrong. (He further agrees with me that it’s an abomination that Hamas claims it’s a “natural” consequence of Israeli occupation.) He also thinks it will be the undoing of the longed-for Palestinian state:

Let this much be said: Israel has never devised - not in Dimona, not in underground RAFAEL plants - a weapon against the Palestinian national movement that is anywhere near as effective as the Palestinian’s own suicide bomber.

Let the comments fly in, from bottomlessly self-congratulatory supporters of Palestinian statehood in Australia, New Zealand, Berkeley, from all those places where white people like yourselves exterminated indigenous populations with impunity. And stole the land on which your condo was built.

I support a Palestinian state no less than you. But if you spin your impassioned defenses of suicide bombing as a necessary tactic - a natural tactic - a natural response, you’ll be spinning that line, and waiting for an independent Palestine, for much longer than any Palestinian should ever have to wait.

Maybe, maybe not.

I’m not so optimistic. [update for clarity: I'm not optimistic that the West will hold to the moral demands it has made on Hamas; I think appeasers will seek to erase the moral distinctions between the position of Hamas and that of Fatah.] Indeed, I think that our moral equilibrium—if indeed we had an equilibrium, and one could argue that the biens-pensant of the West had lost theirs prior to the event—has been turned upside down in the wake of 9/11. Michael Walzer was among first to capture it with his spring 2002 essay “Can There Be a Decent Left?”

 I haven’t come across any arguments that seriously tried to describe how this (or any) war [in Afghanistan---the Iraq war wasn't even on the horizon at the time Walzer wrote this. --ed.] could be fought without putting civilians at risk, or to ask what degree of risk might be permissible, or to specify the risks that American soldiers should accept in order to reduce the risk of civilian deaths. All these were legitimate issues in Afghanistan, as they were in the Kosovo and Gulf wars. But among last fall’s antiwar demonstrators, “Stop the bombing” wasn’t a slogan that summarized a coherent view of the bombing–or of the alternatives to it. The truth is that most leftists were not committed to having a coherent view about things like that; they were committed to opposing the war, and they were prepared to oppose it without regard to its causes or character and without any visible concern about preventing future terrorist attacks.

A few left academics have tried to figure out how many civilians actually died in Afghanistan, aiming at as high a figure as possible, on the assumption, apparently, that if the number is greater than the number of people killed in the Towers, the war is unjust. At the moment, most of the numbers are propaganda; there is no reliable accounting. But the claim that the numbers matter in just this way, that the 3120th death determines the injustice of the war, is in any case wrong. It denies one of the most basic and best understood moral distinctions: between premeditated murder and unintended killing. And the denial isn’t accidental, as if the people making it just forgot about, or didn’t know about, the everyday moral world. The denial is willful: unintended killing by Americans in Afghanistan counts as murder. This can’t be true anywhere else, for anybody else.

The radical failure of the left’s response to the events of last fall raises a disturbing question: can there be a decent left in a superpower? Or more accurately, in the only superpower? Maybe the guilt produced by living in such a country and enjoying its privileges makes it impossible to sustain a decent (intelligent, responsible, morally nuanced) politics. Maybe festering resentment, ingrown anger, and self-hate are the inevitable result of the long years spent in fruitless opposition to the global reach of American power. Certainly, all those emotions were plain to see in the left’s reaction to September 11, in the failure to register the horror of the attack or to acknowledge the human pain it caused, in the schadenfreude of so many of the first responses, the barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved. Many people on the left recovered their moral balance in the weeks that followed; there is at least the beginning of what should be a long process of self-examination. But many more have still not brought themselves to think about what really happened.

Walzer’s essay was published five years ago. Have we made progress on that front? Um, no.
 

Just the other day, in reference to John Kerry paying his respects to Iran’s Khatami at Davos, I was saying that

what is “acceptable” in political discourse changes faster than you can say “homophobe” (or “Islamophobe” or “anti-Semite“). And that what is “acceptable” behavior from the domestic political opposition changes faster than you can say “visiting Assad in Syria” or “paying respect to Iran’s Supreme Shithead ….”

That got no further play in the media—I guess no one cares, because Kerry is out of the presidential race. (Well, someone cares about cares about Kerry, but my post on that will have to wait for another day.)

However—you knew there was a however, right?—Joe Biden is in hot water (considered all but dead one day after announcing that he’s running for president) for making this remark about Barack Obama:

“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

This is a major event in the leftosphere, and cool-as-a-cucumber Garance Franke-Ruta at TAPPED helpfully explains how we’re going to have to start policing our language now that we’ve got a black man and a woman running for president:

[N]ow that we have the first credible African-American and female presidential candidates in American history running, I think we’re going to learn that many of the common formulations we use to talk about ourselves and our politics can sound tin-eared at best — and downright offensive, at worst — when discussing African-American or female subjects.

And why should we watch our mouths? Because too many cooks spoil the broth. Or something. (I know it has something to do with hot liquid refreshment):

The issue isn’t just Biden being an insensitive boob, but rather that commonly used words and phrases activate different frames — remember that whole discussion? — in different contexts, and that women and African-Americans live in a verbally constraining soup of negative frames.

Forget what Biden said. He’s an idiot.

What is Franke-Ruta’s excuse for sounding like, you know, Ari Fleischer trying to intimidate Bill Maher on September 26, 2001?

Well, she doesn’t see it that way. She thinks a healthy national debate over “negative frames” will emerge.

This is going to seriously damage some public figures, such as Biden. But, overall, I think that it will be a healthy process for American society to undergo, and that we are going to learn an unusual amount about ourselves, as well as about the candidates seeking to lead us.

Hahahahahaha! Excuse me while I go count the days until I can start collecting Social Security. In the words of the immortal Maurice Chevalier (update: not to mention Lerner and Loewe!):

“I’m Glad I’m Not Young Anymore”