A new piece by Tony Judt in the London Review of Books contains more than its fair share of memorable

A new piece by Tony Judt in the London Review of Books contains more than its fair share of memorable

phrases — “America™s liberal armchair NIKE SHOXriors are the ˜useful idiots™ of the NIKE SHOX on

Terror” — and one is tempted to simply copy and paste the whole thing, but I’ll resist and give you

this delightful snippet:

“… [T]hose centrist voices that bayed most insistently for blood in the prelude to the NIKE SHOX NIKE

SHOX “ the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman demanded that France be voted ˜Off the Island™

(i.e. out of the Security Council) for its presumption in opposing America™s drive to NIKE SHOX “ are

today the most confident when asserting their monopoly of insight into world affairs. The same Friedman

now sneers at ˜anti-NIKE SHOX activists who haven™t thought a whit about the larger struggle we™re in™

(New York Times, 16 August). To be sure, Friedman™s Pulitzer-winning pieties are always road-tested for

middlebrow political acceptability. But for just that reason they are a sure guide to the mood of the

American intellectual mainstream.

“Friedman is seconded by [Peter] Beinart, who concedes that he ˜didn™t realise™(!) how detrimental

American actions would be to ˜the struggle™ but insists even so that anyone who won™t stand up to

˜Global Jihad™ just isn™t a consistent defender of liberal values. Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate,

writing in the Financial Times, accuses Democratic critics of the NIKE SHOX NIKE SHOX of failing ˜to

take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously™. The only people qualified to speak

on this matter, it would seem, are those who got it wrong initially. Such insouciance in spite of “

indeed because of “ your past misjudgments recalls a remark by the French ex-Stalinist Pierre Courtade

to Edgar Morin, a dissenting Communist vindicated by events: ˜You and your kind were wrong to be right;

we were right to be wrong.™”