American Liberalism and Bebel's Socialism of the Fools

Kristol writing on The Paranoid Style In American Liberalism referencing Arelene Getz's Where's the Outrage essay linking Bush and the NSA taps with South African Hit Squads. Kristol describes Getz's paranoid logic (and you can read her for youself too) as,

First the Bush administration will listen in to international communications of a few hundred people in America who seem to have been in touch with terrorists abroad ...and next thing you know, government hit squads will be killing George W. Bush's political opponents.

What is one to say about these media--Democratic spokesmen for contemporary American liberalism? That they have embarrassed and discredited themselves. That they cannot be taken seriously as critics. It would be good to have a responsible opposition party in the United States today. It would be good to have a serious mainstream media. Too bad we have neither.

Bad enough we no longer have a responsible opposition. I've been linking the anti-semitic progressive leftist yesterday and Nick Cohen has it right,

But the liberal left has been corrupted by defeat and doesn't know much about anything these days.
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... it has been maddened by the direction history has taken. Deracinated and demoralised, its partisans aren't thinking hard enough about where they came from or - and more pertinently - where they are going.


And they're going for Bebel's Socialism of the Fools.