One leftist intellectual's disgusted response to last weekend's anti-war protest in Central Park:

After a couple of hours there, listening to speeches, reading the hate-America literature, I still donít know what to think about Iraqówill an attack open a Pandoraís box, or close one?óbut I think I know what I feel about this antiwar movement, or at least many of the flock who showed up in the Sheep Meadow.

A movement of Marxist fringe groups and people who are unable to make moral distinctions. An inability summed up by a man holding a big poster that proudly identified him as "NYC TEACHER." The lesson "NYC TEACHER" had for the day was that "BUSH IS A DEVIL Ö HANDS OFF NORTH KOREA, IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN Ö.

The author details a number of morally and intellectually bankrupt encounters he has had with leftist intellectuals in the wake of 9/11 and concludes that he, like Christopher Hitchens, has had enough of the rank, knee-jerk idiocy that has become the characteristic tone of dissent in the U.S.:

So, for my part, goodbye to all that. Goodbye to a culture of blindness that tolerates, as part of "peace marches," women wearing suicide-bomber belts as bikinis. (See the accompanying photo of the "peace" march in Madrid. "Peace" somehow doesnít exclude blowing up Jewish children.)

Goodbye to the brilliant thinkers of the Left who believe itís the very height of wit to make fun of George W. Bushís intelligenceóthereby establishing, of course, how very, very smart they are. Mr. Bush may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer (I think heís more ill-informed and lazy than dumb). But they are guilty of a historical stupidity on a far greater scale, in their blind spot about Marxist genocides. Itís a failure of self-knowledge and intellectual responsibility that far outweighs Bushís, because theyíre supposed to be so very smart.

Goodbye to paralysis by moral equivalence: Remind me again, was it John Ashcroft or Fidel Castro who put H.I.V. sufferers in concentration camps?

Goodbye to the deluded and pathetic sophistry of postmodernists of the Left, who believe their unreadable, jargon-clotted theory-sophistry somehow helps liberate the wretched of the earth. If they really believe in serving the cause of liberation, why donít they quit their evil-capitalist-subsidized jobs and go teach literacy in a Third World starved for the insights of Foucault?

Goodbye to people who have demonstrated that what terror means to them is the terror of ever having to admit they were wrong, the terror of allowing the hideous facts of history to impinge upon their insulated ideology.

Goodbye to all those who have evidently adopted as their own, a version of the simpering motto of the movie Love Story. Remember "Love means never having to say youíre sorry"?

I guess today, Left means never having to say youíre sorry.

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