"When Trudeau added that "Ridiculing the non-privileged is almost never funny -- it's just mean," he really got under the skins of conservatives such as Douthat and the former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum, who are becoming frantic in their efforts to blur the meanings of "privileged" and "non-privileged" in order to justify their increasingly embarrassing defense of inequalities and degradations that are poisoning the whole society and their own movement's base. Sooner or later, they'll have to face this. But as long as they can find feckless liberals to bash, they'll put that off.
Frum launched the conservative attack on Trudeau (and, with a characteristically partisan spin, on The Nation and The New Yorker) in his Atlantic blog post by defending Jews. He wrote that "Garry Trudeau is not the first person to insinuate that France and Europe are guilty of over-concern for the sensibilities of Jews at the expense of the sensibilities of Muslims, .... But Trudeau is the first prominent person identified with the mainstream of American liberalism to advance the point, and that represents a milestone of sorts. But a milestone toward what?"
The only milestone here was Frum's own breathtaking insinuation, which he left hanging in his question mark, that Trudeau is as guilty of anti-Semitism as "the rulers of Iran," to whom Frum linked him because Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had sponsored Holocaust-denial conferences including anti-Semitic cartoons. Contrary to Frum's suggestion and, indeed, to his own perverse performance, Trudeau never insinuates. It's not his way of communicating. What he actually does is try to nourish consensus about where to draw red lines of editorial "good judgment and common sense," as he put it, against gratuitous, childish attacks on Muslims or anyone else, including Jews. Conservatives disparage this effort only at the cost of betraying their own commitments to republican ordered liberty and, indeed, only at their own peril."
PS Here is a trivia about Trudeau that you didn't know: he was a roommate with Rashid Khalidi at Yale.
Frum launched the conservative attack on Trudeau (and, with a characteristically partisan spin, on The Nation and The New Yorker) in his Atlantic blog post by defending Jews. He wrote that "Garry Trudeau is not the first person to insinuate that France and Europe are guilty of over-concern for the sensibilities of Jews at the expense of the sensibilities of Muslims, .... But Trudeau is the first prominent person identified with the mainstream of American liberalism to advance the point, and that represents a milestone of sorts. But a milestone toward what?"
The only milestone here was Frum's own breathtaking insinuation, which he left hanging in his question mark, that Trudeau is as guilty of anti-Semitism as "the rulers of Iran," to whom Frum linked him because Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had sponsored Holocaust-denial conferences including anti-Semitic cartoons. Contrary to Frum's suggestion and, indeed, to his own perverse performance, Trudeau never insinuates. It's not his way of communicating. What he actually does is try to nourish consensus about where to draw red lines of editorial "good judgment and common sense," as he put it, against gratuitous, childish attacks on Muslims or anyone else, including Jews. Conservatives disparage this effort only at the cost of betraying their own commitments to republican ordered liberty and, indeed, only at their own peril."
PS Here is a trivia about Trudeau that you didn't know: he was a roommate with Rashid Khalidi at Yale.
