"I am on the side of the Iraqi and Kurdish opponents of this filthy menace. And they are on the side of civil society in a wider conflict, which is the civil war now burning across the Muslim world from Indonesia to Nigeria."
The ugly phrase is "civil society". In my mind, it always conjures up a noble Englishman in khaki gear travelling into the heart of darkness down the Nile to find some other Englishman carrying on the white man's burden of enlightening the natives. This is a code phrase I recall reading somewhere about the stratification in Venezuela, the writer mentioned that "civil society" was against Chavez. So who is for Chavez. I suppose only, as a right-winger married to a Venezuelan told me, the ignorant indigenous poor people living in the shanty towns around Caracas, who are easily misled by a demagogic leader, who is not so smart himself (I suppose because he himself is part-Indian or black or whatever).
It's no surprise to me that this type of vocabulary is creeping into Snitch's writing. While reading Coulter, Horowitz etc. is usually repellant, sometimes they write columns attacking left-wing people in which the charges they make are probably honest, like that certain DLC Democrats are lying when they say they are fighting for working class people. There was a column in the New York Press by some conservative writer (not Taki) back when the Snitch/Blumenthal brouhaha was going on and the writer mentioned that Snitch has betrayed his trust years ago. I don't recall the details, I remember Tom Wolfe was involved somehow, and the article writer commented that Wolfe was teed off that Snitch has used him to "get" his friend Tom Wolfe, and that he had thought Wolfe got back of them by transforming them into ridiculous characters in "Bonfire of the Vanities" (actually, many people commented the Peter Fallows character resembled Hitchens).
Aside from a possible history of being a fair-weathered friend and betrayals, I don't really see how Snitch was "helping" the left. If you want to bring people to the left in the US, the way to NOT do it is to put a pampered drunk looking English guy on C-SPAN ranting about how Mother Teresa was a horrible person and that type of stuff. Not that some far-out leftie rags shouldn't do analysis, just like Chomsky analyzed coverage of Cambodia, then compared it to coverage of East Timor. But the manner in which he did it made him seem like a raving liberal nut. He's said to be a younger Gore Vidal in many ways, and that is apropos, as Vidal sometimes acts the same way, although only sometimes. The fact that the corporate media chooses to give them a wide audience makes me somewhat suspicious. I agree with Cockburn on Snitch's departure - good riddance to bad rubbish.
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