--- Jim Devine <jdevine03 at gmail.com> wrote: I don't know why Naomi Klein's Comment was "particularly egregious" -- since people like Robert Novack make similarly egregious Comments more than weekly. Perhaps Klein's Comment was egregious, but not particularly so.
---
Oh, they do the same thing from a different ideological perspective, and usually in order to stake out turf on the American political playing field. Do Novack or George Will actually know anything about three-quarters of the stuff they write about? Does George Will really know anything about the subtleties of Iraqi politics? Did he suddenly taking a crash Ph.D. course in Arabic Studies? Really the only people who can by rights portray themselves as authorities what is going on in a place like Iraq are people like Juan Cole. For somebody like Will to do this would be like more submitting a wordy op-ed on the price-transformation problem (see, I don't even know what that is).
If I recollect the Klein piece correctly, it was quite heavy on getting to the ideologically predetermined conclusion (Putin should negotiate) and quite sparse on facts (like mentioning what happened the last time the RF tried negotiations). This is quite common in commentary from across the ideological/political spectrum, I think mainly because it's an obscure part of the world nobody but Russia specialists ever heard of until a few years ago and so there are very few people in a position to talk about it intelligently. I can name maybe only half a dozen people off the top of my head, none of whom except for Anatol Lieven -- a man who has been covering the region for the past couple of decades and wrote The Book on Chechnya War I -- ever get anywhere near an op-ed page.
Thank God for Lieven.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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