During the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, Robert Fisk's name came up a lot because at the time his reports were often linked and excerpted.
You scanned the broad vistas of the Internet to find whatever counter Fisk articles were available.
More recently, the question of Chomsky's alleged downplaying of Pol Pot's crimes was discussed. Thanks to you, I was exposed (via links) to a torrent of rambling, anit-Chomsky blog posts from all sorts of odd axe grinders.
And now, you're trying to tell us - via this Weintraub piece - that Juan Cole's tussle with Hitchens is much ado about nothing - or worse, an example of Cole's duplicitousness.
Whenever your bete noir, Chris Doss, mentions, even in passing, that the peoples of the CIS have mixed feelings about the Stalin era we can look forward to an avalanche of URIs about Stalin's crimes.
As if we don't know.
I suspect that if I were ever to become famous and popular, you'd dive deep into the archives of LBO and my blog to locate material demonstrating my perfidy.
A simple question occurs: what are you going on about here?
Are we to believe that Weintraub's 3,577 words add up to a refutation of Cole's primary point: Hitchens is performing character assassination jobs for the right?
And you compound your error by responding to Doug's query with still more links - all intended to make Cole look shady.
See, here's what I'm driving at...
In West Philly, where I grew up, I'd sometimes find myself in fights. Strategic viciousness was often required. For example, I threw a particularly dangerous bastard down a flight of steps and leapt on his mellon-sized head to drive my point home (the point being, stop fucking with me muthafucka).
During these conflicts, my bros always had my back.
We might argue amongst ourselves on sunny days when the threat level was low but when the shit started we put pettiness aside and got to work defending our right to be left the hell alone.
Bro, we are under fire; the shit has started and you are taking potshots at allies near and far.
If you were with me back in the day and had punked us the way you're punking folks you should be critiquing (because no one's perfect) but, nonetheless, expressing solidarity with we would've considered you a hindrance - at best - and maybe a problem that needed solving.
In short, what the fuck are you up to?
.d.
--------- "It's a simple equation folks. Prostitution, divided by Hotels, equals dead Elves."
Olly