Well, the Wall Street Journal again does a better job of commenting on something than I did:

Stupidity Watch

British novelist David Cornwell--writing under his pen name, John La Carré--has penned a hysterical anti-American screed for the Times of London. A sample:



"America has entered one of its periods of historical madness, but this is the worst I can remember: worse than
McCarthyism, worse than the Bay of Pigs and in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War.

The reaction to 9/11 is beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest
dreams. As in McCarthy times, the freedoms that have made America the envy of the world are
being systematically eroded. The combination of compliant US media and vested corporate interests
is once more ensuring that a debate that should be ringing out in every town square is confined to
the loftier columns of the East Coast press."

Now, Cornwell is a fiction writer, but even fiction has to have enough plausibility to maintain the reader's suspension of disbelief. Cornwell's description of America is simply delusional; it bears not the slightest resemblence to reality, as anyone who lives here knows.

It's noteworthy that those who argue for regime continuation in Iraq insist that Saddam's opponents meet an impossible burden of proof (Cornwell hints at this, declaring that "Baghdad represents no clear and present danger to its neighbours, and none to the US or Britain"). But anti-American polemicists seldom feel any obligation to construct even the barest factual foundation for their accusations. What evidence does Cornwell have that America's freedoms "are being systematically eroded"? Only this:

"Last Friday a friend of mine in California drove to his local supermarket with a sticker on his car
saying: 'Peace is also Patriotic.' It was gone by the time he'd finished shopping."

That's how totalitarianism always takes hold, isn't it? First they came for the bumper stickers, and I wasn't a bumper sticker, so I did nothing . . .