Kurt Anderson, who is some kind of New York media personality (Spy Magazine and public radio’s Studio 360), belatedly endorses the Bush-Cheney ticket in a sick and twisted screed in New York Magazine. His cocktail-circuit friends, he bemoans, ignored the Iraq elections because they refused to grant a “victory” to Bush.

Each of us has a Hobbesian choice [sic] concerning Iraq; either we hope for the vindication of Bush’s risky, very possibly reckless policy, or we are in a de facto alliance with the killers of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. We can be angry with Bush for bringing us to this nasty ethical crossroads, but here we are nonetheless.

Keep in mind, this writer claims to be speaking for “liberals.” What he is trying to say is that we “liberals” have no choice in this conflict but to adhere to the absolutist Bush vision of the world.

This Kurt Anderson is nothing more than a caricature of a “liberal,” a real live New York media elite who is so suffused in “conventional wisdom” that, try as he might, he is unable to think of himself outside the imaginary box drawn around him by conservative rhetoric. His mind struggles against the confines of this box:

During these past few years, I have heard it said again and again that liberals’ ineffectiveness derives from their inability to see the world in the simple blacks and whites of the Limbaughs and Hannitys and Bushes. (Why else, the argument goes, did John Kerry lose?)

Maybe. But now our heroic and tragic liberal-intellectual capaciousness is facing its sharpest test since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Back then, most of us were forced, against our wills, to give Ronald Reagan a large share of credit for winning the Cold War. Now the people of this Bush-hating city are being forced to grant the merest possibility that Bush, despite his annoying manner and his administration’s awful hubris and dissembling and incompetence concerning Iraq, just might—might, possibly—have been correct to invade, to occupy, and to try to enable a democratically elected government in Iraq.

He has accepted the exact terms of surrender demanded by the Manichaean demagogues of the right. Not only does he accept the ridiculous premise that you’re either with us or with the terrorists, he goes even further and accepts the decimation of history that is required to become faithful to our Dear Leader. He forgets, as he is trained to, that Bush’s war has already been lost — the war that America foolishly signed up for, the war against WMDs. Bush not only cannot be “vindicated” on this premise — he has already been proven completely and utterly wrong.

It is the conservatives who have made a blood-sport out of mortgaging the future of Iraq on their military doctrine and what they insist to be the character and fate of America. This is just as stupid as the notion, claimed by no-one, that our defeat in Vietnam “vindicated” the superiority of Communism over American democracy. While he does not endorse either-or in principle, our Mr. Anderson has taken that pill in practice, and entered the matrix of imaginary neoconservative politics.

James Wolcott recognizes him as the vapid, defeated bien-pensant that he is:

He’s glib in a Manhattan Mandarin manner that conceals the glibness behind a knowingness that itself conceals a lack of deeper, driving conviction.

I suppose what I’m saying is that Andersen has always struck me as one of those media personalities who’s always “positioning” himself without ever taking a real position.

To which Anderson responds:

[M]y loathing of political discourse reduced to crudely partisan A and B ideological choice – you’re either a red-stater or a blue-stater, a believer in Michael Moore or Ann Coulter, a Bush-hater or a Bush-lover, no complexity allowed – was the whole point of the column in New York.

No, the point of your article was to demonstrate to your peers that you have the “courage” to defame “your side.” In order to accomplish this self-serving end, you had to testify first that the Republican straw-man liberal was real, and second that the right-wing vision of what the war signifies was valid. You are wrong on both counts.