Seriously, this man is so overrated.
How is it possible to think this way…
I haven’t written about the Ground Zero mosque controversy because I’m still not entirely sure what I think of it.
And still be considered human, let alone some kind of great public intellectual?
Oh, wait, what am I saying…
Even on the “right,” that kind of “thinking” remains highly prized, and well paid.
This is the same man who regularly has conversations like this:
Paul Berman: Yes. There was and is a tendency like that. I will admit that, in one infinitesimally tiny respect, I can sympathize with it. It is because of George W. Bush. I also used to think, when I heard George W. Bush speak, that the opposite must be true. If George W. Bush said the sun rises in the east, I would have been tempted to argue that, on the contrary, the sun rises in the west.
MJT: [Laughs.] I used to react to Bush that way, as well, but I had to stop after a while. I stopped after 9/11.
Paul Berman: I’m confessing to my own prejudice here, but I couldn’t bear the tone of the man.
Every interview he does goes like that:
“I’ve been studying this for years, Joe Blow, and I’ve travelled the Middle East extensively, and I still don’t quite understand why Muslims hate us AND why the only people who seem to want to do something about it are those dreadful unwashed hicks who clutter up the rest of America..”
This is a man who once declared that he’s only met two people in the Middle East who were “ruder and more openly intolerant than Ann Coulter.”
But I’m supposed to trust his Middle East reportage. He’d make a much better Manhattan restaurant critic, don’t you think?
