The soft bigotry of blowhards

Clark's comments, predictably, earned him denunciations from Jewish groups. After all, the notion that rich, secretive Jews living in places such as New York are pulling strings to visit war and misery on the masses is a time-honored anti-Semitic cliche heard from Charles Lindbergh, Ignatius Donnelly and "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion."

Of course, groups like the Anti-Defamation League are not hard to offend. When the United Nations group tasked with proposing names for hurricanes suggested "Israel" for one storm a few years ago, the league's national director, Abraham Foxman, went into overdrive denouncing the bigotry of such meteorological nomenclature. So it's not like Foxman et al could give a pass to an even bigger blowhard -- Clark.

In response, the American Prospect's Matthew Yglesias, who is Jewish, led the liberal rescue party, denouncing some of Clark's conservative critics as "moronic" and "hacks" and defending Hurricane Wes on two fronts. First, Yglesias argued, "everything" Clark said "is true" and "everybody knows it's true" so it can't be anti-Semitic. And, second, given that Israel's defenders will call any criticism anti-Semitic, there's no point in getting worked up about it.

The first is a rich and fascinating claim. Truth is a defense against slander, but is it a defense against bigotry? Liberals rarely agree when it comes to defending honored members of the coalition of the oppressed. Just ask former Harvard President Lawrence Summers, who questioned whether innate ability explained why fewer women succeed in math and science and who was defenestrated from Harvard as a sexist for his troubles. And let us not run through the list of people called bigots for pointing to inconvenient facts about blacks, Latinos or gays.

Liberals might rightly note that facts aren't bigoted but that the insensitivity with which they are deployed can be. For instance, when Pat Buchanan infamously wrote that Virginia would have an easier time absorbing a million Englishmen than a million Zulus, few disputed the accuracy of the statement. But the way it was offered grated on sensitive ears (as does Buchanan's predictable embrace of Clark and Yglesias as truth-tellers against Israel's "agents of influence" among us).