What can you say about a guy like the Bull Moose. “The question is why Democratic leaders continue to collude with the anti-Semitic appeasing left? This should be a time for introspection for a party that relies heavily on Jewish support.” Now, in this context, “collude” means that Democratic leaders work with people who run a website on which some other people have posted some allegedly anti-semitic material. Wittman, by contrast, used to work for lunatic anti-semite Pat Robertson. Before that, my understanding is that he was an actual practicing Communist, a dedicated member of a political party committed to the violent overthrow of the United States government and its replacement by a brutal, ruthless dictatorship.

Currently, though, he’s a friend to Jews everywhere, which is nice of him. This is the question, though. Does Wittman ever worry, do any liberal hawks ever worry, does anyone on the “decent left” ever worry, that their foreign policy preferences derive large amounts of their electoral support from racist hatred of Arabs and bigoted prejudice against Muslims? Or do they deny that that’s the case? Do they think the precious comment threads of warmongering blogs, the call lists at rightwing talk radio, are blissfully free of such sentiments? Call me crazy, but I believe it was David Brooks who published a column over the weekend arguing that the Iraq War failed, in essence, because Arabs are sub-humans incapable of living together peacefully. Or maybe he was trying to say Muslims are like that. And, of course, he didn’t say it in so many words but he’s David Brooks, conservative punditry’s friendly ambassador to the left. Just imagine what they’re saying in the fever swamps.

Does this bother anyone?

Good stuff. He’s not really as shrill as he ought to be in terms of pointing out the evils of the hysteria-mongerers, but he does an excellent job in debunking their hysteria.

Jon Chait had a funny column over the weekend comparing the ’06 midterms to World War One. At the very end, though, it offers up some fairly odd commentary on the war itself: “Woodrow Wilson didn’t make the world safe for democracy, but he did manage to keep a pretty noxious regime from dominating a continent.”

Wilhelmine Germany wasn’t especially noxious. It was quasi-democratic and evolving in the direction of greater democracy. Among its opponents was Tsarist Russia, the most noxious regime on the European continent at the time. And, of course, the allied victory didn’t exactly prevent noxious Germany from dominating Europe . . . the Germans came back, in much more noxious form, and tried again. Even though Nazism only lasted 1933-1945 it inflicted sufficient suffering that I think it’s extremely plausible that the world would have been better off with a German victory. The real twist, however, is what would have been the fate of the Bolshevism in case of a German win. It would depend, I suppose, on how and why the German victory was achieved.

On top of that, reliable sources have contended to me that American intervention in the war wasn’t especially decisive, though I’m not sure about that one way or the other.