Last night I was paging through the New Republic and, for some reason, ended up torturing myself by reading Leon Wieselter’s latest exercise in pretension and self-regard. It was fairly ordinary, as these things go, but included this aside about supporters of the Iraq War:
(The other day Rachel Maddow, who has never been significantly wrong about anything, published this Stalinoid sentence in The Washington Post: “Whether they are humbled by their own mistakes or not, it is our civic responsibility to ensure that a history of misstatements and misjudgments has consequences for a person’s credibility in our national discourse.”)
Stalinoid? Seriously? For a very mild suggestion that people with a history of being wrong should be thought less credible in the future? That sounds more like a bare minimum of common sense than a cultural pogrom aimed at neocons and liberal hawks.
I’ve suggested in the past that we should all calm down a bit over analogies to Hitler and Nazis in popular discourse, so I’m hardly one to complain about using Stalin in the same way. But this is still a pretty reprehensible slur. Wieselter needs to find a better outlet for his frustration over being wrong about the Iraq War.
