Peter Beinart should find better causes. When he angrily accused the White House of dishonesty over the Niger Uranium claim, I thought he was pretty arrogant. Now, being so indignant over the cancellation of what sounds like an effete and weird production of an obscure opera strikes me as rather odd. While "free speech" has come to mean saying outrageous things just to rub them in the faces of others, it can now result in riots, bombings and deaths. OK, we shouldn't knuckle under to manipulated Arab rage, but I'd rather have a better cause than what sounds like a pretentious and annoying production and a few gratuitous and some not very clever cartoons.

And it's not as if liberals in Academia really believe in freedom of speech anymore. They just have different codes of what is and isn't permissible (Obscene now refers to corporate profits and defense budgets rather than the sexually prurient, for example). Use the "n-word," advocate homemaking or invite Ann Coulter to speak on campus, and you're likely to spark riots by liberal activists. Maybe we should rid ourselves of these prejudices and denials of freedom, before we start lecturing Germany on freedom of speech.

He writes:

Partisan militancy may be necessary to combat Republican power. But it cannot define what it means to be a liberal in the United States today.

Is there Republican militancy? It sounds like an oxymoron, like the image of Republicans staging protests in Florida over the recounting crisis in 2000, which tickled David Brooks at the time. Militancy doesn't really describe conservatives except the white supremacists who aren't really conservative as much as fascists. Republicans I know tend to see politics more as a means to keeping government from getting out of hand more than as a means to grasp power. It's more like we organize and vote to prevent Democrats from adopting total socialism. "The power of the Republicans" just doesn't sound all that ominous, knowing that if they are real conservatives they'll cut taxes and try to slow down the growth of government or turn it back. Of course, they haven't been able to do much of that due to the amount of spending required by entitlement programs. We seem to be a nation split down the middle, fighting over its soul. It's enormously difficult to really do much about programs so loved by Republicans. You need 60% majorities in Congress, and even then, you'd have trouble because so many people have a stake in the status quo. That ominous power of the Republicans isn't so much a threat as an obstacle in the path of the socialist dreams of the left, eliminating poverty and nationlize health care, neither of while really appeal that much to tax payers. It's one thing to pay payroll taxes with the expectation of support when you retire and quite another to pay taxes to support people who don't seem to really want to do much to help themselves. Of course there are poor people who need help and would help themselves if they could. But making charity a legal entitlement just doesn't make sense to most of us.