Glenn Greenwald never fails. I was just catching up on the infamous Leon Wieseltier-Andrew Sullivan ethno-politico-theological brouhaha of last month that I completely missed while trekking around Latin America, and I found this simple but wise paragraph:

“What one thinks of Andrew Sullivan, or how angry he’s made one over the years, ought to be about the most irrelevant factor imaginable in determining one’s reaction to this TNR attack.  Sometimes, even people you don’t like are the targets of odious and harmful accusations, and sometimes, even your Bestest Friends, fellow party members and listserv pals might do wrong things that merit criticism.  Wieseltier’s polemic is a classic example of anti-semitism accusations tossed around with no conceivable basis and for purely ignoble ends.  It’s the very tactic that has caused significant damage in the past.  So obviously unhinged is this particular assault that it actually presents a good opportunity to discredit behavior like this once and for all.  That’s all that should matter; how many grudges one nurses towards Andrew Sullivan is nice fodder for gossipy listserv chats, but no responsible or even adult commentator would allow it to influence one’s views on this matter.”

And that’s why Glenn Greenwald is one of the very few mainstream writers on politics I can read regularly without a bad case of moral indigestion.

Other good responses to Wieseltier came from Sullivan himself, and from Matthew Yglesias and  Joe Klein.

Yglesias’s post minced no words:

“For the purposes of intimidation, after all, baseless charges work better than well-grounded ones. Nikolai Krylenko, Bolshevik Minister of Justice, said “we must execute not only the guilty, execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more.” And it’s much the same here. If you call anti-semites anti-semites, then people who aren’t motivated by anti-Jewish racism will figure “hey, since my political opinions aren’t motivated by anti-Jewish racism, then I’m safe.” The idea is to put everyone on notice that mere innocence will be no defense.”

The only problem was I wasn’t actually clear from reading Yglesias (apparently a long-time sparring partner of Wieseltier’s) where exactly runs the thin red line you can’t cross. Maybe that takes years of hanging out at MSM confabs, a future I’m as likely to encounter as sequestration in a Saudi harem.

Reading Sullivan, on the other hand, I felt I was reprising some of my own intellectual history:

“As a Jew and a Catholic, we read Buddhist scriptures together. We were, in fact, somewhat painfully alike in many ways: religious traditionalists whose reverence for our faiths was also marked by our rebellion within them. We share a commitment to secularism and religion, these days a very rare combination. His mentor was Isaiah Berlin; mine Michael Oakeshott.”

But, finally, it’s Jeffrey Goldberg, taking Wieseltier’s part, who – with minor adjustments-  gets the final word on the whole sad business:

“I wish that he (Lila: all of them) would open up  that their hearts to complexity.”