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Editor's Note: Why Michael Can't Read: Defining the American Left -- Part II will be published March 16, 2005 on GOPUSA.

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Professor Michael Berube is one of many fierce and shallow critics of our new database -- DiscoverTheNetwork, which is a comprehensive guide to the political left. In a recent attack (web site) on our site (on March 2) he reveals once again the intellectual laziness of the left when it comes to engaging opponents in, well, intellectual argument. On the other hand, tenured radicals like Berube have lifetime jobs and captive audiences, so what is their incentive not to be lazy?

When DiscoverTheNetwork was unveiled on February 15th, Berube was one of many leftwing bloggers to attempt a riposte with this mindless, tongue-in-cheek, assault (web site) focusing on one page in the website that featured a hundred or so individuals profiled on the site. Forget that the website is the product of years of thinking about the left and that its rationale has been laid out in a series of books beginning with Destructive Generation, which I co-authored with Peter Collier, and including The Politics of Bad Faith, Left Illusions and Unholy Alliance (published last fall). Forget, too, that the new website, the result of tens of thousands of man-hours of work, is itself an attempt to redefine the political spectrum in a way that brings our political language into closer relationship with the reality it seeks to describe. That, in particular, it makes an argument for changing a situation in which radicals like Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore are habitually described as "liberals" by mainstream media, along with ideological feminists like Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Argument? The left isn't interested. In a collective hissy fit (web site) the leftwing "critics" like Berube responded to the posting of DiscoverTheNetwork with howls of ridicule and anguish, fixating on a picture grid (web site) that appeared on the Individuals search page as the focal point of their ire. The grid had committed the unpardonable offense of "lumping together" a fraction of the individuals profiled in the base. As it happens, these individuals had been selected because they were famous and therefore recognizable, and thus likely to entice browsers of the base to enter its interior pages and view the content inside (each picture served as a link to a profile).

Berube's assault was typical. It was conceived (ineptly as it happens) as a satire of the alleged absurdities committed by the site's authors, and thus not as a serious argument. Berube guffawed over the fact that Barbra Streisand (web site) and Katie Couric (web site) were included in the base, as though no one could take these women seriously (imagine if conservatives had tried that) and because they (along with other leftists) were part of a site that included Islamic radicals like Sami al-Arian (web site) and the "blind sheik" Abdul Rachman. (web site) Al-Arian is the imprisoned North American leader of Palestine Islamic Jihad (web site) and Abdul Rachman is the convicted head of the Islamic Group (web site) which tried to blow up 200,000 commuters in the Lincoln and Holland tunnels a dozen years ago, and actually bombed the World Trade Center for good measure.

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