Jonah Goldberg via Sadly No!:
There is a difference between the “American left” and “liberals,” after all. And usually when fringe leftists openly denounce imperialist America or express hope that she will be bloodied abroad or at home, self-described liberals are usually the first to respond, “Hey, liberals arent leftists.”
Not that he gives any examples of leftists wanting America bloodied “abroad ort at home”, but I give you the “liberal” Michael Tomasky, being among the “first to respond, ‘Hey, liberals aren’t leftists.'”:
But Cohen completely ignores the fourth category of foreign-policy debate: liberals who are neither hawks nor on the left. People who, for example, supported the US invasion of Afghanistan. People who, for that matter, supported the interventions of the 1990s. People who would very much like to have seen the United States do something, earlier and more forcefully, about Darfur.
Who are these people? Mainstream liberals who aren’t the anti-militarist left but who also opposed the Iraq war (or, in a small number of cases, supported it originally but quickly recognized the horror of the situation and withdrew their support).
Like who? Well, like me, for starters. And, off the top of my head: Mark Danner, Todd Gitlin, Eric Alterman, Joshua Micah-Marshall, Fred Kaplan, Paul Krugman, Paul Starr, Robert Kuttner, Harold Meyerson, Jo-Ann Mort, John Judis and the aforementioned Yglesias. And a thousand others.
They aren’t the left, of course, they’re serious. And everyone knows leftists aren’t serious.