Alexander Cockburn (in a subscribers-only Nation column) notes that it's perfectly acceptable to describe the violent death of your ideological opponents as simple justice, a la Ward "Little Eichmanns" Churchill -- as long as your opponents are on the left:

The New Republic's Tom Frank (not the Frank, please note, who just wrote a book about Kansas) describes in TNR how he recently sat in on an antiwar panel in Washington.

Frank listened to Stan Goff, a former Delta Force soldier and current organizer for Military Families Speak Out, who duly moved Frank to write that "what I needed was a Republican like Arnold [Schwarzenegger] who would walk up to [Goff] and punch him in the face." Then upon Frank's outraged ears fell the views of International Socialist Review editorial board member Sherry Wolf, who asserted that Iraqis had a "right" to rebel against occupation, prompting TNR's man to confide to his readers that "these weren't harmless lefties. I didn't want Nancy Pelosi talking sense to them; I wanted John Ashcroft to come busting through the wall with a submachine gun to round everyone up for an immediate trip to Gitmo, with Charles Graner on hand for interrogation." After Wolf quoted Booker Prize-winning author Arundhati Roy's defense of the right to resist, Frank mused, "Maybe sometimes you just want to be on the side of whoever is more likely to take a bunker buster to Arundhati Roy."

Here's that New Republic article, courtesy of a Freeper, who finds it delightful.

Now, I'm still not willing to defend Churchill's death sentence for World Trade Center workers (all of them in the original essay, all but the blue-collar workers and various others in his subsequent apologia -- a qualification just like the one made by his ideological opposite number, Ann Coulter).

But can we have a single standard, please?