YOUR LIBERAL MEDIA

Radar reports:

Noted neocon and New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus ... has been given control of the paper's Week in Review section. Prepare for (justified) liberal outrage....

I'm not sure "Noted neocon" is the exact term I'd use for Tanenhaus, but the link at those words is to a Jim Sleeper column at Talking Points Memo that lays out the evidence of Tanenhaus's fondness for writers who think the biggest threat to the Republic is the "hate-America left":

... mightn't Tanenhaus reconsider his extended parading of conservative, neoconservative, and liberal war hawks such as Peter Beinart, Paul Berman, Richard Brookhiser, David Brooks, Christopher Hitchens, and Joe Klein, who still can't stop assailing the "hate-America left" and its liberal fellow travelers ...?

...He has been way too kind to Beinart, who keeps baying that Michael Moore and Markos Moulitsas are more dangerous than Bush and his minions. And he has been far too kind to Brooks, who, fresh from heralding the end of ideology and urging a new civility, demonstrated his own post-ideological civility by remarking Connecticut Senate candidate Ned Lamont's "vicious," "Sunni-Shiite style of politics," whose "flamers… tell themselves their enemies are so vicious they have to be vicious, too."

[Tanenhaus] couldn't resist some gratuitous left-bashing of his own in The New Republic: Quoting George Orwell's observation that English intellectuals' attraction to Stalinism "betrayed 'a secret wish ... [to] usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip," he adds that

"It is no less true today. The intellectual left, most conspicuously in its Ivy League, Manhattan, and Hollywood variants, still clings to its dream of the whip handle, just as the educated right dreams of the day when the intelligentsia will be the first to feel the stinging cord."

... his gesture toward balance ("the educated right...") seems only a fig leaf for a continuing lust to catch the intellectual left dreaming of a Stalinist whip....

This guy now gets the reins at a much-read news-and-opinion section of the most important Sunday paper in America. Talk about liberals being people who don't think it's polite to take their own side in an argument....