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In Praise Of Stephen Walt!

Well, agreement anyway. Andrew Sullivan writes:

It seems to me simply wrong to ascribe the bile of flocks of angry commenters that appear on any site that tackles contentious topics to the blogger himself. You can criticize him or her for not deleting them and providing a platform to hate (Ann Althouse's readers routinely mock me for having HIV, for example, and she does nothing) but you can't criticize someone for attracting such creatures on the internet - let alone convict him of the same views. To further convict him on the basis of anti-Semitic emails sent entirely independently of him to a third party - and to describe them as "Stephen Walt's Mailbag" when in fact, it's Jeffrey Goldberg's in-tray - strikes me as deeply unfair. But that's what my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg has done with Stephen Walt in his latest post. He has every right to lambaste Walt for things he writes and has written (although I think "Jew-baiter" is an ugly and absurd excess) - but this guilt-by-association is perverse.

He quotes Walt expounding, and I agree.