XDA

Our least favorite law professor columnist, Paul Campos, gets a little personal in today's installment of the weekly opportunity Campos uses to reveal his true ignorance of the war we are in and his candyland ideas of the world outside his classroom. First he compares my friend Hugh Hewitt, and leading right center blogger, Glenn Reynolds, to Ward Churchill in the title of his piece; then he compares them to fascists (which is a joke--at worst Reynolds is a libertarian and Hewitt an evangelical, both are about as far from fascist as you can get on the political continuum). Here is Campos' money quote:

And while it would perhaps be an exaggeration to call people like [Glenn] Reynolds and his fellow law professor Hugh Hewitt (who defended Reynolds' comments) fascists, it isn't an exaggeration to point out that these gentlemen sound very much like fascists when they encourage the American government to murder people.

OK, let's go back. Here, in total, is what the Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds said (linking to Cap'n Ed Morrissey) about the capture in Iraq of 100 of the 800 Steyr-Mannlicher HS50 sniper rifles Austria sold to Iran a few months ago, et al. Here is the first paragraph:

This has been obvious for a long time anyway, and I don't understand why the Bush Administration has been so slow to respond. Nor do I think that high-profile diplomacy, or an invasion, is an appropriate response. We should be responding quietly, killing radical mullahs and iranian atomic scientists, supporting the simmering insurgencies within Iran, putting the mullahs' expat business interests out of business, etc. Basically, stepping on the Iranians' toes hard enough to make them reconsider their not-so-covert war against us in Iraq. And we should have been doing this since the summer 2003. But as far as I can tell, we've done nothing along these lines.

And here is what Hugh Hewitt said, after quoting the above:

Glenn will no doubt attract virtual bricks from the usual suspects, but he goes right to the heart of the problem. If we know that Iran is killing American soldiers, if we don't punish that action is some way, the killing will not only continue, it will increase.

Note that Hezbollah hasn't kidnapped any Israeli soldiers lately. There's a reason.

I am unable to find the fascist content in any of these three paragraphs. Of course, I'm not a lefty, so I don't immediately use the word 'fascist' to describe someone I simply don't agree with.

Campos is totally wrong, and really very naive, to say "Of course Iran is not at war with America..." (They invaded our territory (the Tehran Embassy) in 1979, and have never backed down, never apologized and continue to wage war against us since that first warlike act).

He is also completely and somewhat simperingly wrong that scientists working on nuclear weapons are classified as non-combatants.

Campos is also monumentally wrong (and I hate to say this considering his position at the University of Colorado Law School) as usual about the law, almost every bit of it he refers to. The smart, anti-fascist, right side of the political aisle has pointed out a lot of what was lacking in Campos' screed, like facts and logic--that sort of thing, particularly Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit and John Hinderaker at Powerline.

Name-calling, particularly using names like 'fascist' and 'nazi,' is not designed to further debate, but to cut it off--to stifle continuing and free speech by shifting the ground under the opponent, who must instantly start defending him, or her, self from the vile names so that the original thread of the 'debate' is lost and forgotten.

Campos should be ashamed of himself, but I believe, as I have for years now, that he is too fatuous to feel shame. There's some name-calling that is actually deserved.

And finally, when the Behemoth of lefty intellect Ward Churchill was, as usual, comparing people to Nazis, he was talking about his fellow citizens who were victims of the 9-11 attacks. How in the world does that odious comparison to SS Obersturmbannführer Eichmann in any way compare to Reynolds' and Hewitt's seeking effective ways to protect our troops in Iraq from attack by Iranians or by Jihadists with Iranian supplied weapons?

UPDATE: One of our favorite law professor bloggers, Eugene Volokh, has his well reasoned say on the matter, Money quotes:

Nor can we simply say that "Murder is the premeditated unlawful killing of a human being" and appeal to some abstract legal principles to decide that targeted killings are "unlawful" and therefore beyond reasonable discussion. First, the legal rules are far from clear — for instance, some have pointed to Executive Order 12333 as a categorical prohibition on "assassination," but an influential, and, in my view, persuasive, 1989 memo concurred in by various Executive Branch legal officials concludes that many targeted killings remain permissible despite this. The memo likewise concludes that many such targeted killings do not violate various international law norms.

[...]

In any case, these are serious questions that serious people should discuss seriously. But Campos isn't in the mood for discussion. He is so confident of his position that he wants his academic adversaries fired, the usual rules of academic freedom suspended, and the debate presumably shut off at all levels: After all, if discussion about this is improper for academics, it is presumably at least as improper for journalists, think tank members, Congressmen, executive officials, and everyone else.

Welcome to visitors following the link from Instapundit.

UPDATE 2: Our less liberal paper, The Rocky Mountain News, which runs Paul Campos' thoughts and ideas on Tuesdays, was nice enough to publish Glenn Reynold's response to Campos. Reynolds was nicer than I was, but ultimately his response cut the deeper. Behold:

Other law professors have, of course, made similar arguments, at far greater length than my blog post. Campos, himself a law professor, could have learned these things through a simple Google search, but apparently did not.

Instead, he authored an uninformed column, and then added a thuggish suggestion that my university should discipline me for daring to utter thoughts that, in his uninformed state, he found uncongenial. After he has educated himself sufficiently to have an informed opinion on the subject, Campos might still disagree. But if he does, I promise not to try to get him fired for not sharing my opinions. Perhaps one day, he’ll learn to return the favor.

UPDATE 3: Local blogger Jeff Goldstein throws in his two cents--snarky without being smarmy. His best paragraphs:

It used to be that public intellectuals took their positions seriously enough to engage in good faith arguments. But Campos—despite being given a high-profile forum from which to do so—is less interested with arguing points of fact than he is in placing his opponents on the defensive. That is, rather than argue against a position on the relative merits of that position, Campos seems entirely more interested in unfairly demonizing those who disagree with him, the hope being that such a rhetorical ploy will weary them into silence. Which, as a strategy, is both intellectually lazy and transparently self-serving.

Reynolds calls this attitude “thuggish,” which is far too kind a description, I think. Because what it is is precisely the kind of progressive totalitarian impulse that, drawing on the intellectual entitlement it feels it has earned by virtue of what it considers to be the moral and intellectual unassailability of its positions, is able to rationalize away anti-intellectual behavior as just another necessary evil in the service of constructing the perfect society, even if doing so dictates that virtually any means, however temporarily distasteful, are ultimately justified.