Dershowitz A Sellout? No Question About It: He’s Not!

5/11/18

Excellent essay on the Dersh though I don’t find it a complex issue even though the original linker, Ron Radosh, thinks it is. 

Here’s what I wrote on the thread following from Radosh’s original post:

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/05/11/alan-dershowitz-donald-trump-what-happened-218359

.... It’s not really a complex issue, though this essay in Politico is really good in its roundedness and surprising balanced sympathy for Dershowitz. He most assuredly has a superior mind, legal and otherwise. And he has warts, sure: we all do. But his aren’t lack of principle, hypocrisy or lack of intellectual integrity. They’re, if anything, characterological: ego driven, hungry for attention, limelight seeking and those kinds of traits. 

My only criticism of this piece is, in microcosm, its placement of too much emphasis on his appearances on Fox. So what if he’s on Fox a lot? It gives him millions of eyes, ears and minds. 

The world revealed by that sand grain is one gone off kilter in its dismissal of all things that putatively favor Trump, let alone in reacting syndromically against Trump himself, as if just under 1/2 of voting Americans are wholly wrong about him, as if he isn’t accomplishing things, as if there’s no argument whatsoever to be made for any aspect of him or in his favor with respect to any issue. 

There is in this essay a little too much credence given to that view, a view which doesn’t bear scrutiny, as informing a valid criticism of Dershowitz. Mind you that lesser imperfection is offset by the good, strong sway given to the opposite and right position, namely:

..... In another view, the people who’ve lost their way are the liberals and civil libertarians, blinded by their rage for Trump, who have dropped their principles in a moment of political threat and are taking out their anger on a man who has been their staunchest ally....

....Maybe the question isn’t what happened to Alan Dershowitz.

Maybe it’s what happened to everyone else....

I’d like to see someone make the case, other than what’s already been cited in the essay, against that “another view.”.....