Strange noise on the Left

A blogger named Suzi Gablik gets frosted by anti-war criticism of President Obama and writes a post called "Why I'm Not a Liberal Anymore":

All I know is that I can hardly stand reading the Huffington Post these days. The stuff coming out of "progressive" mouths is all too often on a par with Glenn Beck's abusive rants . . .
I think the straw that broke this camel's back was an horrendously ugly and smearing essay Christian Parenti wrote last week, which was published on the Huffington Post after Obama's Afghanistan speech. . . .

The essay in question was standard issue anti-war leftist discourse, no different from anything any peacenik has said about U.S. foreign policy since Vietnam. Because its target is a Democratic president, however, Gablik decides to excommunicate herself from liberalism.

While not so naive as to believe in Peace Through Pacifism, I nevertheless admire the peacenik consistency of those on the Left who, like Parenti, don't allow themselves to be bamboozled by appeals to partisan unity or stunned into silence by the haloed awesomeness of Obama.

Is there anything in Gablik to be admired? Not really. She slams Beck for "abusive rants," yet what did she write last October?

Palin's cultivated malice almost makes the KKK look untutored.

So much for consistency. And who exactly is Gablik? An art critic with a penchant for grandiose abstraction:

A new paradigm of an engaged, participatory and socially relevant art is emerging . . .
Within the modernist paradigm under which I grew up, art has been typically understood as a collection of prestigious objects, existing in museums and galleries, disconnected from ordinary life and action. . . .
Many of the beliefs about art that our culture subscribes to, that the problems of art are purely aesthetic and that art will never change the world, are beliefs that have diminished the capacity of artists for constructive thought and action. . . .
As many artists shift their work arena from the studio to the more public contexts of political, social, and environmental life, we are all being called, in our understanding of what art is, to move beyond the mode of disinterested contemplation to something that is more participatory and engaged. . . .

Verbose nothingness, the familiar incantation of buzzwords -- "paradigm," "socially relevant," "participatory" -- that function primarily as signifiers of membership in the intellectual ranks. And now, because some liberal critics have turned their guns on Obama, she decides that HuffPo is coterminous with liberalism, and therefore she is not liberal.

Remember this next time somebody tells you conservatives are anti-intellectual morons.