Back from a week long trip to Vegas.    I attended the National Association of Television Producer's convention and the conference itself is probably worth a blog entry at some point.

In the meantime, Instapundit linked to this interview with Naomi Klein of No Logo fame.   If I were to ever construct a list of contemporary ideologues I just love to hate, Naomi Klein would be pretty high up there (along with Arundhati Roy, Paul Ehrlich and a handful of others.)   I found No Logo to be just plain idiotic and heartily agree with her other critics (such as the Economist) and calling her basically a jilted teenager who nevertheless knows how to turn a phrase.  

But in this interview, she rather forthright about a major failing for so many on the left -

...And I even sometimes get the sense — in some anti-war circles — that we who oppose the war don't have any responsibility to talk about how to improve the situation in Iraq beyond just advocating pulling out the troops.

There's almost a sense that to do so would be to weaken our position. I was talking to a journalist a few weeks ago and I was saying that I believe our responsibility is to hold Bush to his lie. They promised democracy, sovereignty and liberation. They haven't delivered, but our job should be to demand that these become realities. His response was, "So what you're saying is that something good could come from the war, right?" He was trying to trap me. I realized when he did this that this was a big reason why anti-war forces have refused to have positive demands — precisely because it will be used against us. It will seem as if something good could come from this war. My response to this is: Who the hell cares? Who cares about our anti-war egos? Which is really what this is about.

...I have heard people on the left in the U.S. say that we don't owe Iraq anything, that they have oil revenue, that our only responsibility is to just pull out. That is wrong. Our responsibility goes far beyond that. Anybody who says that has really not taken a hard look at the level of devastation of that country.

...Quite frankly, there's a lot of skepticism in Iraq — from what I saw — about the international anti-war movement. In part, it's because anti-war forces were not critical enough of Saddam. But it's also because we haven't proposed this kind of practical solidarity that has to do with improving people's lives, and not just absolving our conscience. Or saying “Not in our name,” and then going home.

...It's very, very frustrating. What I keep coming across in the U.S. anti-war movement is the acceptance of this idea that Americans are incapable of caring about anyone but themselves. The progressives in the U.S. are fairly self-loathing...

Now, there's a TON of material in this Klein interview that I've cut out for various reasons but these passages do significantly increase my respect for her.  'Tis a mighty fine line between "not supporting something" and "hoping it will fail" and Klein quite clearly recognizes that many on her side of the aisle cross it quite readily.