Canceled

The Economist endorsed John Kerry:

[Bush's] biggest mistake . . . was one that will haunt America for years to come. It lay in dealing with prisoners-of-war by sending hundreds of them to the American base at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, putting them in a legal limbo, outside the Geneva conventions and outside America's own legal system. That act reflected a genuinely difficult problem: that of having captured people of unknown status but many of whom probably did want to kill Americans, at a time when to set them free would have been politically controversial, to say the least. That difficulty cannot neutralise the damage caused by this decision, however. Today, Guantánamo Bay offers constant evidence of America's hypocrisy, evidence that is disturbing for those who sympathise with it, cause-affirming for those who hate it. This administration, which claims to be fighting for justice, the rule of law and liberty, is incarcerating hundreds of people, whether innocent or guilty, without trial or access to legal representation.

This is idiotic and back-asswards. Sending Taliban fighters to Cuba didn't put them outside the law--the terrorists did that themselves, by waging war outside of sovereignty, without wearing unit designators: unprotected by the Geneva Convention. Under the laws of war, captured Taliban could (and perhaps should) have been killed. Shipping them to Guantánamo, for evaluation and--if innocent--eventual release showed our respect for human rights. The Economist, like the left, complains when Bush allegedly fails to follow treaties--and then complains when he does.

It's the last straw. Though I've been a subscriber for more than 15 years, the Economist has been moving left since the early 1990s. And its become more facile by the hour, as John Derbyshire chronicles:

There was a sort of faddish infatuation with The Economist back in the early 1990s among both business and policy elites in the U.S. The bloom went off the rose rather quickly, though, and at the end of that decade the break-up was made official in The New Republic, where Andrew Sullivan published a scathing piece calling the venerable British weekly “a kind of Reader’s Digest for the overclass.” The gravamen of Sullivan’s charge was that The Economist embodied good old British amateurism and the cult of effortless, but illusory, superiority — that a staff of glib second-raters held America’s educated classes in thrall by a combination of marketing skill, appeals to snobbery, and brazen bluff, rather as a tiny cadre of unflappable Englishmen had once held down the multitudes of India by dint of similar techniques. . . The arguments are never dense or demanding, and everything is seasoned with witty quotations, historical curiosities, deft literary allusions, and illuminating anecdotes.

The world faces enormous challenges in this age of International Terrorism, Inc. America's careful and humane treatment of captured terrorists at Guantánamo isn't one of them. Win or lose on Tuesday, I'm canceling my subscription.