Some time ago a genius discovered that Republicans don’t watch Michael Moore films and Democrats don’t watch Hannity and Colmes. Lefty talks to lefty, nutcase to nutcase and no one crosses the party lines. There is no real debate. I myself regularly check out Hannity and Colmes, Michelle Malkin, Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter – albeit via Tbogg – but niggling doubts persist about the spectrum of my reading. So I determined to read Dawid Warszawski’s lengthy rebuttal of Tony Judt in this weekend’s Gazeta Wyborcza. This would be just the kind of robust, intellectual jousting that helps us form a synthetic view of the world, uncoloured by one’s own preferences.

Tony Judt had claimed that people like Adam Michnik (editor of GW) and Vaclav Havel were this era’s useful idiots, with their unstinting support for US foreign-policy misadventures. I agree entirely with him, so let us see what Warszawski has in defence…

In paragraph two he writes: “I unambiguously supported the war with Saddam [sic] out of fear of the weapons of mass destruction which the Iraqi dictator possessed and had used against neighbouring countries and his own citizens.”

I’m afraid I stopped reading there. I met UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter and there were no weapons of mass destruction. Everyone knew it. They were laughing at Colin Powell before he even left the podium at the UN with his forged casus belli.

Warszawski’s article is headlined: “Me, a useful idiot.”