When I wrote Useful Idiots, I speculated about the motives of American liberals and leftists who more or less openly rooted for America's enemies. Some of this behavior was attributable to romantic attachment to the idea of Marxism, which many had absorbed to varying degrees at our "best" universities. But the advent of the current war against Islamofascism has been clarifying. For here is an enemy, unlike, say, the Sandinistas or the Soviets, that makes no pretense (however empty) of representing the poor; that condemns and deplores that beacon of liberalism, the Enlightenment; that cheerfully oppresses women and minorities; and that celebrates the stoning of homosexuals. And yet even against this enemy, the American Left cannot help but hope for American failure. 

The decision by the New York Times to publish details of the SWIFT program is not just disgraceful, as President Bush put it, it is treasonous. What else can you call it? Does the information about our methods of tracking terror financing not provide aid to the enemy? Does it not make another attack on the very city in which the Times originates more likely? The Times is also contradicting itself.  In 2001, it ran an editorial recommending exactly the sort of program it has now sabotaged. Powerlineblog has it.

And what is the logic of publishing? In defense of the Times' decision, reporter Eric Lichtblau notes that the Bush administration has publicly proclaimed its interest in tracking terror financing, so what's the big deal? 

He cannot be serious. The administration has also publicly proclaimed its interest in capturing or killing bin Laden. Would the New York Times publish details about how we're trying to find him? Would it publish the name of an informer within al Qaeda? I don't know. They are so corrupted by their own self-importance and by their hatred of the president that they have become a menace. 

Here is how I put in Useful Idiots:

That some precincts on the Left — even now — can find reasons to blame the United States for the hatred directed against it, is evidence that the rotten kernel of their appeasement and weakness throughout the Cold War was America-hatred.