What irony that two of the most annoying political commentators of our time share the same name. David Broder is the "Dean" of political pundits "inside the beltway", and Henryk Broder chastises his fellow Germans for appeasing Islamic extremists.
It’s nearly impossible to avoid David Broder’s words of wisdom. His op/ed pieces in the Washington Post are syndicated in regional newspapers around the country, and then nearly every Sunday his face stares back at us on the Sunday talk shows. Broder hates the political polarization that characterizes Washington, and his underlying message is "why can’t we all just get along"? Unfortunately, he blames the Democrats for not "getting along" with President Bush and his agenda. Broder, more than any other comentator, is the source of beltway Conventional Wisdom. It was precisely this Conventional Wisdom that lulled the media to support the disasterous unilateral invasion of Iraq, and it is Conventional Wisdom that is preventing the immediate withdrawal of US forces, resulting in a SURGE of flag-draped caskets arriving home from Baghdad. It was Broder’s Conventional Wisdom which did not object to the Bush administration of practicing torture, nor criticize the Guantanamo prison camp from operating outside of any known laws. Scott Horton elaborates in Harper’s:
"The Washington Post‘s David Broder is called the “dean” of the Washington punditry. More recently, he seems to sum up everything that’s wrong with the class who brought you weapons of mass destruction, the Iraq war and the ever “resurgent” President Bush. He is the vessel of a received wisdom which keeps the war-president in place, cautioning against criticism and validating war- and fear-mongering at every turn. Rather than provide pearls of wisdom based on a lifetime in Washington politics, Broder dishes out naïve, uncritical appraisals of Bush which often have a sycophantic twist—by contrast, he strings administration critics with malicious attacks which reflect faulty reasoning and imaginary facts."
Henryk Broder delights in being a politically incorrect voice in German political commentary. So Broder goes against the grain of entrenched anti-Americanism in Germany: he praises President Bush and celebrates the Iraq War, disdained by nearly all of his compatriots (and, incidentally, by now nearly all Americans). Unfortunately, his political incorrectness puts him in the same camp as the hate blog Politically Incorrect with its rabid Islamophobia. His provocative pieces in Der Spiegel and elsewhere, where he equates Islam with terrorism, have the desired result. They provoke strong reactions which Henryk Broder gleefully reprints on his blog as proof of virulent anti-Semitism in Germany. Because of his strong support of American neoconservatism, Broder was the recipient of the presitgious Ludwig-Börne-Preis last week in Frankfurt. Named after the brilliant Jewish journalist, the prize is awarded each year to honor independent journalism. The French writer and Holocaust survivor Alfred Grosser considers awarding this prize to Henryk Broder an insult to humanism:
Helmut Markworts Entscheidung, Henryk M. Broder den Börne-Preis zu verleihen, missachtet diesen Humanismus. Er beleidigt damit jene Grundwerte, aufgrund derer Ludwig Börnes Name 1832 beim Hambacher Fest mit Begeisterung gefeiert wurde. Diese Werte bildeten die Basis der ersten deutschen Verfassung, die 1848 in der Frankfurter Paulskirche beschlossen wurde. Mit der diesjährigen Feier zur Verleihung des Börne-Preises in der Paulskirche wendet man sich von ihnen ab.
See also Thomas Rothschild’s excellent piece in Freitag, where he asks: why not just give the prize to Paul Wolfowitz?
