Let's see if I can write this in a neocon style.

Michael Rubin is a third-rate policy "intellectual" who edits a magazine founded by a well-known bigot. Unsurprisingly, given that background, he's decided to smear one of the bravest advocates of marrying human rights with American power, Samantha Power, as an antisemite. He does this all in the service of building to the point of smearing Barack Obama, whom Power advises, as an antisemite.

Like the coward that he is, Rubin doesn't ever actually come out and say what he's saying -- namely, that Power is an antisemite. Instead, he flags a question Power asked a New York Times reporter at least five years ago as evidence that she "seemed upset" that the paper eventually called the Israeli non-massacre at Jenin a non-massacre. Such are the standards held by those who worked for the Bush administration -- Rubin worked for the constellation of flat-earth Pentagon directorates known collectively as the Office of Special Plans -- and constantly accuse the rest of us of myopia.

Befitting his cowardly McCarthyism, he demands that Power "explain what she did mean." I can't speak for Power, but the idea that people like Rubin deserve to ever be treated as good-faith interlocutors needs to be stamped out. The proper response to people like him is constant, incessant ridicule. What he's doing -- and will deny if ever he's called on it, like cowards do -- is constructing a slander of people like Power, a true and clarion proponent of American power and American justice, so he can imply with a wink that Barack ("Hussein!") Obama will murder Israeli babies in a Sbarro. In truth, Samantha Power has published, after this little quote appeared, in The New Republic, which is not in the habit of publishing antisemites.

Charming people like Rubin deserve to be treated as they would be in a more appropriate context for their manners, such as a prison yard.