Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky have been joined by members of their favorite nationality, the French, in being deeply suspicious of the events of September 11th. The French have gone one better, in fact, insisting that all of the events of that day were a right wing conspiracy.
It is a measure, I suppose, of just how badly the reality of the terror attacks hurt the leftist agenda that some on the left have taken on such an extreme posture of denial. One strains to remember any event that so completely shut the American left up in the weeks following September 11th, for example. And even now those members of the left who speak up against the Bush administration do so from well out on the margin, and they know it. Most of the major statements against US policy vis-a-vis the War on Terror have been made from the safety of Great Britain.
But none sink so deeply into denial and fantasy than the French, which suggests that none on the left are so ambivalent about their own agenda. Indeed, the French leftist program is on the way to becoming the most recent example of the failure of leftist ideology, having rendered the French economy stagnant and unable to compete in Europe much less the rest of the world with impossibly high taxes and restrictions on worker productivity. The right has been gaining politically in France and is currently sizing up opportunities for reforming the French economy by rolling back such leftist initiatives as the 35 hour work week. Perhaps it's a good time for those members of the doctrinaire left who can't face reality to go somewhere and play Dungeons and Dragons for the rest of the year.
Or they could just spend the summer reading and debating books that advocate crazy conspiracy theories. Either way, they take themselves out of the flow of real world affairs. The best thing for them and France, really.