The delicate snowflakes of the Center for American Progress

Eli Lake at Bloomberg has the story:

It's official: Thanks to Benjamin Netanyahu, the Center for American Progress is no longer a safe space for progressives.

At least this is the considered opinion of about a dozen of the liberal think tank's staff members who endorsed a 13-paragraph statement expressing how their employer's decision to invite Israel's prime minister to speak on Tuesday wounded their feelings.

The statement says that inviting Netanyahu was "a humanity and human rights issue universally felt," and "we are in a place of confusion and hurt." The staffers complain that it will be difficult to explain the invitation to their progressive allies.

Normally, the earnest and unsuccessful protests of anonymous research-institution staffers are not all that important (the statement was read aloud in a closed meeting last Friday, but eventually reported by the Nation). Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at CAP who specializes in Middle East policy, told me he respectfully listened to the dissenting voices last week, but chose to go forward with the event anyway. "We are a think tank, and if we start going down the road of only inviting voices that agree with us, our analysis will suffer and run the risk of slipping into a one-dimensional advocacy," he said.

He then notes what has been increasingly apparent for some time: the unique nature of the tactics of post-America's particular brand of Freedom-Haters. They actually use infantile fragility as a weapon for fomenting totalitarian revolution:

 . . . it shows the migration from U.S. college campuses to Washington of the "cry bully" culture, to borrow a brilliant phrase from Julie Burchill. It's a new politics of powerlessness, where the aggrieved (or those in solidarity with them) demand that all dissenting views be excised from the discourse for the safety and well-being of the aggrieved.

Feelings instead of rifles. Hey, it seems to be getting the job done.

How long before the jackboots-with-the-vapors scream for Katulis's head on a platter?

"Some in the progressive camp seem to have the view that isolating and condemning Israel would achieve the most effective results to advance America's interests and progressive values," Katulis told me. "I don't agree with that view because I don't see what that would practically achieve. My view is that it would be more effective to keep the dialogue open and remain critical of Israel's actions when we disagree with them, which is what we've done for years."

There was a time, not so long ago, when those words would not be controversial among the Democratic grassroots. Today, they probably require a trigger warning.

Seriousness is a commodity at a premium in post-America.