A Hot Time in the Capital Last Night (Walt and Mearsheimer at Politics and Prose)

A friend passes along the following account of Walt and Mearsheimer's event
at Northwest D.C.'s most influential book store, last night:

Went to Politics and Prose in Washington, DC last night.
Place was like a sauna.  A man passed out it was so hot.
I thought EMS would find a way to shut it down there were
so many people.

A waitress told me it was the biggest turnout in her
year there and a man outside said he'd been going for
10 years and this was the biggest he'd seen.  He
claimed it was bigger than turnout for Gerry Adams and
Howard Zinn.  Then he said, Do you think the country
is ready for a discussion of this stuff...clearly
indicating that he did.

I couldn't get in for some time.  First questions I
heard were all antagonistic, but then there was a
string of more positive questions.  Almost all of the
questions that morning at the Cosmos Club were
positive.

Very interesting evening.  I don't agree with
everything they say (though I do with a very
significant portion), but I think they're doing a very
important service in getting the country talking about
it and exposing how outrageous it is to hurl the
anti-Semitism charge around so carelessly in the way
that some groups do. They're absolutely right that
it's meant to silence and intimidate. Dan Okrent said
a couple of years ago in one of his Sunday columns for
the NYT words to the effect that he thought it was
cheapening an important term.  

I would give good money to know whether the man who
passed out was Jewish and whether one, maybe two, of
the principal aid givers were Palestinian.  There
would have been a very powerful story there, but I
wasn't about to get up in people's faces at that time
and ask.  And at some level it doesn't really matter. 
A man was down and other patrons of the store came to
his assistance.  They might disagree politically (or
they might have been in perfect alignment), but what
mattered was providing help to somebody in distress
without regard to things that may at one time have
been hangups for people. The country has come a long
way and because it has we've helped to create space to
touch on sensitive issues in desperate need of
discussion.