Monday August 09, 2004

DO TELL. Ramesh Ponnuru:

...again and again [Wieseltier] suggests that liberals are sadly lowering their standards to match those of conservatives. Right. We had this great, civil, elevated political discourse until Limbaugh and Coulter came along, and it's too bad that liberals are now meeting fire with fire. I don't have the space, time, or patience to go into all the counter-evidence here, which could stretch all the way back to the Goldwater campaign or, for that matter, to William F. Buckley Jr.'s first coming to public attention. Suffice it to say that no right-winger wrote a major book talking about killing Bill Clinton during the 1990s.

I assume that final crack refers to that new Nicholson Baker book, which so sorely vexes some conservatives' understanding of such arcane literary terms as "fiction," "character," etc. But what's the rest of it about?

It's really too bad he doesn't have the patience, because I would love to hear how the Daisy ad stacks up again McCarthyism (both original and throwback varieties), Nixon's plumbers, the various bullshit Clinton prosecutions, and yeah, while we're at it, Limbaugh and She Who Cannot Be Named, and all the other dirty tricks without which modern conservatism is nearly unimaginable.

Maybe they're saving that one for the cruise.

<br />[Your user agent does not support frames or is currently configured not to display frames.]<br />