Tuesday November 13, 2007

DOWN AT THE CORNER/FAR FROM THE SLUMS/JONAH AND THE WINGNUTS ARE PLAYIN'/READ AN ESSAY AND FLAP YOUR GUMS. Jonah Goldberg has some fun with Hillary Clinton's gender-card play:

I'm sick of your lies Lowry. This is nothing but an unfair criticism. I don't want to say you're anti-Semitic, but if my name wasn't Goldberg, I'm not so sure you would be attacking me this way. You're practicing the politics of pile-on, the blogging of bullying, editing of intimidation.

I confess that before I followed the thread back, I thought maybe someone had called Goldberg a neoconservative.

Meanwhile, John Derbyshire wonders

And incidentally, when did "having sex" become the standard colloquial expression for coitus? Does anyone else dislike it as much as I do? It makes it sound like an operation—like having a haircut or having root canal... I wonder how we got stuck with it.

If Derbyshire thinks "having sex" is limited to coitus, I'd suggest that he take another look at the style guide.

He's also upset that a provocative ad appeared in his Playbill at a recent performance of the opera Norma. "I don't mind soft porn," he says, "But... the Met?" Guess he's never seen Salome.

For added misery, Stanley Kurtz declares that he finds as much "fun" in a 7,000-word New Atlantis essay on Facebook et alia as he does in a Brad Paisley video. Not for the first time, I find his judgment suspect.