Carney writes that “opposition to the Iraq war or support of trade tariffs shouldn’t precipitate excommunication from the Right.” Fine. I know of nobody who argues otherwise. Carney has characterized David Frum’s recent NR article as an attack on “conservatives who have not adequately displayed their enthusiasm for the direction our nation’s foreign policy is going.” This is too insipid to deserve a response. Carney also says that it is sad that “a handful of conservative writers. . . have called those who criticize the neocons anti-semitic.” This is rather worse than insipid.

Let’s return for a moment to Robert Novak’s charge that David Frum may have joined the White House to serve Israeli interests. Never mind that he went there as an economic speechwriter. Nobody would ever make that charge about Mike Gerson, even though he has been responsible for more of Bush’s rhetoric regarding the Middle East than Frum. The difference is that Gerson is an evangelical rather than a Jew. Carney has written delicately that “the unfortunate charge of dual-loyalty implicit or explicit in some of Novak’s and Buchanan’s writings” is “poisonous to debate.” Yes it is, and in some cases that poison has a name.