J. Bottum weighs in too, and makes some fine points:
Enough with all this, already. On Friday, David wrote, “I posted an essay on the Jewish webzine Tablet explaining how my neoconservative friends (and they are my friends) blew it on the Middle East.” And on Tuesday, John wrote that, despite their disagreements, his foreign-policy thinking and David’s “stem from the same root—a conviction that the West is under ideological assault and needs defending from its Islamofascist enemies.”
Maybe this current muddle is a proxy for that foreign-policy debate they’re not engaging, but then, again, maybe it isn’t. Regardless, the point to take away is that there simply isn’t any disagreement here about the homespun nature of President Obama. If push comes to shove, I’m going to have to whack David upside the head for indulging that vulgarity about Obama’s mother and then completely support him, because he works with me, and because I enjoy his mercurial brilliance, and because he didn’t say what he’s thought to have said.
But why does it have to come to that? We’ve got enemies enough without creating more.