Here’s Sullivan’s latest fantasizing: “I was also told by someone present at the Ramesh Ponnuru/Laura Ingraham discussion at Aspen that two other conservatives are now regarded as suspect by the ruling Republican intelligentsia: George Will and David Brooks. I imagine William F Buckley Jr, who has pronounced the Iraq war a failure, is also no longer a conservative in good standing. The attitude of people like Ponnuru and Ingraham and Levin is indeed Stalinist in form, if not content. But when you have to defend a massive increase in government spending and power in the name of conservatism, this kind of newspeak is necessary.”

Now there’s some solid journalism! The “ruling Republican intelligentsia” has various attitudes that can be inferred from what “someone” told Sullivan either Ingraham or I had said. In truth, there was no “Ramesh Ponnuru/Laura Ingraham discussion at Aspen”; we were, with other people, on two panels together. I think Ingraham said something critical of Brooks’s “national greatness conservatism.” (Note that her comment was precisely the reverse of what Sullivan is suggesting: She was criticizing Brooks for being too positive about increased government.) I don’t recall saying anything about Will or Brooks. I admire both men greatly; they are two of my three favorite non-NR columnists, the other being Charles Krauthammer. (I have offered both praise and criticism for Will in a recent issue of NR.)

I don’t “defend a massive increase in government spending and power in the name of conservatism,” but have been deploring it for some time (longer than Sullivan has, in truth, to pre-empt one of his favorite tactics). Neither Ingraham nor I suggested that anyone who pronounced the Iraq war a failure was therefore not a conservative. Sullivan wonders why people consider him hysterical; maybe they won’t when he stops throwing around such words as “Stalinist” so loosely.