Wieseltier performs what has become a typical move among liberals who deplore the excesses of anti-Bushism. He surveys the “degradations” around him: among them, the rehabilitation of Noam Chomsky by the New York Review of Books, Al Gore’s reference to Abu Ghraib as “the Bush gulag,” moveon.org’s comparison of Fox News to Pravda, and Black Sabbath’s likening of Bush to Hitler. He says that all of this is not only uncivil but, worse, stupid. But again and again he suggests that liberals are sadly lowering their standards to match those of conservatives. “Liberals must think carefully about their keenness to mirror some of the most poisonous qualities of their adversaries. It was never exactly a disgrace to American liberalism that it lacked its Limbaugh.” 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. It’s nice that Wieseltier is trying to rescue liberalism from madness, but this is such a cheap way to do it.