Two views, on one column :
One of the few things coming across clearly in this mostly incoherent belch
of sarcasm is your continuing contempt for Gonzales, who is just as clearly
not at fault here. This situation apparently gives you another chance to
beat him (and, by extension, Bush) about the head.
Interestingly, though you have jumped the Bush ship because he doesn’t push
enough of your conservative buttons, if I were coming to this column with no
awareness of who Jonah Goldberg was, I would reach the end (if I got that
far) expecting to discover you were another in a long line of “Bush
continues being a right-wing-extremist-jerk” writers from the Washington
Post.
Who knew you could sound so Mainstream Media?
And:
Every once in a while, our mood, the luck of the muse, and our
passion for the subject ,coalesce into a really fine piece of
writing. It wasn’t just that I agree wholeheartedly with your
thesis, but the column itself really is a great piece of writing.
The innuendo, subtle insults, twisted scholarly references (e.g.,
Quasimodo), mean-spirited questioning of motivations, wide-eyed
protestations of wonder, etc. simply come together in a strong
demonstration of your passionate feelings about the foolishness
of the whole thing with a (barely) hidden questioning of the
morality of it all.
Based on my own experience, I’ll bet you didn’t slow down to put
a lot of thought into what you were writing, you just opened the
throttle and let ‘er rip with your feelings in charge. That
generally results in either our best or our worst writing.
This one was “best”
Me: I actually disagree with both. I think a conservative can have contempt for all parties concerned without going “mainstream” and I don’t think this was one of my best columns. But it is always interesting to see how opinions vary.