Le Nouveau Canard

My doctor, who likes to talk politics, remarked to me once: “You know, when I was a philosophy student, the first thing they taught us was that the ad hominem argument has no validity. Then, when I got out into the real world, I discovered that it’s about the only kind of argument most people ever use.”

Amen. As a battle-scarred veteran of the real world, I can testify that those who disagree with my newspaper columns spend less time refuting me than enlarging on my character defects. Readers and even colleagues have found me lacking in compassion, nasty, witless, simplistic, fearful of change, Neanderthal, and of course bigoted. My putative bigotries include anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, and homophobia. I’ve been accused of others (hating Italians, for example), but these are the Big Four. I’ve also been diagnosed as “obsessive.”

JS

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Joseph Sobran

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William F. Buckley Jr.

My doctor, who likes to talk politics, remarked to me once: “You know, when I was a philosophy student, the first thing they taught us was that the ad hominem argument has no validity. Then, when I got out into the real world, I discovered that it’s about the only kind of argument most people ever use.”

Amen. As a battle-scarred veteran of the real world, I can testify that those who disagree with my newspaper columns spend less time refuting me than enlarging on my character defects. Readers and even colleagues have found me lacking in compassion, nasty, witless, simplistic, fearful of change, Neanderthal, and of course bigoted. My putative bigotries include anti-Semitism, racism, sexism, and homophobia. I’ve been accused of others (hating Italians, for example), but these are the Big Four. I’ve also been diagnosed as “obsessive.”