I’ve been subjected to my fair share of bashing in my time, and some of it even justified, but I’ve never actually read a published letter directed to my boss, Marty Peretz, imploring him to fire me. In a Slate.com Breakfast Table email dialog today, Margo Howard asks Marty, ‘Oh, and do you think you could muzzle Andrew Sullivan? He has obviously been overcome with disdain for Clinton’s personal weaknesses to the point of becoming a Bush booster. I mean, how does an intellectual, Catholic, gay man come to wave his pompoms for that callow kid?’ Howard’s writing is an almost perfect representation of someone so stuck in East Coast intellectual and social snobbery that she can’t even begin to conceive of why an intelligent person might have preferred Bush’s modest conservatism to Gore’s phony populism. After all, Gore is ‘one of us.’ Bush is ‘one of them.’ And notice too how she thinks someone’s political views HAVE to be related to their personal identity. Can a gay man not prefer small government to big government? Can an intellectual not prefer a modest executive type to a micro-managing pseudo-intellectual like Gore? Can a Catholic not support someone who opposes partial birth abortion over someone so funded by NARAL that he’s close to backing infanticide? And by the way, I have never decried Clinton’s personal weaknesses – only his public lies, perjury and obstruction of justice. Small points, I suppose, when Clinton is ‘one of us.’ But notice the left’s instinctive response to someone not towing the party-line: muzzle him. C’mon, Margo. Try.

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