In a Crooked Timber thread on a dumber than usual Russ Douthat column, one commentor calls bullshit on Douthat’s defenders:
It is sweet, though, that virtually every mendacious reactionary hack** given an elevated media platform to spew sophistry all over us lesser folks has a cadre of online defenders. They usually embrace some common themes: suggesting that the blogger in question is engaging in behavior beneath ver by pointing out the latest episode of bullshittery; pulling out scattershot quotations that purport to completely negate the plain reading of everything else in the article; and above all, implicitly or explicity demanding that we evaluate every work sui generis, with no consideration whatsoever of the track record of the author or vis peers. I wonder if someone has made a benefit-of-the-doubt bingo card.
You don’t just see this sort of behaviour in defence of rightwing hacks against their own hackery, but much more dangerously, also is something you see a lot of in the socalled mainstream media. Take the War on Libya for example, which when proposed was quite obviously a clusterfuck waiting to happen for those of us allowed to remember the Wars on Afghanistan and Iraq, but which for some reason few serious commentators were able to discuss in this context.
