Andrew Sullivan is gloating over this column, perhaps because it exemplifies one of the most pernicious and persistent stereotypes of the left. Or at least, that's why I'm groaning over it. I do have some modest suggestions that might provide a start for discussion: an intelligence test to earn the right to vote; a three-significantly-stupid-behaviors-and-you're-out law; fines for politicians who pander to the lowest common denominator and deportation of media representatives who perpetuate such actions. ...We can stop this sapping of our national integrity but we must do it soon, lest the morons become the norm and those of us who use our brains for more than memorizing advertising jingles are ourselves ostracized from society. Such arguments play into the hands of the right. They belong in a Charles Murray rant, not under the flag of anything identifying itself as the left.

Andrew Sullivan, rightly blasting Bill Bennett's attack on gay rights, concludes with a telling indictment: It's not an argument. It's the rhetorical embellishment of a privilege. Conservatism has always been prone to such a trap. Perhaps Sullivan, one of the strongest proponents of driving a wedge between civil rights and economic justice as ideologies and as movements, should take his own words to heart.

Gregg Easterbrook's recently found himself at the center of a controversy around charges that comments he made on his site about movie violence and Jewish studio executives demonstrated antisemitism. As I made clear in an exchange with Josh Cherniss this summer, I tend as a Jew to try to cultivate a healthy skepticism of that charge - it's an ugly one, those who deploy it too easily risk both defaming those who don't deserve it and lessening the weight of the charge against deserved targets. This looks to me pretty clearly like a case of choosing words poorly and missing the implications they held for someone else reading them. But what struck me in this case is not the unfairness of the charge, but one particular and problematic line used in defense: From Josh Chafetz: GREGG EASTERBROOK IS MOST EMPHATICALLY NOT AN ANTI-SEMITE. It would be impossible to work at TNR and be anti-semitic... From Andrew Sullivan: He has worked for many years at The New Republic, testimony in itself that he is hardly anything even close to anti-Semitic. I'm not sure which problematic argument is being advanced here: That someone who works for an "enlightened," respectable publication could not be antisemitic? That someone who works with many Jewish coworkers could not be antisemitic? That someone who works for a magazine that staunchly supported the war in Iraq could not be antisemitic? Lemme know what I'm missing. Otherwise, it seems to me that Sullivan and Chafetz reached the right conclusion for awful reasons. This brings me back to Norman Podheretz' execrable argument that under the Talmudic principle of bitul b'shishim, Pat Robertson's advancement of the theory that Jews had collaborated with free masons and Illuminati to cause every war in American history by controlling the international monetary system could be excused because of his support for the Israeli Government - and the ADL's decision to give Robertson an award. I have no reason to believe that Pat Robertson couldn't have gotten himself a gig with the New Republic in his heyday if he really wanted one - or that if he did, he would become any less prejudiced.