These are the kind of thoughts that your editor is supposed to stop you from writing. Leon Wieseltier:

I woke up the next morning still under the spell of solidarity and love. I decided to make the spell last. I gave away my tickets to a performance of some late Shostakovich quartets, because for once I was not interested in the despair. Instead I spent the day listening to the Ebonys and the Chi-Lites and the Isley Brothers. For lunch I went to Georgia Brown’s for fried green tomatoes.

I was waiting for the next sentence to be about watermelons, but he spared us that at least.

This is pretty impressive. Barack Obama could lose the election in November. And if he loses the election in November, it’s possible that some people will blame racism for his loss. So The New Republic decided to print a John McWhorter attack on those hypothetical people‘s hypothetical argument about a hypothetical defeat. It seems those arguments, though they haven’t been made and are about events that haven’t occurred, are groundless.

See Ta-Nehisi Coates for more on this ridiculousness. Personally, I blame Whitey for letting this run.

David Greenberg has a weird article in The New Republic slamming various liberals, including myself, who didn’t go in for hard-core anti-Russian demagoguery as an immediate response to Russia’s invasion of Georgia:

When the right language happened to come from McCain–who declared, “We are all Georgians now”–the general response among liberal pundits was to scoff. Writing on The Washington Post’s website, Andres Martinez told the senator to speak for himself. “I am not a Georgian,” he insisted, deriding the “over-the-top rhetoric about democracy and liberty” from McCain and Bush. Blogger Matt Yglesias, writing under the aegis of the Center for American Progress, called the statement “empty political sloganeering,” “downright irresponsible,” and “mawkish sentimentality.”

My initial thought was to respond to this by saying that I was right. McCain was engaged in empty political sloganeering that substituted mawkish sentimentality for an actual policy response. But Greenberg, stunningly, doesn’t deny that I was right — he just thinks that being right is no defense!

Why should the statements of liberal pundits trouble us? It’s not because their criticisms are necessarily wrong.

The rest of the article goes on to posit a supposed divide between noble idealistic liberals like Greenberg and bad ol’ cynical realists like me. But I think the real divide is captured by Greenberg’s admission that the statements he objects to aren’t necessarily wrong. On the one hand, you have some people who think that the purpose of foreign policy commentary is to try to elucidate the issues and point the way to practical policy responses that will improve the world. On the other hand, you have some people who think that the role of foreign policy commentary is to demonstrate that you have an appropriate emotional orientation to the world. To me, this is “mawkish sentimentality” rather than a serious, responsible, approach. And Greenberg agrees! But somehow I’m wrong anyway. Well, fair enough then.

… proclaims Karl Rove runner up as “rookie of the year” for their “Best of the Press” awards:

Runner-Up: Karl Rove as Fox commentator

After resigning from the Bush administration last summer, Rove has been dabbling in political commentary. He’s made dozens of appearances on Fox News, and he contributes to Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal on a fairly regular basis. As one of our participants wryly observed, “Everybody freaking loves him now. Go figure.”

I’m not quite sure what sense of “everybody” they’re using here; I don’t love Rove. It’s interesting that there’s nothing here about the merits of Rove’s commentary as opposed to its ubiquity. I would think that the runner-up rookie of the year would be someone knows for his or her insights not simply for showing up as a conservative hack.