A Spoonful of Cyanide

Kurt Andersen, the man who founded the satiric Spy magazine in the late 1980s, has a piece in New York magazine that InstaPundit linked to today. It’s filled with dark invective and sarcasm aimed at not just President Bush, but virtually all Americans who live in the blank white spaces of the famous New Yorker cartoon illustrating how liberal Manhattanites and their L.A. counterparts view “flyover country”. In that sense, it’s yet another example of the sort of coarse tone that short-circuits so many recent leftwing pieces by making them virtually indigestable by anyone who doesn’t already agree with the author’s biases. But in the middle of all of his bile, Anderson gets something spot-on:

If partisanship makes us abandon intellectual honesty, if we oppose what our opponents say or do simply because they are the ones saying or doing it, we become mere political short-sellers, hoping for bad news because it