I have a very

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I have a very hard time knowing quite what to think about this back and forth between assorted lefty intellectuals on the one hand and Andrew Sullivan on the other.

I was myself sickened by Susan Sontag’s short piece in this week’s Talk of the Town. I actually wrote my own column about the contempt I feel for the press releases I get over the transom from outfits and organizations whose vision of the world and America is so myopic and hideous that they can’t seem to think of anything to say but that this tragedy is the result of our own perfidious actions abroad and that, in some sense never quite stated explicitly, it serves us right. But I eventually scrapped the column — at least for the moment — because I couldn’t come up with anything articulate beyond simple contempt.

It’s hard for me to know whether to feel more or less sickened by Sullivan’s vicious attacks on anyone who is even slightly off-message about this tragedy and more particularly the ugly and facile slurring of the “blue” states, the hackneyed attacks on “elites” (nothing so pitiful as a blue state elite raging against blue state elites), or the gratuitous and laughably forced swipes at the 42nd president.

(“In this, he is the antithesis of Clinton — a man who used emotion for effect and idled while our national security weakened. And unlike Clinton, Bush didn’t organize his schedule for photo-op political purposes.”)

This seems like a classic example of what I like to call a Godzilla vs. Mothra situation. Two comical and imbecilic monsters doing battle. And who to root for?

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