VRWC MEETS VLWC (via Paul Cella):

How I Was Smeared (Harry Stein, Autumn 2002, City Journal)

It probably shouldn’t have come as a surprise. After all, as a conservative of fairly recent vintage, I’ve seen how easy it is for liberals, assisted by a compliant press, to cast ideological foes as moral reprobates and thus avoid engaging their ideas. Hadn’t it happened to a slew of judicial nominees, from Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas to, most recently, Thomas Pickering and Priscilla Owen—as well as to a long line of conservative politicians and social critics? Such attacks, coming as they do from those who assert their passionate tolerance, succeed because they are so hard to respond to. They are like the classic below-the-belt question: “When did you stop beating your wife?” But today’s underhanded question—“When did you become a sexist or a homophobe or (worst of all) a racist?”—is even more lethal: the accusatory word cuts short any argument and puts the target on the defensive, as those whom you’d expect to stand firm for principle melt away.

Again, I knew all this theoretically. But I truly didn’t know how bad it could be.

Then it happened to me.

As Mr. Stein says, he should have seen this coming when he started sleeping with the Enemy, but it's still despicable. Posted by Orrin Judd at October 31, 2002 7:27 PM