Legal Commentary

Christmas 2007 musings on politics and history

By Beldar

Journalist Matt Bai is a clever fellow and a good writer. His coverage of the Left has not infrequently been "critical" both in the sense of offering a critique and of offering an unflattering portrayal, and that's true too of his lengthy essay in today's NYT Sunday Magazine entitled The Clinton Referrendum. But sometimes, for those of us well-educated grown-ups not deeply embedded in the Left ? and I use the word "embedded" in exactly the same sense it's used to describe modern war correspondents in Iraq who live, sleep, and eat with the troops of a particular military unit ? Bai's most telling observations are the ones to which he himself is entirely oblivious.

To test how many of you have the same reaction I do, I won't use italics or bold-face to set it off, but here's one, which I include among quite a bit of before-and-after contextual material that gives a sense of the intended subjects and scope of Bai's essay:

Full post as published by BeldarBlog on December 23, 2007 (boomark / email).