A sleepless afternoon's general observation about political writing in the 21st century.

There is no more miserable creature than a daysleeper on a holiday weekend. Even with the white noise of the A/C directly above my head and the chalky blue noise of long-since memorized movie dialogue coming from across the room, noise from some nearby barbecue made sleep impossible. Which is how I came to spend an hour or so this afternoon reading political blogs from the putative Right and putative Left and finding myself consistently sort of grimly amused.

In the same way that so many who espouse a belief in "small government and laissez faire capitalism" also wrongly believe themselves to be the intellectual heirs of Hamilton and so many who want nationalized this and that believe they are the true heirs of Jefferson (which is even odder and more maddening), cheerleaders for the Republicans will betray their core values in a heartbeat if it means keeping gays from marrying and cheerleaders for the Democrats will abandon their core values in a heartbeat if it means "making the rich pay their fair share" (whatever that even means).

The worst part about the sophistry on both sides, really, is that they will present detailed, semi-coherent arguments in which both premises and conclusion roundly contradict positions they've taken within, say, the last week or so.

No, I don't have any particular examples in mind, because my objective isn't so much to ridicule partisans as to offer them some constructive criticism. It's especially irritating that Republicans don't already know how to do this, since it's a strategy that was more or less perfected in the late, unlamented Reagan years by one of their own.

William Buckley used to have this strategy, from which the new generation of scribblers could learn, where, when he was about to adopt a sentimental position which ran directly contrary to his stated convictions, he would dispose of this unhappy inconsistency within the first few sentences. “Now of course one should be able to allow what one wishes to allow and ban what one wishes to ban in one’s club, university, household, church, voting laws…” or something of that sort, for instance, if he was about to argue that his alma mater was being unfair to some club for crew cutted crypto-Nazis. He’d then use a conjurer's trick, such as telling a long, rambling, semi-related anecdote that may or may not prove to be amusing and usually involved either a gaggle of dead Greeks or the rowdy crowd at boarding school. At any rate, during the patter, one tended to lose track of the fact that he had just offhandedly announced that, for the next couple of pages and couple of thousand subordinate clauses, logical Buckleyan principles would be suspended in favor of sentimental Buckleyan affinities. Then he’d argue from pathos and bathos and from appeals to credibility of Church Fathers and so on and he’d usually manage to not quite shred his own belief system in the process of arguing contrary to his espoused Conservative core values. It was actually sort of pretty to watch.