Laura's takedown of Keelin McDonell's churlish critique of Sarah Vowell is well-put and rather apt. Of all the targets cluttering up the contemporary political landscape, Keelin decided to launch an assault on Vowell? Talk about your misplaced priorities...
The big mystery to me, though, is whether that's who Keelin wanted to deride or that's what The New Republic made her do. A glance at her TNR oeuvre reads like a who's who of easy targets: Harold Pinter, Stephen Colbert, France. And is a broadside against George Galloway really counterintuitive? But it's not just her: another reporter-researcher there, Steve Groopman, just emerged with a piece blasting The Center for American Progress for hosting Sam Seder's mockery of the State of the Union (which, full disclosure, I participated in). Here you've got a think tank releasing complex policy documents on every subject imaginable and you focus on a speech-watching party? Please.
Now, Steve and Keelin are smart. Really smart. And though I've not had occasion to check this with either of them, I've trouble believing their aspirations as writers are confined to taking on Pinter, Galloway, and an Air America event. So while I respect that sneering critiques on deserving (and undeserving) lefties is part of TNR's DNA, does the publication's appetite for perpetuating its own stereotype need to so dominate the bottom third of their masthead? They've got a lot of talent there, and with the older guard (Chait, Cohn, Foer, Scheiber, etc) demonstrating weekly that the magazine's real value lies in its willingness to engage ideas and ideologically provoke, it'd be comforting to see evidence that they're training their field team to eventually play the same game.
