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Department Of Housekeeping

Sorry to waste the bandwidth doing this, but I see that Glenn Greenwald is quoting me out of context in such an egregious way that I should probably respond. Greenwald, correctly noting the disingenuousness of Karl Rove when he assesses the Democratic candidates, writes:

The inanity of all of this is manifest. When the Right and the media assumed that Hillary Clinton was the inevitable nominee and that Obama couldn't win, the Right just "loved" Obama, and people like The New Republic's Jason Zengerle marveled at what they actually believed was the astonishing (and real) phenomenon that no "conservative writer [is] able to withstand Obama's charms." Now that it appears that Obama rather than Clinton will likely be the nominee, that has, quite predictably, reversed itself completely: suddenly the Right hates Obama and has great respect for Hillary Clinton.

My "marvel[ing]" came in response to this positive article about Obama from Stephen Hayes, who's not exactly known as an intellectually honest conservative journalist (and who I try to mock as often as I can). So the fact that he was saying nice things about Obama was sort of like Glenn Greenwald saying nice things about The New Republic: in other words, unexpected. In response to Hayes's piece, I joked:

Is there any conservative writer able to withstand Obama's charms? A nation turns its lonely eyes to Charles Krauthammer.

I'm not really sure how Greenwald managed to twist that joke into a serious statement representing the sentiments of a whole class of "people." But he did.

--Jason Zengerle