Taranto’s take

Over the weekend I wrote (click here) about the “granddaddy” of the bogus Bush administration scandals that dominated the New York Times’s election year coverage — the “outing” of Valerie Plame. In his Best of the Web column yesterday, James Taranto furnished his own extended account of the Times’s militant assertions of criminal wrongdoing and prosecutorial demands. It’s a terrific piece of work that collects the handiwork of Times columnists in addition to the anonymous Times editorialists.
In his column’s second item yesterday, Taranto invoked Richard Hofstadter’s analysis of “the paranoid style in American politics” in his discussion of Howard Dean’s introduction to Kansas. Coincidentally, Deacon devoted his Daily Standard column yesterday to a related discussion of the current location of “the paranoid style”: “Paranoid, nous?” Unlike Taranto, however, we received a professional second opinion confirming Deacon’s diagnosis after we noted it here.

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