Check out Jeff Jacoby’s Boston Globe essay, “Smears, slanders from the left.” “For eight years now,” Jacoby says, he’s “been rounding up examples of liberal hate speech – the gross and vicious slanders of conservatives uttered all too often by mainstream liberals.” Jacoby rolls off a list of examples — the typical equating of conservative thought to Nazi-ism or to KKK-ish sentiments, for instance — but most compelling is the main point the essay drives home, summed up succinctly early on: “as bad as these vitriolic slurs are, even worse is the failure of responsible voices on the left to condemn them.”

… Well, Hitchens has done some nice knee-cappin’ of Chomsky — and the gang running “The Idiocy Watch” at The New Republic has been evenhanded in its documentation of hateful, overblown pap (post 9/11). But these few represent exceptions to a more general rule. Just ask Orange County CC Prof Kenneth W. Hearlson, screwed by his own peers, who — given a golden opportunity to speak from the moral high ground for a change