MAN TURNS HIS BACK ON HIS FAMILY, WELL HE JUST AIN'T NO GOOD. I've noticed before that some conservatives like to talk about their "liberal friends" as if they're all incoherent dumbasses, and I wondered how these guys keep getting invited to liberal dinner/cocktail/swinger parties.

Now I'm thinking, maybe they have to be invited -- because they're family:

My cousin, whom I'll call "Bob," just included me in a group e-mail that implied President Bush was anti-Semitic...

I was incensed, and my first reaction was to press "Delete" and erase the offending message. After doing so, I reflected a bit more and decided that my silence might imply that I agreed, so I went to an earlier mass e-mail from Bob and pressed "Reply to All." My trigger finger has now caused a family furor.

I'll bet. The author, one Alan Bromley, gets an angry note from his cousin about the mass reply, which prompts him to round up other witnesses to justify his actions, including a lawyer (!) and friends of his 17-year-old daughter, who say they "respond to the entire group all the time" (as one would expect 17-year-olds to do).

Finally Bromley tells his cousin to "Keep family and politics separate" -- at the end of an article published online at OpinionJournal.

This is why my attitude toward conservatives is slightly different from those of my colleagues. I don't mind in the least their views -- in fact, I quite enjoy them. I just don't like them personally.