A ONE-WAY TICKET TO OATMEAL, NEBRASKA. NRO's Mark Goldblatt, having recently dismissed black people as "the most hypocritical, most paranoid, most pretentious group of people on the planet" (next to the French, of course), now dumps on my fellow citizens and I, declaring that "New Yorkers, who pride themselves on their sophistication, seem honestly to believe that calling the president names constitutes a compelling argument against his policies."

Goldblatt's defense of his slanderous proposition isn't worth addressing -- he doesn't understand the difference between a reason and an excuse, let alone the difference between righteous indignation and blind rage -- but I note with curiosity that Goldblatt lives in New York, himself, and this gets me to wondering about all these blue-state Republicans who bitch about the evil residents of the blue states. Can you imagine living in Bumfuck, Mississippi -- by choice, not because you had to -- and writing screeds for the Bumfuck Herald-Dispatch about what a bunch of villainous cretins the citizens of Bumfuck were? Forget about the ass-kicking that would surely ensue (Bumfuck has not the culture of toleration our own metroplis enjoys); what would motivate an individual to voluntarily remain in such a self-created hell?

Goldblatt, Brooks, Sullivan, (and on a bad day, Richard Brookhiser) et alia: there are many fine hamlets, villages, gulches, junctions, and corners in this great land of ours to which you may repair to write smack about the City. Why not go to them? Better still, why not go to Hell?