REVERSION TO FORM. Hadn't checked out Mr. Moderate Michael Totten for a while -- not since he won some respect from me by declining to agree with lunatics that his Lebanese friends were proud and happy to be bombed by Israel.

So I peeked in:

Producers aren't the only ones bored with the format. How about hiring lots of centrist pundits?... Here are a few places to start. Half of them have been on TV already. Put them on more often!

Go look at his list of "moderates." I warn you: it's pretty much what you expect (though he waits until comments to sort-of-include the Ole Perfesser).

Next week: an expose of that Idiotarian bastard FDR.

UPDATE. Fun comments, in which Michael gamely takes part. Is centrism in the eye of the beholder? I take centrism to mean on-the-other-handism that seeks to split the difference, which I like better in politics (which is largely about splitting differences) than in commentary, where it tends toward warm mush.

Peter Beinart's stuff, for example, seems to a hothead like me like an endless stream of polite requests for everybody to stop being so unreasonable. This is not my cup of gruel, but if you don't care for pistols at dawn, I can see where you might find it soothingly accommodationist. Beinart would probably try to form a T-group in a gang war.

The folks on Michael's list have agendas which can be entertaining, on the mad terms of our poisonous debate, but I can't imagine ordinary people reading, say, Armed Liberal yelling at a newspaper and thinking it an attempt at finding consensus. They'd probably wonder why he was yelling at a newspaper.

Most of us are frankly a little strange.