QUARANTINE. Rod Dreher:

The question, though, is not whether the Sixties (or the Enlightenment) were good or bad, but whether on balance the Sixties (or the Enlightenment) were good or bad. I answer in the negative.

Think about this: the lunatic Dreher has, in the past week or so, been engaged seriously by Andrew Sullivan, Megan McArdle, and Ross Douthat -- three writers for the Atlantic Monthly, a magazine that once represented the summit of American intellectual attainment. And now its authors treat seriously a man who thinks we'd be better off if the Pope could make us say that the sun revolves around the earth.

Wiser men than I have been talking for years about how conservatives have pulled American discourse to the right. But we can't be reminded often enough that they pulled it so far to the right that it left the earth's gravitational field.