WHEN DID IT HAPPEN? Dean Esmay writes in Blogcritics, that it's hard not to notice...

...when surveying the American political landscape at the moment, that there are no great Liberal intellectuals anymore. There are a few bright-minded self-described liberals; Robert Reich comes to mind, as does Susan Estrich. Camille Paglia has a truly original and interesting mind. But aside from a few rare exceptions, most "liberal" argumentation seems to come from one of four places:

1) People who disagree with me are racist.
2) People who disagree with me are warmongers who glory in violence.
3) People who disagree with me want the poor to starve and suffer.
4) People who disagree with me are blinded by corporate brainwashing.

I would have added "5) People who disagree with me want to oppress women," but that one seemed to fade away after Clinton's impeachment. (By the way, am I the first one to notice that?) In any case, the shorthand terms for all of the above are "right-winger" or "the radical right."

At times it's sad to watch. The mighty New York Times is now a laughingstock. Even people who share the New York Times worldview roll their eyes at it. Left-wing journals of opionion like The Nation and The New Republic tend to be humorless and, while they may be angry or resentful, are usually just plain boring.

I don't know if I'd lump The New Republic in there myself. While I'm not a regular reader there, the pieces that I've read (usually because they've been linked to by other bloggers), such as yesterday's "Air War" have been pretty impressive. But overall, I tend to agree with Esmay essay: while there are moderate liberals who are quite reasonable, the further left you go, the further you start seeing things like this, in various forms, over and over again. Michael Moore's made a career of such stunts. But, to paraphrase Esmay's point, when did Michael Moore become the model for intellectual discourse on the left?

Or as James Lileks wrote a little while ago:

Who’s more miserable - the far right or the far left? The former is likely to wash its hands of the modern world, lament how things have gone to hell since the Brits stopped shoving civilization down the ululating maws of Wogland, and announce that you’re all welcome to your polyglot mishmash - I’ll be over here getting smashed on port and reading Patrick O’Brien novels. But at least they seem dedicated to enjoying life on their own terms; if they’re cultural conservatives, they retire to their version of Heston’s apartment in “The Omega Man,” surrounded by the remnants of Western glory, keeping to themselves, and venting their spleen now and then by burping off a few rounds at the moaning zombies outside in the darkened park.

The hard left, on the other hand, demonstrates all the symptoms of anhedonia, or the inability to feel pleasure - there’s a rancid bitterness, a pissy miserablism that makes you feel very, very sorry for them. The world is going to hell, and they’re stuck in the last car with a newspaper they’ve read six times already; the only person they can harangue is sleeping off a skinful of lager, and they’re trying to work up a hot batch of hatred for the woman in the skin-cream ad above the traincar’s window, but she is rather pretty, in a Sloany way. (Bitch.) They’ve given up on convincing the rest of us fools that we’re trampolining with scissors and knives - all they can do is sneer, whine, mope and spit. In high school terms, they’re the skinny spotted unpopular kids who cannot believe the cheerleaders don’t know how wretched their empty lives really are. Sure, they have dates. Sure, they’re going to college. Sure, they’re going to meet big beefy guys with MBAs and end up in a nice house with a big garden, but don’t they know how empty it all is? Don’t they know that their very existence on the planet causes poverty in Peru and kills fish in the Atlantic?

Check out Esmay and Lileks' essays if you haven't read them yet. They're both very good.