Mary McGrory

Jay Nordlinger's Impromptus column isn't exactly a blog (neither is what John Derbyshire does on NRO), but it does have some bloglike qualities. One of those qualities is that from time to time, he tends to debunk, with only a few sentences, various silly writing. To wit, this bit on Mary McGrory:

Dumb of me, I know, to get irritated by Mary McGrory, the veteran liberal columnist in the Washington Post. But she had a column yesterday that I couldn’t help gagging on. It was a typical column, one that praised Colin Powell as an adult among children, as the only sober, cautious presence in an administration of hotheads. (By the way, who’s the one who chose that secretary of state? Oh, yeah: George W. Bush. But he never gets credit, from the Powell-lovers, for having done so.)

Writing of Iraq, she spoke of the country that “so many of the hawks in Washington want to invade if they don’t have to go themselves.” That is one of the great, nauseating, confused lines of this kind of Left; Mark Shields talks that way all the time too. “You want to go into Iraq [for example], but you’re not willing to go yourself. How dare you! Shut your mouth unless you’re prepared to strap on a gun.” Yes, maybe the president should send Laura Bush, or perhaps the twins, if he doesn’t have time to fight, hand to hand, himself.

That grown-up people who are given columns in the Washington Post are capable of thinking that way — that it’s basically illegitimate to advocate a military action unless you’re going to don fatigues yourself — is amazing.

Equally amazing is the “Thank God for Powell” theme. That anyone could hold people as learned, experienced, and patriotic as Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and Condoleezza Rice to be hicks with itchy trigger fingers . . . again, amazing. Those three — just to stick to those examples — are as civilized and humane as anyone Mary McGrory or Mark Shields will ever meet.

I have the same reaction to McGrory, a bitter, shriveled liberal whose writing is predictably pathetic, and the column Nordlinger refers to was particularly bad. Every once in a while, it's probably worth pointing these things out.

[Posted at 21:43 CST on 02/22/02] [Link]