Norman Mailer, as you may or may not be aware, spends his time writing and disseminating puerile screeds against America and the Western World in general. His latest abomination caught the attention of none other than comedian and political color-man Dennis Miller, who was apparently invited by the Wall Street Journal to respond, comic lampoon against nonsensical gobbledygook. Among the highlights:

A guy like Mailer hates a guy like Bush because Mailer thinks of himself as infinitely smarter than Bush and yet President Bush is the most powerful man on the planet and old Normy's connecting through Atlanta and flying on prop planes to a community college that's so far out in the sticks the mail rider has yet to arrive with the message that The Great Mailer is currently more out of the loupe than a jeweler with conjunctivitis. All so he can scoop up a submicroscopic honorarium and the accolades of star-struck locals and 18-year-olds who mistakenly think Mr. Mailer wrote "Gravity's Rainbow."

Mailer, not to be consistent with his higher-plane-of-consciousness magnanimity, answered with an intent not at all in good spirits:

Dear Dennis,

Just because the two big guys who flanked you on Monday Night Football took away your balls and left you with a giggle in replacement doesn't mean you have to suck up to The Wall Street Journal.

But thanks for appreciating my fine use of "keen."

Keen up, then, to my piece and read it again without panic. You're too good to become squalid and kiss-ass for so little.

Cheers, blessings,

Norman Mailer

Megan McArdle called foul. I added my several cents to the argument:

Mailer and the left: my guess would be that Megan is matching the stated intent of the "enlightened left" to its behavior - not rank and file, mind you, as Megan seems specific; therefore the top-echelon fellows like, say, Fisk and Mailer, Gore and Chomsky. They're all lauded as caring and passionate and arduously devoted to human dignity, peace, love and all sorts of wonderful colors of the leftist-worldview rainbow. But what comes out of their mouth or pen betrays a certain calculating coldness; a horrible, spindly bitterness. There's a sharpness - a deliberateness, a permanence - in the delivery of a negative comment.

Miller and others - even Limbaugh - may poke fun and attach names, but I'll tell you: it's never done in the manner - the syntax, the rhythm, the tone of voice - one would use if they truly wanted to hurt someone.

I say this as a keen, objective observer: I'm quite good at reading a statement's motivation and intentions. I've seen a lot of snappy insults flung about by people who generally lampoon; mouthy folks who, true to their character and experience, wheel and deal with jokes and jabs.

And then there are people who are unmistakably brittle and vulpine. You wouldn't believe it until you saw it, but they intend to injure. I've known a couple of people like that personally and angry exchanges have been, in a word, frightening.

For a less aristocratic analogy, they're the guy who, when mates are blotto and taking a few fun swings at each other, gets hit, gets mad and, quietly slipping on the knuckles, asks for one more shot.

People like this inhabit all planes of society but it appears Megan's view - mine, as well - that they saturate the highest, most venerable and intellectual ranks of the left.

To which someone asked:

Are you nuts? That's like calling Buchanan and Jean LePen top-echelon conservatives.

I responded:

I doubt it.

First of all, Le Pen is nobody's child; when American conservatives talked about him, it was with a mixture of revulsion and bemused observation, what with France's history of Stalinists and Trotskyites, extremists on the other side of the pond, grabbing large chunks of a given vote.

The New Republic stands out for hammering Mailer consistently; elsewhere he's either lauded or arbitrarily disconnected from the left but without the necessary criticism to dialectically disown him - which Buchanan, now teetering at the weirdo ideological nadir between reactionary and radical, receives from the mainstream right whenever he opens his trap.

Vidal - intellectuals who have been shamed out of authority do not have their biographies written by Fred Kaplan.

Chomsky - I wouldn't exactly call Harvard and MIT backalley SA dens, and I have yet to see him politically jettisoned from the intellectual left.

Fisk - celebrated and again, hasn't received the shaming one requires to be disconnected with a given ideological wing, or else claims that "he doesn't represent it" ring hollow.

These four have hardly been disassociated by the left, which as a group seems unwilling to expend the capital or energy. Instead, whenever one of this bunch says something reprehensible, the left shrugs its shoulders and denies involvement.

When Pat Buchanan's blubbering, blame-the-Jews missive on the Iraqi liberation was printed, conservatives rightly took a day to tear it to shreds. And that was it. Buchanan has been marginalized and, indeed, the right does not take him seriously.

And if you don't believe me or don't buy into the great responsibility a community of journalists and publications has to shame and expel those who no longer represent its collective voice, Buchanan received his condemnation in no uncertain terms from one of the premier conservative magazines in 1999.

Here is the final paragraph of that article, written by Ramesh Ponnuru, a coup de grace if ever there was one:

During the '80s, conservatives used to groan every time Kevin Phillips was quoted as a "conservative" saying something snippy about Ronald Reagan. They joked that he had acquired a new first name, "Even," as in, "Even Kevin Phillips opposes these tax cuts." Like Buchanan, Phillips is an old Nixon hand who decided at some point that exploiting cultural resentments and seeing various elites get their comeuppance mattered more than expanding freedom. The difference is that letting Buchanan continue to describe himself as a conservative would be not just irritating but destructive. He is in no important sense a conservative any more. Let his failure be his alone.

Will oddball misanthropes like the four aforementioned ever be widely challenged by the left? I don't see a day in the near future. Does that damage the left's credibility? Of course. Does that sit well with me? Since their ideas are nearly as damaging as those of the methuselahs, I am quite content to see the left shrink and shrink again.