Get A Grip

Jonah Goldberg posts an endless letter hyperventilating about how I somehow didn’t provide full context for a couple of quotes and links to NRO’s Corner blog yesterday. Maybe I should indeed have elaborated that the NRO debate about "racial superiority" was not about Americans’ purported racial superiority to potential immigrants, but fears of potential immigrants’ purported racial superiority to Americans. Well, excuuuse me. Two links not enough?  I just found it interesting that the whole concept of "racial superiority" or "inferiority" was being debated at all. As for Herr Derbyshire, readers know by now, I’d hope, that I find his eccentric celebration of prejudice to be more amusing than shocking. And then there are those moments when a gleam appears in the eye of a dotty uncle when he talks about rounding up illegal immigrants "in greatly increased sweeps", and depleting their numbers by "attrition" … and you wonder what he’d tolerate given half the chance. Look: Jonah Goldberg isn’t John Derbyshire; and Ramesh Ponnuru isn’t Ann Coulter. But they choose to hug them close. Sorry if that gets embarrassing from time to time. Deal with it.