Here we go again . . .

Thanks to this review, everyone can rededicate themselves to perhaps the most important cause in post-election conservative politics — beating the shit out of Jimmy Carter.

I haven’t read Carter’s new book on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and I quite likely won’t, though certainly not out of a hysterical aversion to anything Carter does or says. Though I believe it to be substantively appropriate in the context of the occupied territories, the apartheid analogy has never impressed me as an especially useful rhetorical tool; it avoids the historical specificity of the occupation and asks us to condemn it on something other than its own terms (which are in any case abundant). Regardless, I’m assuming this all means we can anticipate a renewal of the familiar syllogisms, bursting forth like an incoherent, diarrheal stream: Jimmy Carter hates Israel; Jimmy Carter loves terrorists; Jimmy Carter is a Democrat; Democrats are being taken over by the blogofascists; the left wing of the blogosphere echoes al-Qaeda; and so on and so forth, in secula seculorum.