Critical of Palin? Bad man! Bad Christian!

So I was on Larry King Live last night for one segment, talking about my doubts about Palin. Opposite me was the radio talker Lars Larson, who kept robotically repeating the line that he trusts Palin's "judgment," and that she talks in ways that the "East Coast media elites" hate, but that normal people understand. I should have pointed out that that's an insult to the people Larson thinks he's defending; if expecting a politician running for vice president of the United States to give clear, lucid answers to basic questions having to do with running the country is somehow elitist, and rattling off discombobulated talking points is how normal non-elitist people talk, I fail to see how that's an argument in favor of the masses. Anyway, Larson deviated from his talking points on our short interview just long enough to blame Bill Clinton for al Qaeda and 9/11, so I'm guessing he's not exactly the most competent judge of what's relevant in such matters.

I did get this morning an e-mail from someone who is not like Larson, but who is rather a very thoughtful young conservative intellectual. He writes:

I have to say your actions of the last week have cast serious doubt on your qualities as a man and as a christian. Even if all you say about Palin is true (personally, I believe it's far too early to tell), to say so on national television fails a minimal decency test that any christian always has to set himself. Never mind Reagan's Eleventh Commandment, it is just really poor judgement to openly attack another person whom you have never met. How do you square that with love your neighbor like yourself? Are we not supposed to set a standard for others. Isn't that what being a city on a hill is all about? I fear your behavior is indicative of the total crisis of faith in which the conservative movement finds itself right now. And it makes me really, really depressed.

Ah. So, if I, in my professional role as a columnist, blogger and commentator, criticize the public acts and statements of a conservative politician -- even if what I say is true -- well, then I am a bad man and an indecent Christian. To attack openly a person one has never met is immoral -- a standard that would make the practice of opinion journalism (for one) impossible. I wonder why I've never received from this reader a comment attacking my integrity as a man and as a Christian when I was criticizing Barack Obama on this blog, or anybody else but Sarah Palin? I wonder if this reader has applied the same absurd standard to his own commentary about Obama? I wonder if this fellow is in the habit of passing judgment on the state of other people's souls based on their analysis of a politician's qualities?

As for Reagan's 11th Commandment -- "Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican" -- that bit of dubious bit of strategic wisdom (the leftist version of it is, "No enemies to the left," which the mainstream French left, during the Cold War, used to justify its turning a blind eye to what the Communists really represented) is a proverb useful to political hacks, not to commentators. In fact, if you want to cite an example of a "total crisis of faith" among conservatives, you could hardly do better than the missive above, instructing conservatives critical of the vice presidential nominee that it's their duty as Christian men to pretend that what we plainly see doesn't exist -- this, for the sake of the Cause. Since when is loyalty to anything other than the truth done anybody any good? Did conservatives' who knew better withholding criticism of George W. Bush's failings serve the country, or the conservative movement, well? I'm only surprised the reader didn't tell me that it was my obligation as the Empress's subject to lavish praise on her new clothes.

UPDATE: And you know what we get with this kind of thing? Eight years after conservatives embraced Bush as the embodiment of all that is just and Right(-wing), and eight years after loyalty to the Cause trumped all criticism of the man, even useful criticism, we have gotten to a state in which conservatives are running around saying they never liked him, that Bush was never a true conservative. Why? Because he failed. Had Bush had a successful presidency, they'd be singing a different tune. We're bound and determined to make the same mistakes with Palin, it seems.