"What's My Name, Fool?"

As most of you know, I quite like Andrew Sullivan's blog and find him to be the best conservative pundit out there. But Leon Wieseltier at the New Republic absolutely eviscerates Sullivan in what is supposed to be a correction about a pretty picayune matter. From the first line to the last, Wieseltier pretty much gives Sullivan a serious beatdown. It's a bit like a Jack Johnson fight, or when Mohammed Ali humiliated Floyd Patterson in 1965 for the latter's continuing to refer to Ali dismissively as "Cassius." The humiliation comes in the refusal to deliver a knockout because the beating is all the worse and more humiliating when you make the beating last. I half expected Wieseltier to punctuate each paragraph with "What's My Name, Fool?" as Ali did throughout the 1965 Patterson fight.