LOWER YOUR VOICES. I recently finished Bernard Goldberg's Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right, and although I offer this post as Book Review No. 1314, I'm considering a House Rule excluding polemical material from use in reviews, as all too often the summary is "unlikely to convince anyone who is predisposed to disagree."^(*) That, despite Mr Goldberg opting to criticize (from notionally a libertarian perspective) the coastal politicians and entertainers comprising the nearest thing to social-democratic advocacy in the Democratic Party, as well as fundamentalist preachers, their political allies, and entertainers using the Republican Party as an engine of vanguardism (yes, dear reader, that's what "national greatness conservatism" is, one does not have to say things like "collective good") rather than as an instrument for greater freedom (make the tax cuts permanent, allow school choice, unbundle the hunting down and killing -- or maybe in best Radio Free Europe fashion, simply laughing them to scorn -- of terrorists from nation-building in places that are nations only by courtesy. Fair enough. But when one puts together a book out of a collection of newspaper columns, and most of the colums, as one might expect from a disaffected member of the legacy press, focus on the foibles of that legacy press, one gets a hodge-podge of loosely connected points, rather than a carefully constructed argument that anticipates and attempts to address the strongest criticisms one who disagrees might raise. Doesn't a good sermon have to reach out to the doubter and the sinner?

^(*)Well, maybe that House Rule will take effect in 2008. The year is half-gone and 13/50 < 1/2. The polemical stuff (no matter who writes it) makes for quick reviews. But I've already ruled illustrated railroad histories off limits.