Conor Freidersdorf Puts On His Big Boy Pants, Finds Them Not Big Enough.

Conor Freidersdorf is one of the innumerable and pestilential self-important twenty-somethings with degrees from impressive universities who have found gainful employment as pundits at places like the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Atlantic. Unlike writers like Matthew Yglesias, Ezra Klein, and Ross Douthat, Freidersdorf is not what I would call a big-leaguer, lacking even the occasional flash of A-game that you get on more or less a regular basis from others. God bless him, though, he keeps taking his hacks whenever he gets a turn at the plate.

Now, a wise young man in such a position would sharpen his skills against lesser competition, slowly honing his debating skills and his intellect until he was ready to bandy words with some of the true intellectual heavyweights. But Freidersdorf is not a wise young man and his notable lack of wisdom is what keeps bringing him into my area of interest. See, Our Young Conor fancies himself an intellectual and he has chosen to try to make his Rebellious Republican bones against one of the smartest, most professionally-accomplished men in the right-wing firmament, Mark Levin. Each time he has tried to give Levin a rhetorical drubbing — and it really is cute to watch him hitch up his big boy pants and toddle over to Levin with his crayon-scrawled argument in hand — Levin has flicked him aside with nary a care. It’s obvious that he’s well out of his league, that his big boy pants just aren’t big enough to make him a grown-up in the realm of conservative writers, but that hasn’t stopped him from acting as if he is. In fact, Our Young Conor seems to suffer from some deep masochistic tendencies that compel him to write blog post after blog post that fairly scream, “Thank you, Sir. May I have another?”

What must gall the young blogger terribly is that Levin has taken to ignoring his provocations, preferring to let others administer the harsh discipline. That is as it should be. Conor Freidersdorf is no more ready to go head-to-head against Mark Levin as he is to step to the plate against Roy Halliday or write a few new chapters in the books of de Sade.

His latest plea for a spanking is a perfect example. Freidersdorf undertook to review Levin’s book Liberty and Tyranny, which has spent the last 23 weeks on the New York Times’ bestseller list, including 12 weeks at #1. Normally, someone who wanted to review a book, especially a book with such massive appeal, would get a copy of the book and read it, perhaps making a few notes about things to research later, then provide a review that actually dealt with the substance of the book. Our Young Conor, though, is not a normal book reviewer. He is an Intellect, a Graduate of an Important College, a Young Man on the Move with Important Things to Say. He doesn’t have time for any of that reading stuff.

What he did was to skip to the end, read the last few paragraphs, then extrapolate the contents of the rest of the book from its conclusion.

In other words, he made s**t up.

I won’t fisk Freidersdorf’s review. Doug Ross already did that and if you’re interested what happens when keen intelligence is employed to destroy overweening arrogance, read his post.

I will make three observations about Our Young Conor’s post. Don’t expect any of them to be particularly detailed. Freidersdorf is such a weak thinker that his posts fairly refute themselves. Take my first observation. Our Young Conor admits that he only bothered to read the “final pages” of Levin’s book, yet he magnanimously proclaims Levin’s entire book “much more worthy of engagement”. How, I wonder, could he say that, considering that he didn’t actually read the book? He can’t possibly be talking about the themes of the book, since no reasonable human being would ever admit to understanding the contents of a book simply by skipping to the end. He’s simply being dismissive, acting out against a far more formidable thinker whose attention he can no longer command. It’s the act of a petulant infant.

My second observa…well, wait. I know I promised promised three observations, but I think I’m just going to finish this early. It’s a nice day today, and I have other things I could be doing that are more enjoyable and productive than batting around Conor Freidersdorf. There is plenty that is objectionable with Our Young Conor’s post — his intentional blindness to the particular threat to personal freedom embodied in New Deal-style progressivism, his conflation of independents and the apolitical to “main antagonists” against whom the modern conservative contends, and his comparison of Levin’s book to “The Da Vinci Code” — but you can see that all for yourself, if you’re so inclined. If he can’t be bothered to read Levin’s book well enough to make an informed rebuttal against it, I won’t fash myself to treat him as an honest broker of information or a mature and intelligent writer.

Nice try, Conor, but you’re still not ready to take on Mark Levin. From the look of things, you’re not even ready to take me on, though you’re welcome to try.

UPDATE: Well, I see Stacy McCain has beaten me to the punch. Ah well, he suffers fools even less gladly than I and his punk-smacking is superior to mine.

Other Posts of Interest:

• Conor Freidersdorf is Not Ready to Take on Mark Levin
• David Brooks: Garbage In Garbage Out
• Color Me Unimpressed, New York Times

Tags: Conor Freidersdorf, Conservatives, Mark Levin

Category: Conservatism, Cool Columnists and Wicked Writers