Since so many other Democratic bloggers have already discussed Will Saletan's devastating critique of the president's performance Tuesday night, I won't waste your time with any kind of a recap or a lengthy quote. (If you're one of the three folks left who hasn't already read the piece, you'll find it here.) What I would like to do, though, is this: I'd like to request a thorough, well-executed fisking of the article by a thoughtful conservative blogger. Not a snide dismissal or an angry denunciation, mind you, but a calm, rational refutation of Mr. Saletan's major points. The kind of fisking that we'd expect to see from a George Will or a Bill Buckley, if they were in the fisking business.

And why would a pro-Kerry Democrat want to see something like that? Well, here's the thing: It seems to me that one of the unmentioned -- and relatively speaking, of course, unimportant -- casualties of the recent hostilities in Iraq has been the general level of discourse in the blogosphere. (A quick confession: I've had to kill five or six posts before they saw print in the past few days because, on second reading, they just seemed a little too ... well, a little too something. Not quite angry or uncivil, but close. And when a notoriously squishy moderate like me starts getting his Irish up, you know there's a problem.) A carefully-reasoned rejoinder to Saletan's eloquent and persuasive argument might be just the thing to get us all back on track.

So that's the challenge I'm respectfully throwing down this morning before my conservative friends in the blogging community. Take Will Saletan's piece and rip it to shreds. Go ahead. Really. Make the poor man sorry he ever even learned how to type.

Any takers?

UPDATE: Hard as it is for me to believe, there are other people up at this ungodly hour (about 4:30 AM) and they have enough energy to send e-mail -- in this case suggesting that I was being a tad disingenuous in the post above. And there's probably some truth to that. I do think it would be extraordinarily difficult to refute Saletan's argument; not surprisingly, most of what he says seems almost self-evidently true to me. On the other hand, I'd enjoy seeing somebody give it a try, and I suspect I just might learn something if their counter-arguments were smart and well-crafted. Which wouldn't be a bad thing, would it?

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