When did the aphorism...

"People judge you by the company you keep" go from a bit of folksy wisdom that parents invoke to warn their children to stay away from "bad kids" to an indictment of the speaker's deficient character for practicing "guilt by association"?

I listened to the last hour plus of Stanley Kurtz's interview with long-time and well-respected Chicago talk show host Milt Rosenberg. It was surreal. There were all sorts of angry callers who obviously were reading straight from their Obama campaign-provided talking points. They were threatening Rosenberg and WGN with reprisals merely for having Kurtz on the air. They offered not one scintilla of reasoned critique of Kurtz's work; of course, they betrayed their complete lack of awareness of anything he had written.

Calling him a "smear merchant" (and that's directly from the Obama campaign) is risible. If anything, my own take on Kurtz is that he is so very earnest, so scholarly, and so dispassionate that reading his often long posts on The Corner makes me wonder if he "gets" the concept of blog posting (that is, it's not the best place for a seven paragraph exposition of an issue). That's not a slam at the content of what he writes, and it is offered merely to highlight just how ridiculous calling him a "slimy character assassin" truly is. As an aside, when The Corner adopted a technique of hiding lengthy posts by showing the opening few lines and adding a link that said something like "Keep reading this post", I wrote to Jonah Goldberg that this ought to be referred to as the "Short Kurtz".

If Obama wasn't frightened by what Kurtz might reveal, this would be a non-issue. That he is so afraid should open the eyes of those who are willing to see.