ORRIN JUDD calls Garrison Keillor a “Gutless Weasel” for his nasty insinuations regarding Norm Coleman. The language is harsher than I would have used, but in fairness to Judd Keillor’s remarks are weasely.

What astounds me about the Left over the past few months is the way in which racism, antisemitism and homophobia have become the stock-in-trade of its house provocateurs. Some are still trying to deny that this is so, but the evidence just keeps piling up. It’s a downward spiral into nastiness that goes a long way toward explaining the election results all by itself.

I thought the Left was supposed to be against this stuff, but apparently it all depends, as Dale Amon suggests, on who’s doing the talking. I’m beginning to think that it was all just a scam — just as the Left’s enthusiasm for free speech on campus was a lot higher when the main beneficiaries of free speech protection were communists.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

For me, it was the Clinton sex scandals. Watching Susan Estrich falsely say on TV that what Clinton allegedly did to Juanita Broaddrick was not rape in Arkansas at the time–torture her by holding her down and biting her lip until the pain and bleeding were so great that she submitted to rape–literally made me ill. To think that these were the same people who thought that Clarence Thomas shouldn’t be confirmed because he was so far over the line for discussing dirty movies with a staff person and asking her out twice!

I took Anita Hill’s side in the Thomas hearings and I naively thought that feminists did so too as a matter of principle. But I learned in the Clinton rape allegations that most feminists (Gloria Allred being a notable exception) didn’t really care about what Thomas or Clinton had done–just what suited their politics. The feminist movement in the US may never recover the moral high ground–and when I hear Hillary Clinton sounding off about violence against women, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Yes, I think the moral high ground was lost for all time over that one — or, more accurately, was revealed never to have existed at all.

Estrich has recanted now. But, of course, not until after the political moment had passed.