GREGG EASTERBROOK, ARCH VILLIAN

At the risk of saying something incredibly crass and politically incorrect, and possibly getting lots of people very angry with me, I'm going to say something to the crowd now after Gregg Easterbrook with torches and pitchforks:

Get over yourselves.

Easterbrook is no anti-Semite. The man attends an ecumenical church where Jews and Christians worship side by side, for goodness' sake. Look over the totality of his writing, and you won't find a whiff of anti-Semitism. Not a whiff. What you'll find is one ill-advised paragraph about a movie he hated and a movie studio that disappoints him, amid some fine writing about an amazing variety of subjects. Nothing more. Easterbrook is one of the good guys, folks.

But it seems that in the present world, you can't be construed or even misunderstood to say a single solitary bad thing about Muslims or Jews without getting yourself into a career-threatening snare (though bashing Christians has never been more fashionable). This kind of thin-skinned witch hunting has got to stop, or we'll run out of good writers pretty soon. We'll also lose the ability to say anything at all, anytime, anywhere.

Easterbrook didn't burn down a synagogue. He didn't paint a swastika on a sidewalk, or incite a riot in a Jewish neighborhood, or hoist the Nazi flag at a Klan rally. He wrote a weak paragraph that was so poorly worded that it was easily mistaken for anti-Semitic animus. That's his crime. He has apologized; let it go.

Have none of you ever said or written anything that you regret? Have you never written or said a single solitary thing that could be misunderstood, or taken to mean something that it didn't? Of course you have. I certainly have. So let's get over ourselves already.

In the mean time, his case is instructive. If you want to keep yourself out of trouble, the path is clear: Get your own ADL.

Just look at Mel Gibson. He makes a movie about the last moments of Christ's life on earth, and the Anti-Defamation League sets out on a campaign to defame him. A US general gives a speech that lines up quite well with mainstream evangelical Christian thought, and gets lambasted by both the LA Times smear machine and MSNBC. And of course the ADL is all over Gregg Easterbrook. If these guys had their own ADL they could at least defend themselves in the public arena. But they don't, so they'll suffer the slings and arrows of outraged blowhards.

So we Christians need ot set up our own ADL to fight off the other ADL, and the atheists, etc etc. It'll be one busy organization, but the down side is it will just be one more bunch of screaming zealots looking to poke their fingers in other peoples' eyes over trivialities (and yes, I think the ADL has crossed the line from legitimate defense organization to nitpicking zealotry in the past year or so--this case is seriously beneath them).

So instead of all that strife, why don't we just all get over ourselves. Now. The real anti-Semites rule big Islamic countries and say idiot things like "the Jews rule the world," while every single other leader of an Islamic country gives him a big standing O. Oh, and they kill Jews, burn down their synagogues and promise an endless jihad until Israel is pushed into the sea (see Arafat, Yasser). They also kill Christians and even non-medieval Muslims, by the way. Easterbrook wrote poorly for once in his life, and has said he's sorry--what more do you folks want from him? His head on a platter? A promise to never be human again? What?

MORE: Jeff Jarvis is as worried as I am about what we're doing to the concept of free speech when we witch hunt people like has been done to Gregg Easterbrook.

Two things: I cannot express strongly enough my outrage at ESPN for firing him, and pushing his great TMQ columns down the memory hole. Bastards. They've lost this viewer for good. Due probably to Disney's totalitarian ways, ESPN has become a bastion of thought police. I am also plenty annoyed with lots of bloggers right now. The bandwagon mentality, the hunt 'em till we bleed 'em ethos that permeates much of the blogosphere, has cost a decent man his job. I hope you're happy. I'm sure not.

Oh, and one more thing. If you folks want to play this game, fine. I demand an apology from Andrew Sullivan and anyone else who has ever used the term theocrat or any other perjorative to describe evangelical Christians as a group. You folks who talk about us as though were some form of American Taliban may not realize it, but you sound far more bigoted than Gregg Easterbrook ever did. Really. So fess up, or I might just start chronicling your offenses. How would you like that?