Full Force Gail

It's rarely noted, but NYT's Gail Collins, week in and week out, is one of America's very best columnists. And funniest. Aside from her acute moral sense, her greatest gift may be her ability to savagely puncture her target's pretensions while somehow never coming across as angry or mean, a remarkable feat in the blog era, one that I have never been able to replicate myself, and yet one that I envy.

This week she goes after the pro-life hit on Planned Parenthood (by some James O'Keefe epigones), a column that might as well have been titled "Return of the Ratfuckers," were it not for her gentility and the Times's censors. At what point are we allowed to call what the right is doing what it is: "class warfare"?