This Month's Best Lead

'History will record the week that our laissez-faire government fiddled while a major city drowned, the fourth most popular nonfiction book in the land, according to the New York Times, was an itemized account of the ways in which liberals are ruining the country. There is, of course, nothing particularly new about this: baiting liberals is a popular pastime that seems to gain strength whenever catastrophe is afoot--NASDAQ meltdown, 9/11, hurricanes lining up like planes on a carrier deck to attack the Gulf Coast. Besides, assailing liberals is fun, and the genre long ago outgrew the narrow limits of political writing. We hate liberals in the movies and we hate them in academia; we despise them for their twee vegan restaurants and for their infernal artwork and precious sexuality. Before long, no doubt, we will have anti-liberal cookbooks and mutual funds that invest only in companies that piss liberals off.'

--from the lead paragraph in this month's Harper's Magazine, in a book review of Bernard Goldberg's banal & idiotic 100 People Who Are Screwing Up America, by the author Thomas Frank. We'll try to remember to keep bringing you our monthly favorite (and of course we'll gladly accept your nominations, gentle readers), in the continuing belief that if a piece of writing doesn't begin well, it might just as well not have been written.