Hot damn it’s a big night for good reading. From Garry Wills’s excoriation of loser Mitt Romney in the New York Review of Books:
Many losing candidates became elder statesmen of their parties. What lessons will Romney have to teach his party? The art of crawling uselessly? How to condemn 47 percent of Americans less privileged and beautiful than his family? How to repudiate the past while damaging the future? It is said that he will write a book. Really? Does he want to relive a five-year-long experience of degradation? What can be worse than to sell your soul and find it not valuable enough to get anything for it? His friends can only hope he is too morally obtuse to realize that crushing truth. Losing elections is one thing. But the greater loss, the real loss, is the loss of honor.
I could just as easily have quoted the whole post, which does vast impressive things in fewer than 750 words. If a Web editor went through and hyperlinked his claims to articles and studies, this might be one of the best pieces of Web writing I’ve ever seen. Then again, we’ve all got Google. (Tip to Adam Peterson on the find.)