Nothing up his sleeve

Roger Simon is miffed because James Wolcott looks at an empty vessel and doesn’t see a half full glass. In this case, the vessel is Roger himself:

James Wolcott has said a fair number of snotty things about me lately. I won’t link all them because, well, I’m a sensitive guy. [No, you’re not. You’re just too lazy to look them up.–ed. Okay.] Anyway, before I was so rudely interrupted, I have always been an admirer of Wolcott’s. He’s a witty writer and deserves his lifetime gig at Vanity Fair.

So I wondered why I stuck in his craw so much and at first glance figured it was the apostate thing–no one pisses off the club so much as the member who resigns. Of course, deep down my politics and his may not be so radically different as he thinks they are. I’m assuming we would both like to see a democratic Middle East with equal rights for women and so forth. On domestic social issues, though I haven’t paid that much attention to his views, we may not disagree much, if at all.

I think the differences between us are ones of temperament and, to some extent, economics. I have always been an optimist and, almost always, an interventionist, all the way back to my days in the Civil Rights Movement.

There you have it.

It only took Roger 195 words to play his well-worn and creased “I was in the Civil Rights movement” card that he always whips out whenever he needs to remind someone that he used to be a Democrat but the party left him when he got all scared by 9/11 and he really needed a hug.

In my office pool, I had paragraph four, 219 words before he used it.

Damn. So close.