Glenn Reynolds responded to Bruce Bartlett taking down his silly notion about defaulting on the federal debt by declaiming that, “Bruce, I’m not trying to turn the United States into Zimbabwe. That would be the guy in the White House, whom you seem surprisingly anxious to defend.”

Reynolds’ response is rich since Bartlett said nothing about Obama in his reply, and Reynolds spent eight years carrying water for the Bush administration. What Bartlett doesn’t understand is that he should only respond to an Instapundit post as glibly as the post was made. Thought, reflection and substantive arguments aren’t fair.

In a related matter, the Howard Baker Center at the University of Tennessee will be sponsoring a lecture by Reynolds on “Blogs, Social Media and Political InCivility” next month.

UPDATE: I got to thinking about how Reynolds described Bartlett’s response as “typically intemperate” and did a search to see how often Reynolds found need to chide Bartlett for that failing and found that most  previous Instapundit links to him are neutral or positive. It would seem that Bartlett only becomes “intemperate” when he criticizes Glenn Reynolds. My question is, what took you so long Bruce?