Certainly better than Wolfe.
I was fascinated to spend hours in the late night (for some reason) reading the reactions by a few academics on crookedtimber.org to Goldberg’s book. While I would never rule out legitimate criticism of Goldberg’s efforts (nothing is perfect and maybe he was trying to slyly score some partisan points there) the sum of what I encountered was of people of some moderate intellectual gifts and academic training becoming arbiters of good scholarship and only allowing those ‘conservative’ viewpoints in outlets they have deemed permissible for being dispassionate.
Then you go to their own personal blogs and they are at Obama’s inauguration, reading the most paranoiac interpretations of Bush policy and utterly distorting the positions of their political opponents—but on a remarkably juvenile level.
It all boils down to “we sit in judgment and we have consensus and have been immersed in academe and therefore we find you lacking.”
It is telling that the most comments they’ve ever been able to generate have been about GOldberg’s book and this includes their own lefty booster posts and personal blogs.