Holy FSM, I love Rachel Maddow. And not in a little way; I mean pick-her-up-and-carry-her-on-my-shoulders kind of love. And I love her even more for the gracious way that she deals with neo-con former Bush speechwriter David Frum.

Frum, who unbelievably has the nerve to sit in judgment of anyone when his carefully crafted propaganda led us into an unnecessary war, employs the Republican tried and true method of creating false equivalencies to defend the indefensible tactics of the McCain campaign. And his target isn't the expected Barack Obama or even Bill Clinton, but Rachel Maddow herself.

That's right. Frum -- who by the way, has only a glancing relationship with facts -- has the bad manners in addition to flawed thought processes to tell Maddow that using snark and humor in her news show brings down the national dialogue just as much as McCain and Palin's race baiting and fear mongering.

FRUM: I think you were talking through much of the show about the matter of tone in our politics. And yet, I think we are seeing an intensification of some of the ugliness of tone that has been the feature of American politics for the past 8 years. I mean , the show, unfortunately, is itself an example of that problem, with its heavy sarcasm, and sneering and its disregard for a lot of the substantive issues that really are important. And I would hate to see Republicans go, probably into opposition, sustaining this terrible cycle of unseriousness about politics, about turning it into a spectator sport. The party is going to have some important rebuilding to do. It’s going to have to do that in an intelligent way and we’re all going to have to do better than we’ve been doing, including in the last forty minutes.

MADDOW: Do you think that my tone on this show is equivalent to people calling Barack Obama somebody who ‘pals around with terrorists,’ people yelling from the…people yelling from the audience at McCain/Palin rallies, kill him, off with his head, traitor, are you accusing me of an equivalence in tone?

FRUM: I don’t think that’s an important question. The question is, given the small plate of responsibility that you personally have, how do you manage that responsibility? The fact that other people fail in other ways is not an excuse for failing in your way.

Talk about your sneering tones. Patronize much, David? Listen, when you gain a moral compass -- something that apparently isn't held in high regard at the American Enterprise Institute where you hang your hat of late -- let's see you "be the change you want."

You want a more intelligent and grown up dialogue? You, the man who gave us "the Axis of Evil"? How about you employ just the littlest bit of intellectual honesty? How about acknowledging the very real damage to the national dialogue being done by playing to the basest bigotries by your party, a tactic that you carried in your own small plate of responsibility for years. We've gotten more truth from one episode of comedy shows like The Daily Show and satires like The Colbert Report than we have gotten in all the speeches and op-eds penned by you in the last eight years.

And that's no snark.

UPDATE: Since you asked...