Lessons from an improbable collaboration.

Wondering what's all the rage for spring?

Rage.

George Will wrote an excellent column on the subject last weekend, deconstructing the "the politics of disdain." Howie Kurtz also wrote about rage last week, decrying the ugliness of postings on political blogs. And if you have an inbox, you've probably seen the Bloggingheads meltdown starring law professor and blogger Ann Althouse, railing against the bloggers and journalists who attack her.

There's no doubt that as the ideological divide in this country grows and new technologies expand, we'll spend more time being furious and bitter and enraged. And, as Will suggested last week, that anger soon takes on a life of its own. It flattens our reality and distorts our understanding of the world.

But look at what else Will had to say about the causes of anger (as opposed to the effects, about which I agree). His piece about the outrages of political outrage points fingers at Paul Krugman, and Bill Clinton, and Howard Dean, and all San Franciscans, with nary a flick to the role played by Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh, and the spear-chuckers from the political right who've elevated rageful discourse to an art form. (If Will thinks his nod at rage parodist Ann Coulter constitutes "balance," he's kidding himself.)

Know what would have made Will's piece great, as opposed to just smart? He should have co-authored it with Paul Krugman. Their argument could have been the same. The analysis would have been more careful.

Consider the example highlighted by Kurtz, who wrote about hateful comments posted on the blogs Little Green Footballs and the Huffington Post. In both cases posters wished that failed assassination attempts on Jimmy Carter and Dick Cheney, respectively, had succeeded. Both Arianna Huffington and Charles Johnson (founder of Little Green Footballs) disavowed these comments—although one of them did feel the need to insist that posters on the other side were worse. But you know what would have impressed the heck out of me? If they'd issued a joint statement that readers advocating the death of public officials are not welcome in either forum.

Don't get me wrong. I can appreciate the Hegelian allure of screaming epithets at one another in an effort to get to the bottom of thorny questions. But political discourse in this country stopped being "discourse" when we all stopped speaking or listening to anyone who disagreed with us. George Will cites Peter Wood, anthropologist and author of A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now, in noting that this kind of speech does not persuade. It's not even an attempt to persuade. It's just "performance art." And while performance art surely has its place in America, I'm not confident we ought to be relying exclusively upon it to debate the surge in Iraq.

But what if pundits had to collaborate with someone from the other side? Just once a year. Topic of their choosing.

A few weeks ago I co-authored a piece for Slate with Jack Goldsmith, who once worked for the Bush Justice Department (not my most favorite job description these days). The collaboration came about in part because the whole U.S. attorney purge had degenerated into what felt like a choose-your-own-adventure book: Op/Ed A ("scandalous ... partisan ... corruption") vs. Op/Ed B ("pleasure of the president . . . Clinton started it").