I see on Twitter that John Derbyshire was defending Tom Tancredo over his Tea Party Convention speech.

(Crazy leftists accused Tancredo of wanting Jim Crow literacy tests, when he was actually asking for the standards that applied to his grandparents, who came from Italy  and had to pass a citizenship test before they could vote.)

I was wondering, before I clicked on the link, who was the crazy leftist who Derbyshire was defending Tancredo from, the kind of guy who says things like

“[The Tea Party Convention] gave a platform to ranters Tom Tancredo, a former Republican congressman, and Joe Farah, editor of a right-wing website, both of whom predictably delivered cringe-inducing screeds.”

Turns out it’s Rich Lowry, National Review editor after Bill Buckley’s purge of patriotic immingration reformers. [The Potent Tea Party | The Left was counting on the tea-party movement to divide the GOP, but it just isn’t happening, February 9, 2010]

Derbyshire starts in with “screeds”–which is not the kind of thing real conservatives say, and goes on from there:

"Okay, Point One: What’s with “screed”? That’s a word right out of the left-liberal vocabulary, one of the little stock they use to emphasize their moral superiority over us child-poisoning wife-beaters on the Right. They, in their lofty dedication to the public good, write columns and give speeches: We produce screeds (”a : a lengthy discourse : diatribe   b : a piece of writing: as (1) : a friendly letter . . . (2) : an informal essay, story, or dissertation” — Webster’s Third). In fact, if you’re going to use “screed” for the noun, why not reach into the Left vocabulary for a verb, too? “Spout” and “spew” are their favorites. But really: We should not touch this lefty Newspeak with a ten-foot pole. It’s just yielding up ground to the buggers. (No time here to deal with “ranters,” but similar objections apply.)

Point Two: Tom Tancredo doesn’t think people should be allowed to vote if they can’t speak English. Do you think they should be so allowed?" [More]