"She’s like the ominous blob in the horror films: the more you shoot at it, the bigger and stronger it becomes."

If a conservative columnist had come up with that image to describe a liberal politician, liberals would gasp and scold about the violence seething in the conservative brain.

But this is the liberal NYT columnist Charles Blow, complaining about how attacks on Sarah Palin aren't doing what they're supposed to do. His idea is lefties need to stop talking about her:

People on the left seem to need her, to bash her, because she is, in three words, the way the left likes to see the right: hollow, dim and mean. But since she’s feeding on the negativity, I suggest three other words: get over it.

So the reason for calling off the attacks is that they're not working. Whatever happened to the "restore sanity" movement that briefly bubbled up — the idea that civility was a free-standing value? I assume the idea that moderate discourse is an end in itself was always only a pose. That is, the idea that civility was an end was a means to an end. When that end wasn't achieved — liberals lost the elections — the means was abandoned. Attacks flared. But attacks failed. At least Blow isn't pretending to believe in civility as an end in itself.