The Right Metaphor

Dan Munz seems to be taking heat for describing Keith Urbahn's terrible, horrible, no good, very bad column as a "war crime." He writes in his defense:

"It also makes me glad I didn't go with my first choice: "...about Keith's abortion of a YDN column..."

Well I finally got around to reading the column (hence the late date of this post), and it looks to me like the abortion metaphor is somewhere on the right track.

Keith can't possibly mean what he says here (can he?):

The job of the true conservative -- at least in the classical sense of the term -- is to shed the sterilizing light of reality and pragmatism onto political discourse.

Pardon me? Reality, it seems, is a sterilizing agent, and a good thing too, since political discourse badly needs sterilization. [If there's one thing our country needs less of, it's new ideas in politics. Am I right or am I right?--ed.] For his next trick, Keith is going to apply the castrating shears of gradualism to the testicles of liberal idealism.