AND I EVEN THINK I SEE TWO CATS FROM INTERPOL, MAN. The Anchoress is upset by a Presidential directive on Interpol. It's not just about Socialism, which The Anchoress says "like the Chicago fog, creeps in on little cat feet," but the Nazis:

I have never understood why the Jews in Germany and Poland and the Netherlands simply went along with what they were told to do by the Nazis... Civil Disobedience is a good thing, sometimes -a force for good- we learned that from the very same spoiled-brat generation that now attempts to utterly corrupt our government, and our way of life...

Blargh blargh blargh. And yet she was only exercised about the Patriot Act when she heard other people wanted to get rid of it. Some civil libertarian.

(She's seeing Nazis everywhere these days, as in a fellow Christian's insufficiently resemblance to herself: "the piece reminds me a little of that scene in Schindler’s List, where the female Jewish architect tries to stay alive by offering to help design a better, stronger gallows..." I wonder whether she was driven to Hitler-Spielberg analogies when Ada Calhoun denounced "psychos shooting up abortion clinics and telling gay couples they're going to hell," or when Calhoun talked about smoking cigarettes and listening to Paul Westerberg.)

I doubt The Anchoress would find this explanation convincing, particularly the bit about Interpol having no international crime-busting agents of its own, which rather spoils the outrage of other yahoos crying that "our president has set an international police agency above the Fourth Amendment constraints of the Constitution that he finds deeply flawed."

The most interesting analyses of the Obama EO I've seen so far come from a reliably rightwing nut source and an less obviously affiliated nut source, which, despite their nuttiness, eschew the popular Bourne Identity nonsense and concentrate on its impact on American cooperation with the World Court and economic benefits to Interpol.

These may be fruitful areas of inquiry, and we should all be concerned about any expansion of government powers, national or international. But alas, in the current environment it's hard to find a good, un-nutty discussion of them. Even commentators who start out sober on the Interpol subject rush without explanation from what seems to be a tax code issue to an alleged abrogration of the 4th Amendment. At this writing, if you look for "Interpol" at Google News, the first result is "US placed under international police-state."

My mind turns again to the decade's social media disaster. We were once promised a consortium of great minds cooperating to unravel current events, and wound up with a cottage industry of propaganda mills extracting partisan advantage out of every news item that comes down the pike and churning it into outrage. Here we see one of its many depressing effects: a gang of rightbloggers who in years past never showed any interest in Constitutional protections predicting home invasions by jack-booted international thugs from an organization best known for tracking down ivory poachers and from a passing reference in Lenny. Paul Krassner, come back; all is forgiven.