ANOTHER MORNING, ANOTHER OUTRAGE. Now the malefactor is John Derbyshire, whose theme, insofar as one can be detected, is that liberals are snobs, and thereby spiritually inferior to those charming folks who believe that God didn't make man from no monkey. It is a hilarious argument as, for one thing, Derbyshire's writing (here and elsewhere) is pretty much one long sneer, -- he's ill-suited to attack others for holding themselves superior to their fellow mortals. Also, here's the anecdote with which he defends his tree-hugger bad, knuckle-dragger good dichotomy:

Last year one of my neighbors, an elderly widow who was very kind and helpful to us when we first moved into this street, fell and broke her femur... The nursing home was a lovely place, spotlessly clean and well-run, smelling of floor-polish, fresh-cut flowers, and disinfectant. The staff were cheerful, attentive and brisk. I could not help but contrast it with the place in which my own mother spent some of her last days -- a privately-owned but municipally-supported place in England, staffed by ill-tempered slatternly girls and stinking of boiled cabbage and stale urine. Being taken to our neighbor's room, I noticed here and there discreet, plain little crucifixes on the walls. It was a Christian establishment, run by some evangelical group. Probably none of the staff believes in the theory of evolution.

This touching scene reminds me of the anti-Communist filmstrips we were shown in Catholic grammar school, in which the apparatchiks were always shown with fulsome sneers and (the clincher) smoking cigarettes. If they could have found any way to portray the female Commies as "slatternly girls" without bringing the near occasion of sin to us tender kinder, I'm sure they would have done so.

A lot of the reasoning at NRO these days is at about this level. That's one of the interesting things about the current war-gloat the Right's on. The much-vaunted Iraqi WMD seems, so far, to either be non-existent or available in such feeble conditions and quantities as to make any complaint of their imminent threat comical. The liberation of the poor Iraqis -- which became, in the later phases of the war, the new, cuddlier justification for the conflict-- is, as the ashes cool, beginning to manifest its absurdity: Iraq as a Republican-run human rights inititative that cost about a hundred billion dollars, and killed dozens of Americans and untold Iraqis. (Maybe that's what it takes to get Republicans behind a human-rights initiative: the promise of conquest, and contracts for their friends.) Their argument for the Iraq invasion increasingly boils down to "we won, so shut up." Considering how successful this logic has been, they can almost be forgiven for applying it to everything else. It's certainly easier than thinking.