THIN AS A FLOPHOUSE BLANKET. It's time someone said it: The closer we get to the election, the more obvious it becomes that Professor Reynolds is a straight-up Republican operative.

Not that he doesn't try, however feebly, to cover. Witness his behavior when employing the latest GOP memes, which he always has factory-fresh on his shelves. Note how he uses the "People keep sending me this" dodge before going into a long, luxuriant description of the tainted and irrelevant Cong-quoted-Kerry dirtbomb. And after yet another lame attempt to drag the mouldering corpse of the Kerry intern story out into the spotlight, observe that he hastily changes the subject -- to "Bush-hatred." ("And speaking of such things, I highly recommend this article by University of Texas law professor Doug Laycock...")

Yes, there's always somebody else onto whom the Prof can deflect attention and responsibility -- like this Rush-in-training who told the Professor, John Kerry and the Viet Cong made a baby and I saw the baby and the baby looked at me! (to which the Professor replied, "Looked at you, eh?" and posted the tawdry tale). But the cover is increasingly flimsy. No one could read a full page of Reynolds and fail to get where he's coming from.

Yet he keeps pretending. Even now, on the very same page at which you can see all the aforementioned disinfo (and the usual Bush-War encomiums), the Professor claims he doesn't understand why people call him a conservative.

On the odd chance that one of the Professor's handlers reads this (hey, it's not impossible -- maybe an ambitious young turk is scanning the most out-of-the-way sources for fresh angles, to get in good with his boss), I have to say: I understand "deep cover," but I don't get shallow cover -- and in this case, Reynolds' cover is as thin as a flophouse blanket. Why are you guys even pretending?

Seriously, this whole kitbag of tactics -- the eventheliberal tactic, the as-a-lifelong-Democrat ruse, and the "Sigh, some Democrat come and save me" (or Lieberman) maneuver -- is absolutely played. It fools no one. Why not bring Reynolds in from the cold? You can spend the saved resources on something really important, like programming veterans to testify that Kerry came to the Hanoi Hilton to torture them in 1971.