THE CONSERVATIVE COMEBACK, PART 844,392. It's hard to believe Andrew McCarthy actually served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney -- under Bush, granted, but still you don't expect actual mental cases to come out of those jobs. Now look what the poor, crazy bastard's descended to -- shaking his fist at Don Imus in the service of Rush Limbaugh in an essay called "Don Imus, House Pet." It's the case of McCarthy's life, and he's arguing it in the Court of Public Opinion! With luck maybe he can get the judge to sentence Imus to be waterboarded -- it's more exciting when it's extrajudicial, but times are tough and he'll take what he can get.

I'll boil it down for you: Imus, McCarthy tells us, is crude, "gratuitously insulting," insincere -- whereas the Balzacian Limbaugh "is able to reach and to teach because, as he noted today, his good-natured humor can be biting and illuminating without being nasty." No, I'm not kidding -- McCarthy not only calls Limbaugh's humor good-natured without being nasty, he actually offers Limbaugh's own generous self-assessment as evidence.

The really weird thing, though, comes when McCarthy finishes his Rush roolz/Imus droolz fan rant and moves on to conspiracy theories:

Here’s the pathetic thing about this episode: We’ve been given the playbook and still we don’t see we’re being played. “Pick the target,” Saul Alinksy said, “freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.”

Saul Alinksy! Slowly I turned...



It ends with McCarthy warning us that Barack Hitler is planning "to usher in a new order in which 'rights' become not what government must refrain from doing to you but rather what government must do for you," and this plaintive cry:

While Don Imus and the rest of the herd bleats over Rush, that is what is taking root. And if you don’t like it, prepare to be the next target.

I used to routinely ask if these people even knew any normal people, but now I'm just assuming that they were all raised in Skinner boxes and shipped to think tanks on their 18th birthdays.