TOXIC DUMP. The Ole Perfesser is spreading bullshit about DDT, claiming that liberal enviroweenies are keeping it from New York bedbug sufferers because of ObamaHitler, as if there were no scientific reason to restrict its use. A useful antidote may be found in Kim Larsen's 2008 article "Bad Blood." A highlights:

DDT proponents are generally reluctant to acknowledge the complicating and protean factor of mosquito resistance. Entomologist May Berenbaum finds this galling. An expert on insecticide metabolism, Berenbaum is director of the entomology department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "Read the entomological literature of the 1950s," she said in a telephone interview. "Way before Silent Spring, scientists were already trying to understand resistance. That's what insecticide toxicology was all about back then. Resistance to DDT was first detected in Italy, in houseflies, in 1947!"...

After Berenbaum published the article, she said, she was barraged by e-mails demanding that she support her claims. "To get them off my back, I finally culled a list of peer-reviewed articles documenting resistance to DDT and other pesticides in pockets all over Africa. This is not my life's work. I spent 10 minutes--10 minutes--and I found 15 articles. What would I have found if I'd spent an hour?"

I've known New Yorkers who have solved their bedbug problems with commercial remedies that did not include DDT. It's difficult but it can be done. The Perfesser is full of shit.

Remember: These people are not uninformed, but uninterested in the truth.

WHAT TO DO ON THOSE RARE OCCASIONS WHEN LIBERTARIANS FEEL BAD ABOUT SOMEONE ELSE. Megan McArdle's heartstrings (or, perhaps more accurately, heartthreads, or body-cavity-strings) are tugged by some well-circulated and absolutely horrible footage of cops storm-troopering a family home in pursuit of a drug bust. She characterizes the folly of drug war justifications thus :

Have you ever had one of those arguments in a bar that start around eleven and wind up when the bartender kicks you out? It starts off on some perfectly reasonable topic, but as the hours and the drinks mount up, the participants are forced to stake out some clear logical positions, and in doing so, crawl farther and farther out along the limb they are defending . . . until suddenly you reach a point at which one of the debaters can either abandon their initial committment, or endorse the slaughter of 30,000 Guatamalan orphans. And there's this long pause, and then he says, "Look, it's not like I want to kill those orphans . . . "

This reminded me of the Iraq War, in which thousands of people were killed, often under conditions similar to those portrayed in the tape, or worse. (And some of them might have been orphans -- at least, for a few minutes before they expired.)

McArdle was on the other end of the barroom justification then. Later she admitted she might have been wrong about it (though, she insisted, that didn't mean the anti-war hippies were right). In subsequent posts she saw that Iraq was "improving," which she suggested meant the carnage may have been worth it:

The improvement may not last. And even if it does, there's still a fine argument to be made that the suffering which preceded it made the invasion a terrible, terrible idea. But the current strategy of ignoring the news from Iraq, or quibbling with it, doesn't lay a sound foundation for making that argument.

Maybe someone from Conservatarian HQ can ease her mind by explaining that even inappropriate drug raids help lift property values, and make neighborhoods more attractive to members of the Producer class. In libertarian land, there's a solution for every problem -- so long as the problem is how you feel about something horrible happening to someone else. And it always is.

Oh, almost forgot:

As an empirical matter, I believe that national health care is going to kill a lot more people every year than the Iraq War when fully realized.

CONSERVATIVE WISDOM ON THE STOCK MARKET DIPSY DOODLE: "Oh great, will Democrats look to use a stupid stock purchase stock error as a way to get more government control over the Stock Market? How about we just teach people the difference between a 'B' and an 'M'?" -- Scared Monkeys. When all you have is a monomania, every problem looks like an ObamaHitler.

On the other hand, it was a pleasure to watch the Randian supermen who populate comments at Megan McArdle's blog immediately start bragging about the gold and armament they'd laid in for the coming Galt-Go -- though not nearly as pleasurable as one response to them:

I grew up on a farm in Minnesota. Guys from Minneapolis in their big, beautiful, 4-wheel drive trucks used to drive down on the weekends. They knew a lot about their guns, but they didn't know shit about hunting. Also, any kind of real deer hunting was too cold for them, so they mostly sat in the coffee shops in town and spun bullshit to each other about how awesome their guns were...

That actually shut them up. Maybe glibertarians have some shame, after all!

ANN ALTHOUSE DOES BATTLE WITH... THE ONION. I shit you not.

At first glance this satire appears to be vigorously pro-free-speech, but I suspect that it's only pro-liberal speech. Maybe my suspicion is wrong, but I'd find The Onion a lot funnier if its satire caused its readers a little pain, instead of nudging them to laugh at people they already hold in contempt.

No doubt she would find it funnier, if by "find it funnier" you mean "howl 'what a hoot!' and point at doll wearing 'liberal elite' sign."

Althouse previously yelled at comedians whom she found "traitors to your craft" because they weren't making enough Obama jokes to suit her. (At that time she also called me "dumb or dishonest" for referring to her as a rightblogger, and probably thinks I mostly leave her alone these days because I fear her stinging wit.)

Thank God America has a Truth Squad at the ready to explain why this so-called "humor" isn't funny!

RELATED: The Truth Squad also finds that a planned Comedy Central Jesus show might be funny, but is the act of "cowards" and thus has no place on a comedy channel.

You know, I actually do miss Bush -- when he was President, they told us we could show our patriotism just by going shopping. Now, to show our love of country, we're expected not to laugh at "the kind of comedy that makes you comfortable" -- as opposed to the comedy stylings of, say, Andrew Klavan, with which we doubt most Comedy Central customers would be comfortable, though not for ideological reasons. A grim business, this War on Whatchamacallit.

UPDATE. Oh Jesus, Jonah Goldberg is bitching about the fucking Machete trailer.

Oh, and no, just for the record, I don't think this is actually inciting violence. But that's a lot more slack than liberals cut, say, Michelle Bachman or Glenn Beck. And they don't even wield machetes.

If it were anyone else in the universe (except Althouse) I'd say he had to be joking.

Between this and the Michael Moriarty Hitler movie, it's clearer than ever: With these guys, the culture war is a war on culture.

CULTURE WAR: INCOMING! Whaaaaa...



Well, I love Michael Moriarty's acting (see him in Who'll Stop the Rain or Larry Cohen's Q sometime), so who knows. And (perhaps this is related) I also have a soft spot for Hitler movies. (Max, for example. It's pretty silly at times, but it has lines like "You're a hard man to like, Hitler." Now how can you pass on that?)

But the Big Hollywood review of Hitler Meets Christ (God, the name sounds like a South Park episode) is not encouraging. For one thing, reviewer Joe Bendel refers to "the thankless role of Hitler." Is he kidding? Hitler's like Frankenstein's Monster -- just walk onstage and people go crazy! Fortinbras -- now there's a "thankless" role. Also:

Relocated from New York, the delusional Hitler and Christ now encounter each other in the seedier environs of Vancouver.

Stop giggling, people are trying to read.

The contrast between them is immediately striking. The Christ figure is neatly dressed, and essentially rational in his discourse, aside from his obvious identity crisis. By contrast, Hitler is slovenly, crude, and erratic. While on one level it makes sense their outward appearance would reflect the relative peace of their souls, one would expect the exact opposite from most “indie” films. It would be the martial Hitler who would be clean and presentable, whereas the Christ would be unkempt and widely emotional in his arguments. Yet, Moriarty has more surprises in store for the viewer.

I'll bet he does. Found via Balloon Juice, where a commenter supplies a winning antidote:

SHORTY OTD. Reason teases anti-Mexican bigots; in comments, its readers take offense.

NET NEUTRALITY: THE NEW WINGNUT FRONTIER. With an FCC ruling pending, the Net Neutrality issue is heating up. Tech people are generally in favor of it (so am I, after seeing what the rat bastard telecoms are capable of); most of the business press coverage positions it as a battle over whether telecommunications companies can cut off bandwidth arbitrarily.

Most Wall Street Journal commenters follow that line of thought, but some holler like this:

I'm sure Pelosi and Reid are dancing in the aisles up at the pollit bureau meetings over this one. Novemebr can't get here fast enough for me! Palin / Quayle 2012!!!!!!!!!!!

Huh what? To see where this is coming from, check out RedState:

Should the tens of millions of Americans on the Internet, we who make a living or keep in touch with friends and family, have our fate determined by a small band of fringe neo-Marxist radicals, or self-seeking lobbyists at Google? I say no...

Hands off our Internet, FCC. End the power grab now.

Yes, it's an actual wingnut talking point: Gummint mess with mah intanet! And they don't just mean the pipes: RedState commenters warn of the day "when Obama censors Facebook, and limits texting." Michele Bachmann agrees Net Neutrality is "censorship of the Internet." None of them can point to a Net Neutrality provision that supports any such claim but, to be fair, Obama Hitler Gadsden Cold Dead Hands Skreee.

I thought at first the ringleaders at least were paid off by the telecoms; I still haven't ruled that out. But I've come to the conclusion that by now any government action provokes this reflex in them -- now that it's run by Democrats, that is. I expect that when sanitation trucks come to pick up their garbage they peer from behind curtains with a shotgun at the ready, praying for the election of President Palin to allow them to finally get some sleep.

THEY DON'T MAKE LIBERTARIANS LIKE THEY USED TO, AND NEVER DID. The idea that Obama is covering for Muslim jihadists in the Times Square unexplosion seems to have been adopted by libertarians. Obama and other statists are defending "fundamentalist Islam," David Harsanyi suggests, in order to persecute libertarians' friends in the tea parties and Israel.

Between this and their traditional commitment to freeing the weed, I think libertarians are a good bet to become the regnant movement of the post-apocalyptic hellscape I'm increasingly worried I won't die soon enough to miss.

WORLD WAR IV MORE YEARS! In response to a Bret Stephens let's-keep-our-nukes column, National Review's Michael Anton strongly suggests that rogue states (Iran, the subject of Stephens' column, is clearly on Anton's mind) will at least give a hand to terrorists who will explode nuclear weapons in the U.S., "especially if they calculate that their role in the act will appear sufficiently ambiguous to minimize the chance of American retaliation." (He might as well just say that Iran is preemptively responsible, Minority Report style.)

Then he talks about deterrence, by which he seems to mean publicly threatening to blow up Iran if something blows up here:

Declaratory policy is what nations say about how and when and why they might retaliate in various circumstances. The purpose — and hope — is that by making terrible threats, we can make follow-through on those threats unnecessary by staying the hand of those whose hatred can never be assuaged but whose innate senses of self-preservation, rationality, and (yes) fear can be leveraged in our favor. Conventional wisdom and official policy alike hold that declaratory policy has no relevance or role to play in the fight against terror.

This is an unexamined assumption — a reflex or, better, a recoiling from where the inquiry, not to say the conclusion, must lead. It is understandable that no one wishes to wander into that dark, monster-infested forest — nor, worse, to be seen to do so. But sooner rather than later, someone — several of us — must. Stephens is saying: Let’s get on with it. He’s right.

This is, I guess, the sort of thing you can say when your readers think Obama is Hitler plus Stalin, hates America, and cannot be trusted to retaliate against people who attack the United States. Because that's the only way it makes sense.

Even if you despise Obama (and this can apply to Ahmadinejad as well as to wingnuts), you have to know that in such a scenario political expediency alone would demand of him some futile, belligerent gesture. The last guy invaded Iraq, for Christ's sake -- what sense did that make? And this time we wouldn't have to go through the charade of hunting for Weapons of Mass Destruction, either, because they'll already have blown up, in Times Square or somewhere nearby. The idea that no one's getting his ass kicked after such an incident is pure fantasy.

But only the punters are supposed to take this seriously, as Anton's doomy if, God forbid language indicates. If you let him and his buddies back in power, they'll blow up Iran one way or the other.

Extra points to Anton for pretending this offer to find diplomatic language for blanket nuclear threats is an act of great bravery. ("To discuss these matters is to risk one’s reputation and perhaps livelihood" -- as if these guys can't always get a job!)

IT ONLY COUNTS IN HORSESHOES AND RIGHTBLOGGING. This Michelle Malkin extended slur on immigration is well (though I assume inadvertently) encapsulated by Jules Crittenden:

Malkin on Faisal’s path to citizenship. The reporting doesn’t in fact suggest his marriage was a sham as Malkin suggests, but she goes on to note the extensive abuse of the marriage route to a green card by jihadis.

That template suits so many rightwing screeds: The example doesn't fit my argument at all, but it's a news hook so what the hell! I guess they've been talking about Obama as a Socialist Nazi for so long that they've lost all skill at, or interest in, logical connections.

THE PANIC ROOM. I see conservatives still believe that the shortest path to Republican victory is terrorizing the citizens. John Podhoretz complains that in the wake of the Times Square non-explosion, public officials have sought to calm rather than terrify, which he considers paternalistic:

The American people are far more sophisticated about these things than those officials appear to believe, and they can be talked to like adults... When [crisis-management] is done well, there should be no sugar-coating. The impulse to sugar-coat is a mark of the conviction among politicians that they are in the same relation to the body politic as a parent is to a child.

He's got a point. Ronald Reagan really did the nation a disservice by fobbing off that "slipped the surly bonds of earth" bullshit off on us when the Challenger blew up. He should have speculated aloud to a stunned nation about the astronauts' final moments of screaming terror, the devastating impact, and their atomized remains. That's leadership!

We're talking about a car stuffed with fertilizer that didn't blow up. I hope Podhoretz isn't a fire warden at Commentary. If the place ever went ablaze, he'd be showing off the George Costanza leadership model:

YOUR MOMENT OF GOLDBERG. Jesus Christ. Richard Cohen jokes, "[Commentary] asks: 'What Kind of Socialist Is Barack Obama?' To which any sane person would have to reply: 'Not a Very Good One.'" Goldberg rejoins:

If Barack Obama isn't a very good socialist, never mind a Very Good One — in super-serious capital letters — doesn't that mean he's still a socialist? Bob Uecker was not a very good baseball player, but he was a baseball player.

I like to imagine Goldberg showing this to someone literate, being told, "That's certainly a novel response to obvious sarcasm," and replying, "Thanks!"

UPDATE. This Goldberger is even worse, but the guy's unconquerable stupidity is wearing me down already. As to his reference in the title to this essay, in the words of Ray Collins in The Magnificent Ambersons, if he weren't so thoughtless I might think him rather offensive.

WINGNUTS DEMAND THEIR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO SOFTBALL COVERAGE. Most of the time, when people talk about a "fair" reporter, I find they either mean a.) one who makes their own side look good, or b.) one who knows when to feint in a contrarian direction to give the impression of fairness. Dave Weigel, conversely, strikes me as the real thing. Having written for both liberal and conservative pubs and seeming to have friends on both sides, he may be said to stand among, but not of, his subjects. He currently serves as the Washington Post's expert spelunker of the caverns of the Right, and does such a good job of it that even the most brain-dead rightwing propagandists have been reluctant to come after him.

That is, till recently. The other day in his Twitter feed (where like many of us he is often unguarded and jocular) Weigel made this offhand comment:

I can empathize with everyone I cover except for the anti-gay marriage bigots. In 20 years no one will admit they were part of that.

OK, class, which part do you think got through to the belligerati: the "empathy with everyone I cover" part, or the "bigots" part? Matt Lewis:

Perhaps Weigel will turn out two decades from now to have been prescient, but "bigot" is awfully strong language for a person who is making the case for tolerance – and this comment simply reinforced a longstanding view among social conservatives that The Washington Post and most of the rest of the mainstream media are not only implacably opposed to their policy agenda, but personally hostile to them as well.

And blah blah African-Americans don't like gay marriage are you against African-Americans blah blah. The article also contains one of the more unfortunately emblematic clauses of our time:

When I confronted Weigel about his Tweet...

"How can he now go to the Family Research Council's 'Value Voters Summit' and objectively report on it?" says Lewis. "How can his coverage of a Rick Santorum speech, for example, be trusted? Some have wondered why the Post would hire a non-conservative to cover the conservative movement..."

What sort of person should the Post get for the job? Maybe someone who thinks, and tweets, the right way -- like Ben Domenech, the Post's former rightwing affirmative action hire, whose absence from the masthead Lewis explains to his audience thus: "Liberal bloggers quickly leveled plagiarism allegations, and Domenech resigned within days of his hiring." (A different sort of observer might have said Domenech was caught red-handed.)

Just think if the Post had the benefit of Lewis' counsel, and the wit to take it, back in the 1970s. With H.R. Haldeman covering the White House, the Watergate story would have been turned out very differently -- a triumph of even-handed reporting, perhaps celebrated with a White House dinner during Nixon's third term of office.

This isn't the only recent attack on Weigel. Newsbusters' Dan Gainor actually got after him for tweeting "I hear there's video out there of Matt Drudge diddling an 8-year-old boy. Shocking," which you would think even an abject tightass would recognize as a gag. And so Gainor does, grudgingly, but adds, "even if it's a joke, it's shocking to have an employee of The Washington Post claiming a prominent conservative had sex with an 8-year-old boy."

Weigel apparently didn't suffer this fool gladly, and Gainor responded, "Of course, then again, I wasn't the one making rape jokes." He also mentioned that "earlier in the evening, [Weigel] had commented about having too much to drink." Gainor leaves it to you, dear reader -- would you rather read someone who has been known to get drunk and make jokes, or a real reporter with impeccable ideological credentials?

This rightwing political correctness is getting to be a pain in the ass.

A FINE EXAMPLE OF THE GENRE (FART). This is, in so many ways, a perfect Jonah Goldberg post:

• Contains meaningless, undefended observation made in passing just to pump up Goldberg's opinions-per-square-inch ratio ("It's pretty nifty looking and a clever idea, though I'm not sure how useful or reliable it is");
• "Truthfully, I don't fully trust any web numbers from any source about any thing. But for a host of reasons, intuitive and historical, Google's numbers feel about right." Also: "But that's pure guesswork on my part."
• Goldberg pretends post will be controversial with the "suits," maintaining that precious Goldberg street cred;
• "Reader" claims Goldberg is right, which vindicates Goldberg's intellectual processes, ensuring there will be many more like this.

I also must applaud a few other Goldberg efforts today: His why's-ID-for everybody-less-offensive-than-ID-for-one-targeted-race post, and his David-Frum-made-me-look-stupid-with-unfair-debate-tricks, come-tell-me-how-great-I-was post. That man's a national treasure.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the Times Square unexplosion and the rightwing attempt to make something of it. Though I recently left New York after 30+ years' tenure, I remain loyal to and protective of it, and when I see these douchebags trying to play again their old "Have You Forgotten" bullshit -- in the absence of an actual explosion, for which they (nonetheless and of course) blame Obama -- I get a great deal pissed off. I know these people. They despise New York. And they only pretend to care about it when they smell political gain.

Ray Kelly has revealed the primary suspect is a white man and Bloomberg says there's no evidence that it was the work of Al Qaeda, but that doesn't stop these jerks from declaring Obama sharia etc. They begin to remind me of the guy Bukowski was sticking mail with in Post Office who roused his ire one day with his incessant, muttered insults on the job. Finally Bukowski jumped back and threatened the guy to a fight, and found the guy hadn't stopped muttering insults -- he was totally oblivious to anything Bukowski or anyone else said or did.

TALK TO THE INVISIBLE HAND. Joshua Green is pleased that new government regs made it easier for him to figure out the details of home loans offers, which in his previous experience had been difficult to parse ("I remember poring over lenders' estimates for hours trying to spot the junk fees and figure out which deal was best"). He thinks that's a good use of the power of government. At Ace of Spades, DrewM disagrees:

Look, congrats on the new home and all but the government doesn't exist to make it easier for people to understand what they are getting themselves in to when they are buying a house.

In a way this is a refreshing change from the usual "Blargh-har, gummint cain't do nuthin' right, Obamacare will kill you!" argument we get from rightbloggers. And it cleaves to the pure, doctrinaire libertarian argument that if you like any government services beyond national defense and the post office -- oops, forgot, the post office has been removed from the "acceptable" list -- you are a sheeple-looter.

The Obama fascist-socialist agenda is just kicking off and conclusive proof that it is destroying America has yet to emerge. So most of that kind of talk -- I was going to make a link here, but you can just go to Hit & Run and look around -- is speculative. You just know these government schemes will all end in Hitler! It just stands to Reagan!

And if even one of them seems to produce a good effect, there must be some mistake. DrewM advances the Randian argument that helping is futile ("I don't want to rain of Green's parade but being relived of individual adult responsibilities is not a triumph"). And he insists that if the Market did not provide this kind of service, it must not be worth having:

I bet there are banks or lenders out there that would provide this kind of service if requested or because that kind of customer service is a selling point for them. Why should the government take away their competitive advantage by mandating everyone provide the same information? How do we know the bureaucrats mandated the right information be shared? There's no feedback like in a market place, simply commands.

Americans' awareness of their own history has degenerated to the point where many citizens believe the American Revolution was a Tea Party at which the colonists battled socialism, and that the ensuing 200+ years have been a protracted struggle against socialism in its many guises (Indians, Spain, Hitler, Obama).

If they've heard of the FDA, they probably disapprove of it, and believe that without it the Market would have eventually gotten around to limiting the amount of rat shit they get in their canned food, and it would be much better than what we have now because it'd be from the Market. And the same goes for integration, voting rights, clean air and water, etc.

Like a lot of people, I could easily say "I'm libertarian when it comes to..." and then rattle off a bunch of stuff like gun rights, smoking bans, etc. I don't, though -- not because I'm ashamed of my positions, but because I'm ashamed to be associated in any way with libertarians.

THE WRONG CROWD. There was a big demo against Wall Street yesterday in New York. Needless to say, it was not run by Tea Party patriots. The unions called it, and cops say 6,000 showed. (I don't doubt they had that many at the very least -- I've seen them at work before and they can really get the peops out. AFL-CIO claims 31,000.)

I also see that, in a hilarious reversal, the Perfesser and other Tea Party fans are already trying to talk down this large, orderly, and successful protest as an affront to democracy. From his flustered tone, it appears even Perfesser Reynolds' insulated consciousness may have at least faintly sensed the irony in this.

Reynolds loves to gas about how Tea Party protesters are better than lefty protesters because, being rightwing, they have "real jobs"; how frustrating it must be for him to not be able to use it against the union guys, most of whom probably expend more sweat in an average workday than the Perfesser emits in a year of saunas at his health club.

The Perfesser also likes to brag about the few black folks who show up at the TPs. But it looks like this New York union event had, as these things usually do, a much healthier minority turnout than the Tea People ever get. Maybe in the Perfesser's view this is too much of a good thing, so to speak.

So his recourse is to call the protesters "thugs" "goons" because they peaceably confronted some bankers. Way to plump your populist cred, Perfesser! Maybe if a few more demos like this one get attention from the press, he'll go back to his traditional attitude toward protest.

THESE KIDS TODAY. Gunaxin is among my favored junk sites, but I was stunned to see them do Family Circus with naughty captions without even mentioning the Dysfunctional Family Circus. Even worse, at this writing their commenters reveal no awareness of DFC, either.

It makes me wonder: Do they know about Suck.com? Crayon? Ultimate Band List? Has the internet been around long enough that we have to teach youngsters about its early history?

Fuck -- I'd better find some agreeable college, design my own Continuing Ed curriculum in Internet History, and get out in front of what promises to be a great educational boondoggle! I'll be running an Ivy department in no time, and then I can just collect checks and fart out posts like the Perfesser. About time I got a sinecure! I'm a known entity!

BTW did you know SpinnWebe is still online?

CONCERN TROLLS. I subscribe to the Goldberg File 'cause I just can't get enough, and today the boy genius does a major shirt-retuck of triumph over a topic of recent interest:

Well, so much for "epistemic closure." The supposed Right Wing Industrial Complex... marches and thinks in complete lockstep... Just when this argument was about to implode from its own idiocy, a Godzilla-sized foot called "immigration" came stomping down on the delicate dorm-room-philosophical Bambi. Conservatives are split on the issue... Karl Rove, alleged leader of the homunculi within the right-wing colossi, Marco Rubio, the golden boy of the tea-party movement, and Jeb Bush, heir to the Bush dynasty, are just a few of the dissenters from the right-wing mob of unindependent minds.

You'd think the coffeehouses of the Right were ablaze with impassioned discussion of this issue. Hardly. The demurrals of these two candidates for office and one Republican political operative have been extremely watery, and are obviously made not to extend debate, but to cover asses. Take Rubio's allegedly bold stand:

"From what I have read in news reports, I do have concerns about this legislation," Rubio said. "While I don't believe Arizona's policy was based on anything other than trying to get a handle on our broken borders, I think aspects of the law, especially that dealing with 'reasonable suspicion,' are going to put our law enforcement officers in an incredibly difficult position. It could also unreasonably single out people who are here legally, including many American citizens."

He has concerns! Well, that'll touch off a firestorm. More likely it'll keep the Cubans in his home state from thinking he's a total fink.

This state law gives everyone in America a chance to posture over it, and thus is is catnip to prevaricating politicians of every stripe. Rubio, Rove, and Jeb Bush can't do shit about changing it*, but if they purse their brows and talk concernedly about how they're concerned, etc., citizens might get the impression that they're actually human -- and, in the precious seconds this misapprehension lasts, consider voting for them.

National Review's Jim Geraghty took a tack similar to Goldberg's earlier this week, when he suggested that Republicans' "Kindler, Gentler Arguments Against Arizona’s New Law" were actually more useful that those of Democrats because they were nicer ("there’s no accusations of hateful motives, no demonization of the proponents..."). Geraghty is of course in favor of the law -- but, with becoming tact, he acts like he's sorry about it ("I wish the Arizona immigration law wasn’t necessary"). That way you know he's considered every side of the issue before coming down on the one nobody ever doubted that he would take.

I'll be happier to accept their claims of open-mindedness when they they stop driving actual free-thinkers out of their party. As for the claim that Democrats should argue their points as National Review writers prescribe, I think there are fewer of them willing to consider the friendly advice of their mortal enemies than once there were. But maybe Joe Lieberman's still listening!

*UPDATE: Oh shoot, I forgot to add this: It's like Megan McArdle voting for Obama.

YOU'RE JUST LIKE ME, AND I MEAN IT IN A BAD WAY. Linked by Rod Dreher (always a bad sign), Kenneth L. Woodward at Commonweal tells us how the New York Times is just like a religion. It's one of those "I know you are but what am I" Liberal Fascism arguments -- oh yeah, you say the Church is always telling people what to do, but the "the Times exercises a powerful magisterium or teaching authority through its editorial board," ha ha.

The big differences Woodward doesn't mention are 1.) The Times can't damn its readers to an eternity in Hell, and 2.) if the Times had anything like the Church's record in protecting and enabling child molesters, it would have been closed down by the authorities years ago.

This sort of thing reminds me of the crappy "we're not so different, you and I" arguments given by fictional criminals like The Joker. No, asshole, we're not the same; you're a fucking supervillain, and none of your high-school Nietzsche bullshit changes it.