Two quotes from the New York Times Magazine article about Republican John Thune's Senate race against Tom Daschle:

In the 2002 fight, Thune told me, Daschle was "like the guy behind the curtain. Now it's like we have peeled the curtain back, and we can actually put some lead on the target."

"Daschle is seen as the Darth Vader of American politics by conservatives," said Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth, an anti-tax group that has been running attack ads in South Dakota since last summer.... "If you want to defeat a movement," Moore explained, "you try to defeat the head of the movement. It's like shooting at the king."

Charming.

You know, in the weeks to come, conservatives will manufacture quite a bit of outrage at Nicholson Baker's novella Checkpoint, in which the subject of killing the president is discussed (ineffectually) for pages and pages by entirely fictional characters. The words I quote above aren't from fictional characters -- Thune and Moore are real people. Yes, I know -- the words are metaphorical. So how about just a bit of outrage that they're directed at a man who's already been the target of a deadly anthrax attack?