"We are something of a toothless tiger, especially when it comes to dealing with a dealer," said a ranking bureau official. Referring to the National Rifle Association, the official said, "That's the way Congress and the N.R.A. have wanted it."

The bureau's powers were limited by a 1986 law, the Gun Owners' Protection Act, passed with N.R.A. support, that reduced record-keeping violations to a misdemeanor from a felony. As a result, federal prosecutors often show little interest in going after rogue gun dealers.

Moreover, the bureau is not permitted to suspend or fine a problem dealer. Instead, it must initiate a complex regulatory process to revoke the dealer's license, which can take years.

"The truth is," said Martha Tebbenkamp, a spokeswoman for the bureau in Seattle, "even if a dealer is indicted, he can still keep his license until he is convicted, and then he can stay in business until all his appeals are exhausted."

That's from an article in yesterday's New York Times about Bull's Eye Shooter Supply, the scofflaw gun shop from which the rifle used in the Beltway sniper shooting spree was either illegally purchased or stolen (with no apparent attempt by the shop to document the loss as the law requires).

If you've supported the ongoing efforts to undermine the enforcement of our gun laws, you have the blood of the Beltway snipers' victims on your hands. It's as simple as that.

The New York Times may be unable to bring itself to report Trent Lott's remarks at the birthday celebration for Strom Thurmond, and The Washington Post may be similarly derelict, but once upon a time these papers actually deigned to tell their readers that Lott had ties to the racist Council of Conservative Citizens:

Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.), who last week claimed "no firsthand knowledge" of the controversial Council of Conservative Citizens, six years ago told the group's members they "stand for the right principles and the right philosophy."...

--Thomas B. Edsall, "Lott Renounces White 'Racialist' Group He Praised in 1992," Washington Post, December 16, 1998

If, as Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott has insisted for a month, he has "no first-hand knowledge" of the views of the Council of Conservative Citizens, which calls itself pro-white, it comes as news to a lot of people back home, including his Uncle Arnie.

"Trent is an honorary member," said Arnie Watson, a former state senator, tax assessor and currently a member of the council's executive board.

"He's spoken at meetings," added Watson....

--John Kifner, "Lott, and Shadow of a Pro-White Group," New York Times, January 14, 1999

Interestingly, this was right after a midterm election in which Democrats, expected to suffer big losses after the release of the Starr Report, gained seats in Congress. So the courtier press must have felt it was acceptable to scrutinize Republican misdeeds.

Now, of course, we've just finished a midterm election widely interpreted as an ass-kicking by the GOP. So the courtier press will not besmirch the reputation of the Republican leader of the Senate.

Anyone have a better explanation?

(By the way, Lott has now apologized, sort of.)

Idiots like Ann Coulter and Ron Rosenbaum insist that no one on the left will denounce the intolerance of Islamic religious extremists. Maybe they should try actually reading Katha Pollitt instead of smugly and ignorantly denouncing her as That Awful Woman Who Hates The Flag. Here’s the opening of her current column in The Nation:

The war between religious fanaticism and secular modernity is fought over women's bodies. Feminists have been saying this for years, not that anyone important was listening, but the Miss World riots in Kaduna, Nigeria, should make it obvious even to the dead white males at the Washington Post. Muslims, already on edge due to the presence in their country of so many lovelies on display, were apparently driven out of their minds by journalist Isioma Daniel's suggestion in the Lagos-based newspaper ThisDay that Mohammed "would probably have chosen a wife among them." By the time the smoke cleared and the bloody knives were put away, the local offices of the paper had been destroyed; more than 200 people, mostly Christian, had been murdered; hundreds more had been injured; and at least 4,500 left homeless. Nothing for the contestants to worry about, though: According to President Olusegun Obasanjo, "It could happen any time irresponsible journalism is committed against Islam." When in doubt, blame free speech.

Pollitt is an old-school secular humanist who regularly denounces better-dead-than-secular religious extremists of all faiths. She knows that the sacred texts of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all subject women to subordinate status -- and she also knows that interpretations of these texts can change to accommodate societal liberalization, the sort of evolution she’d like to see more of in Islam.

Coulter would turn up her nose at Pollitt’s feminism -- she's a feminist only when feminism gives her a means to bash a Democrat or justify a GOP war. Rosenbaum, on the other hand, who is, whether likes to think so or not, a left/liberal on feminist issues, would find himself in agreement with Pollitt, I think -- if he chose to read her. Too bad he never will.

"So here's a simple test for Republicans and conservative pundits. Will they call Lott on this excrescence? Or are they exactly what some on the Left accuse them of?"

Andrew Sullivan wrote that early this morning.

Right now, Matt Drudge is providing his answer, with two headlines:

Jesse Jackson calls for Lott's resignation in wake of remarks on Thurmond...

SHARPTON JUMPS IN...

To Drudge's core audience, Jackson and Sharpton are race-baiting buffoons, not to be taken seriously, ever. Drudge is telling his audience that this is a big joke.

If this is genuinely a surprise to Sullivan, he's even more naive than I thought he was.

Gratifyingly, an editorial in today's New York Times slams the wingnut Republican back-benchers who are blocking efforts to secure and destroy chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons in the former Soviet bloc.

Max Cleland was equated with Saddam and Osama, but these genuine menaces to civilization haven't been. There's no justice.

The feds searched Bull's Eye Shooter Supply in Tacoma, Washington, on Wednesday, as well as the home of its owner, Brian Borgelt. Bull's Eye once owned a Bushmaster rifle used in the recent Beltway sniper shootings, and Lee Malvo, the seventeen-year-old charged with the killings along with John Muhammad, had been seen in the shop by two employees.

Back in October, The Seattle Times reported that Borgelt told a newspaper that Muhammad had bought a Bushmaster from him, then told investigators that he thought the rifle was stolen. It would have been illegal for Borgelt's shop to sell a gun to Muhammad, who had an order of protection filed against him, or to Malvo, a minor; if the gun was stolen, a failure to report it missing within forty-eight hours would also have been a violation of the law.

But why should Brian Borgelt have given a damn about the law?

The Seattle Times reported on Saturday that since 1995 Bull's Eye has failed "three federal inspections in which investigators couldn't find scores of guns as well as forms they need to track criminals" -- but was let off with a warning each time by the ATF.

But there's nothing surprising to me in all this. Back on July 22, 1999, The New York Times published an article titled "Limits on Power and Zeal Hamper Firearms Agency." I read it then and it's made me furious ever since:

The bureau [ATF], an arm of the Treasury Department, was created with limited power, has existed under constant threat of attack by the National Rifle Association, has been kept short-staffed and has to enforce laws often written to make prosecutions difficult.

An examination of the bureau also shows a major distinction in its approach to the job. Historically, it has arrested a sizable number of criminals who use guns in robberies or drug sales, particularly career criminals with three or more convictions. These are considered safe cases that do not arouse N.R.A. opposition.

Until recently, the bureau has been less aggressive in what is now being recognized as a critical part of gun control: going after illegal gun traffickers and the small number of corrupt dealers, among the 104,855 federally licensed dealers, who supply guns to criminals and juveniles.

While half of all crime guns traced by the A.T.F. in the past two years were linked to just 389 dealers, only 42 dealers were recommended for prosecution last year, and only 19 had their licenses revoked.

''There is not a whole lot of vigor in gun enforcement,'' said Julius Wachtel, who retired last year after 23 years as a firearms agent. When it comes to investigating dealers, traffickers or gun shows, he said, the agents have a saying: ''No cases, no waves. Little cases, little waves. Big cases, big waves. All those years of being hammered by Congress have had a chilling effect.''

So when investigators found weapons missing and unaccounted for, and transaction files gone or stuffed behind the cash register, why did Borgelt have to worry?

And there's more. Court records made public Friday reveal, according to The Seattle Times, "that Bull's Eye had one or two guns stolen or routinely disappear from its tables at weekend gun shows it attended."

Oh, and Borgelt lives in a $400,000 house, but hasn't filed personal income tax returns for the past eight years.

The story of Bull's Eye should be on the front page of every newspaper in America. And the people who insist that we merely need to enforce our existing gun laws while undermining the very people who enforce those laws should hang their heads in shame.

A man in Portland, Oregon, reportedly said in a bar that "God might speak to the world through a burning Bush,'' and talked about someone possibly pouring a flammable liquid on the president and lighting it. That kind of idle chatter got the poor bastard thirty-seven months in prison.

Thirty-seven months?

In one 24-hour period we learned that Trent Lott (a) opposes -- and is blocking -- the 9/11 survivors' choice of Warren Rudman as a member of the committee that will investigate the terrorist attacks and (b) still thinks Strom Thurmond's explicitly segregationist Dixiecrat bid for the presidency in 1948 was a good idea ("I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had of followed our lead we wouldn't of had all these problems over all these years, either") (scroll down). And is this a scandal? No. John Kerry's haircut -- that's a scandal.

Is Ann Coulter afraid of losing her precious law license, and the bragging rights it affords her in the pundit wars (hey she’s not a dumb guttermouth, she’s an attorney!)? After reading her third recent column on the Central Park jogger case (the first two are here and here), I can’t help wondering.

She doesn’t want the verdicts in the case overturned. Her beef, it seems, is with Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau, who yesterday asked a judge to overturn all of them. Yet she never criticizes Morgenthau -- she’d rather blame the effort to overturn the verdicts on liberals, or on The New York Times, or on the Innocence Project (which seems to have little or nothing to do with the case). Would aiming one of her typical ad hominem verbal muggings at a fellow lawyer, particularly an esteemed district attorney, violate legal ethics? I’m not a lawyer -- I don’t really know. Nevertheless, I’m sure she believes she has Right and Truth on her side, and if so, shouldn’t she have the guts to criticize the person actually responsible for what she sees as an injustice, consequences be damned?

The full text of Morgenthau’s filing is available as a PDF file here. I wish every Coulter fan would read it.

Here’s Coulter, in her first column on the subject:

…the new DNA tests are also consistent with the version of events presented in court, subjected to attack by defense counsel, and believed unanimously by two multiracial juries…. No new evidence contradicts the five guilty verdicts.

Here’s Coulter, in her second column on the subject:

In the words of the criminal defense bar's sock puppet at the New York Times, Reyes had committed a "nearly identical crime" nearby days earlier. "Nearly identical" evidently refers to the fact that both crimes were: (1) rapes, (2) in a park. That's where the similarity ends.

Here’s Morgenthau:

A self-confessed and convicted serial rapist -- who habitually stalked white women in their 20's; who attacked them, beat them, and raped them; who always robbed his victims, and frequently stole Walkmans; who tied one of his victims in a fashion much like the Central Park jogger; who lived on 102nd Street; who beat and raped a woman in Central Park two days before the attack on the transverse; whose DNA was the only DNA recovered inside and alongside the victim; whose narrative of events is corroborated in a number of significant ways; who had no connection to the defendants or their cohorts; and who committed all his sex crimes alone -- has come forward to say that he alone stalked, attacked, beat, raped, and robbed a white woman in her 20's, who was set upon on the 102nd Street transverse, was missing her Walkman, and was left tied in a way that has never before been explained. Had this evidence been available, the defendants' attorneys would have had an arguably compelling alternative to the People's theory of the case.

Read the filing if you don’t believe that Morgenthau backs this up, and thus makes an extraordinarily strong case for vacating at least the convictions relating to the jogger.

POSTSCRIPT: In the new column, Coulter calls the five convicted men "animals" twice, "savages" once, and "beasts" once. Here’s her racism scorecard for the three columns:

"savages": five occurrences

"animals" five occurrences

"beasts": two occurrences (once "feral beasts")

"primitives": one occurrence

Many, many thanks (in some cases quite belated) to Anti-Coulter, Dr. Limerick, Drunken Ravings, Eschaton, mfinley.com and Michael Finley’s Future Shoes, pixelforge, P.L.A., Plucky Punk, reading & writing, TBOGG (again) and Two Tears in a Bucket for links and kind e-mails.

"I am extremely concerned about the consequences of this intervention on the Iraqi people. I am particularly concerned that weapons of mass destruction could be used again by the Iraqi regime against the people if there should be any opposition or uprising.

"The Iraqi people could pay the price of this war, as they have paid the price of sanctions and all the previous wars."

Uh-oh -- another loathsome sixties-throwback apologist for evildoers? Nope. The speaker is Hussain al-Shahristani, a onetime nuclear scientist who refused to work on Saddam’s weapons program and spent eleven years in prison being tortured by the Iraqi regime. Al-Shahristani was chosen by the British government to present its recent report on the horrors of Saddam’s Iraq, but, according to yesterday’s Chicago Sun-Times, he used the occasion to make two obvious points: (1) yes, Saddam is one vicious S.O.B., but (2) war is not a tidy clinical process of replacing pure evil with pure good -- especially when the self-proclaimed good guys have a history of enabling the evildoers:

"When I was in jail, I was held with British-made handcuffs. In the cells next door, I could hear the screams of people who were having holes drilled into their bones. Those drills were made in Britain."

It would be nice if some TV booker would arrange a face-to-face between al-Shahristani and Ron Rosenbaum, or Andrew Sullivan, or David Horowitz. It would be doubly nice if the interviewer had the cojones to ask Ron or Andy or Davey whether he could look al-Shahristani in the eye and call him a "fifth columnist."

After reading Matt Drudge’s story about the cost of Senator John Kerry’s haircuts, I began to wonder about the spending habits of the man Kerry wants to run against in 2004, George W. Bush. Not surprisingly, Bush has announced that he gets his hair trimmed at (relatively) earthbound prices. Unlike Bush, of course, Kerry has truly terrific hair -- you can understand that he might want to treat it well. What does Bush possess that he might want to treat the same way?

Cowboy boots, perhaps?

(UPDATE: Sorry -- what follows is a misreading of the article; it was actually Bush's father who was the boot buyer. To some extent, of course, the point still stands.)

I did some Web searches and found a 1999 Las Vegas Review-Journal story in which Bush was reported (scroll down) to have once purchased boots from Loveless, a bootmaker based in Oklahoma City.

I wondered what those Loveless boots could have cost Bush. A few clicks brought me to this price list at lovelessboots.com.

The cheapest boots listed are $550 -- for that price, you can get them in Mulehide, Waterbuffalo, African Wildebeast, Frenchcalf, Camel, or Spanish Bullhide. Armadillo boots are $850; Anteater boots are $1,300. For $3,550, you can get boots made of African Hornback Crocodile (tops and bottoms).

I guess there’s been some inflation in the years since Bush bought his Loveless boots, but even so, it’s hard to see how economical a Loveless purchase could have been.

Coincidentally, I’ve been thinking about replacing some boots of my own -- hiking boots. The boots I’m looking at cost a lot less than Loveless boots. The prices I’m looking at range from $39.99 to $165.

Yes, Bush is a Texan who owns a ranch. However, in his real job he works at a desk -- just like me.

Do you think anyone makes hiking boots in African Hornback Crocodile?

It says here that the top-rated show on the Fox News Channel, Bill O’Reilly’s O’Reilly Factor, has an average viewership of 2.65 million people; Hannity & Colmes draws 1.65 million. Alex S. Jones in The New York Times says these are "huge" numbers. These are not huge numbers. These are PAX network numbers. Oh, OK -- O’Reilly does beat everything in the PAX primetime lineup handily. But Hannity does only slightly better than PAX’s top ratings-getter, Doc, starring former country music flash-in-the-pan Billy Ray Cyrus and his mullet; the numbers are here. (Please note that a show with a genuinely "huge" audience -- Will & Grace, say -- draws an audience ten times as large as Hannity’s.)

This is not to say that Fox’s small niche market doesn’t matter. It matters a lot -- for the simple reason that the voting population of this country, particularly in non-presidential elections, is itself a small niche market. Not a lot of us vote, and not a lot of us think about politics much, and right now a statistically significant percentage of the people who do vote and think about politics a lot are people who think Hillary Clinton is more evil than Saddam Hussein or Adolf Eichmann.

The commentators currently trying to figure out why Fox is beating CNN in the ratings don’t really understand what’s going on -- Jones, in the Times, seems out-and-out flummoxed; Neil Swidey, writing a Bill O’Reilly profile/love letter in The Boston Globe, thinks O’Reilly’s appeal is that he’s just so, well ... compelling; even the best of the think pieces on Fox to appear in the last couple of days, from Michael Wolff in New York magazine, suggests that Fox’s strength is simply an appealing us-versus-them pugnaciousness rather than a specific political message that seems profound and inspirational to people who think it’s a knee-slapper to spell the former vice president’s name "Algore."

Two years ago, at a time when hanging chads were being examined in Florida, Robert Wright wrote a column in Slate called "Mad as Hell." Wright never mentioned Fox -- few pundits did in 2000 -- but, without knowing it, he explained the secret of Fox’s appeal, a secret Jones, Swidey, and Wolff are still groping for:

Conservatives are an angrier group than liberals. It's conservatives, after all, who have Rush Limbaugh. Liberals sometimes mourn the absence of a left-wing Limbaugh, as if this void signified a spiritual energy crisis. I personally think it's a sign of mental health..... [T]he fact is that it is Republicans, not Democrats, who depend on a sizeable bloc of voters whose defining characteristic is heated intolerance of people different from themselves (e.g., homosexuals).

Even though I believe in anger a bit more than Wright does, I think he basically nails it.

In her vile October 17 column on the Central Park jogger case, Ann Coulter suggested that New York Times reporters who accurately noted a DNA match between semen found in the victim and a convicted rapist who was never charged in the attack were "looking for the next Scottsboro Boys case" -- were looking, in other words, for an "exoneration" of the five young men convicted of the attack.

What the Times is actually looking for is what everyone in New York City would like to find -- the truth, which remains elusive. A lengthy but incomplete effort at reconstructing the night in question was published in Sunday’s Times, with a follow-up today.

Coulter says liberals (among whom she includes all Times reporters) "long to claim that every criminal is innocent" -- but what the Times gives us is hardly a portrait of innocence. From Sunday’s story:

"One of the most intriguing new views of the case rises from the reconstruction of the sequence of events. By establishing that the teenagers were part of a crowd that was bothering or beating other people during the critical time of the rape, the reconstruction provides them with an alibi that is plausible, if not airtight, and certainly unsavory.

" ‘That was the issue,’ said Peter Rivera, Mr. Santana’s lawyer in 1990. ‘But we didn't say, "No, when the jogger was raped, my client was on 96th Street, mugging someone else." That would have been self-defeating.’ "

From today’s story:

"But though investigators no longer can be sure whether the youths raped the jogger, few of those reviewing the case question whether the teenagers were involved in the other crimes.

"For one thing, many of the police and prosecutors reinvestigating the crimes say, the teenagers were undoubtedly part of the pack of about 35 youths who rampaged through the park that night."

Today’s story includes several paragraphs of testimony from attack victims other than the jogger. It’s not hard to draw the conclusion that the Times reporters believe the five men convicted of the rape were indeed guilty of other violent attacks.

Ann Coulter readers who don’t read the Times know nothing of this. Keeping them ignorant is a huge part of Coulter’s job.

"I still think forced integration was a mistake. As a government action, I think it was detrimental to whites and blacks. And left alone, it'd have come along -- if you look at the football teams in North Carolina, I tell you, there's scarcely any room for a white boy on 'em!"

--Senator Jesse Helms -- still talking like this -- from an interview published in the December 2, 2002, issue of New York magazine

So I don't want to hear another damn word out of you, Sean Hannity, or you, Ann Coulter, about Robert Byrd.

So maybe Garrison Keillor went a bit over the top when he hinted in Salon that there is awkwardness in Senator-elect Norm Coleman's marriage. Keillor, of course, is writing from a liberal perspective, which means there is zero tolerance for what he did. If he'd attacked a Democrat the same way, he could have said everything he said about Coleman and a lot more, with impunity -- hell, he could have written something like this gutter-based, unsourced, sophomoric wallow in John Kerry hate, the latest Boston Herald column by talk-radio bloviator Howie Carr:

How many hours did [Kerry] have to practice his signature to get it to look just like the real JFK's? He has so much clout, the city moved a fire hydrant from in front of his wife's Beacon Hill mansion. But above all else, the man is a gigolo's gigolo. How many guys could dump a first wife from a blueblood family worth $300 million, and end up on the rebound with a second wife worth $600 million?...

``Put down that I saw him cut in line once at Legal Sea Food in Chestnut Hill,'' said another guy. ``More than once, as a matter of fact. He's a line-cutter and a name-dropper.''

...Here's another [Kerry] story .... One night, they're all getting down, and among the guests is a four-sheets-to-the-wind [Kerry]. The girl, who's up on current events, starts tearing into Kerry for his weathervane-like voting record, telling him he needs to make a ``commitment.''

``Baby,'' he finally says, swaying ever so slightly in the breeze, ``I am ready right now to make a commitment. To you.''

In those days, before he tracked down 63-year-old ketchup heiress Teresa Heinz, [Kerry] was known as a cheapskate tipper....

But the 58-year-old boytoy has changed his ways....

Anyone have a problem with this? Kristof? Rosenbaum?

NO COMMENT

"Unfortunately, many of the amendments we saw through this process had little or nothing to do with protecting our homeland," said DeLay. "...We should be pursuing a common goal, and we should only consider change that would increase the effectiveness of the new department to catch or preempt terrorists."

--Tom DeLay, quoted in the July 26 press release "Homeland Security Is Congress' Most Important Task," posted at GOPtoday.com

BOB EDWARDS: The Homeland Security bill was bogged down in partisan disputes for weeks on Capitol Hill. I spoke with Tom Ridge before the ceremony yesterday. He said he was not discouraged by the delay.

TOM RIDGE: No, actually, in the scheme of things, having been a member of the Congress of the United States, the fact that we could get both chambers to deliver an historic piece of legislation reorganizing this much of the government in less than six months I think is historic. Obviously we would have liked to have happened [sic] a little bit earlier, but in the democratic process, when the House and the Senate have to work their will and find common ground with the president, normally something this massive would have presumably taken longer. So we’re grateful that it took as little time as it did....

--interview on NPR's Morning Edition, 11/26/02


So the delays really weren’t so bad? Then why did your fellow Republicans imply that anything short of immediate acquiescence to the GOP on every provision of this bill was giving aid and comfort to bin Laden and Saddam?

Gore is toast; liberalism isn't. That's the message of the New York Times/CBS poll published in the Times today. Gore's numbers are abysmal (regular readers of The Daily Howler know why), but even Andrew Sullivan can't whinge as he usually does that the Times has mischaracterized poll respondents' opinions, which seem pretty damn unambiguous to me:

Mr. Bush remains extremely popular. Still, on a number of issues, there was evidence of public ambivalence or, in some cases, opposition to policies that the White House has signaled it will pursue once Republicans assume control in January.

...55 percent of respondents said they disapproved of the White House effort to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska, compared with 39 percent who approved. Nearly two-thirds said the federal government should do more to regulate the environmental and safety practices of business.

By a ratio of two to one, Americans said they thought that protecting the environment was more important than producing energy. By a seven-to-one ratio, respondents said that Mr. Bush believed that producing energy was more important than protecting the environment....

...Two-thirds said they would have preferred the federal surplus be used to shore up Social Security and Medicare rather than finance a tax cut. With the surplus gone, 48 percent of those polled said they did not believe it was possible to both cut taxes and reduce the federal budget deficit....

Nearly 60 percent said they believed that Mr. Bush's tax cut benefited the wealthy; just over 25 percent said it benefited the middle class. Four percent said the tax cut primarily benefited the poor. Three-quarters of respondents said that the first round of tax cuts had not made a noticeable difference in their paychecks.

I’ve been trying to get my mind around Ron Rosenbaum’s latest exercise in group libel of the Left, which appears in the November 25 New York Observer.

The meat of the column is a tedious and inconclusive comparison of the George W. Bush saga to The Godfather -- surely somewhere on the Internet there’s a "Which Corleone Brother Are You?" quiz that’s more illuminating and more entertaining. Bookending this, however, are two rants consisting of more of the self-important apostasy that made Rosenbaum’s recent "Goodbye, All That" column such a favorite of Free Republic subscribers everywhere.

Rosenbaum declares at the beginning of his essay, predictably, that Gore Vidal and obscure e-mailers who believe Bush murdered Paul Wellstone represent mainstream Left thinking. (For a rebuttal to this absurd notion, read Eric Alterman’s most recent Nation column.) Then Rosenbaum goes further: He stamps his foot, wags his finger, and says, "Why aren’t those who railed against paranoid, right-wing, murder-list Clinton-hatred standing up to this ‘cesspool’ of incoherent Left Bush hatred?" In other words, we must each denounce conspiratorial thinking by people who agree with us on certain issues or we are guilty of such conspiratorial thinking ourselves.

Conveniently, Rosenbaum never applies this theory of group responsibility for individuals’ words and deeds to his newfound friends on the Right -- he never holds conservatives responsible for failing to denounce the Clinton Death List crazies. (Did any prominent conservatives do so? If so, could Rosenbaum please supply a list?)

Then, near the end of his essay, Rosenbaum really kicks it into high gear: He essentially declares everyone on the Left unfit to speak on contemporary politics because of an inadequate Left response to the evils of communism and (so Rosenbaum claims, erroneously) theocracy. But if offering insufficient opposition to global bad actors is a moral disqualifier, why the hell are we supposed to support a war in the Middle East conducted by an administration larded with the folks who gave us arms sales to the ayatollahs’ Iran, as well as Iraqgate and large amounts of covert aid to Afghanistan’s repressive theocrats?

It gets worse. At one point, Rosenbaum seems to be channeling Laurent Murawiec, the ex-LaRouchenik who last July outlined a crusade to overthrow several Middle Eastern regimes in a now-notorious PowerPoint presentation to the Defense Policy Board. Rosenbaum writes:

Wouldn’t it be a victory for the oppressed people of Iraq, of North Korea, of Iran, if their police-state regimes were overthrown? Even by a cowboy unilateralist? Even by The Devil? Even by the nation of Disney and McDonald’s?

Those who would object to such a global series of American ass-kickings are accused by Rosenbaum of wanting to "protect and shield … odious police states and torturing theocracies." Um, no, Ron -- maybe we’re just a bit squeamish about possibly starting World War III. Maybe our fantasies just don’t happen to run to neo-imperialism.

One last detail before I drop this: About midway through his Bush/Godfather riff, Rosenbaum parenthetically works Al Gore in, suggesting that the "pusillanimous" Gore might be analogous to "the snotty WASP Senator in Godfather II." Thus we see how far gone Rosenbaum is. Isn’t Godfather II’s "snotty WASP Senator" right? Isn’t the Mafia a genuine menace? Aren’t the machinations of the Corleones in the Senate scenes of Godfather II criminal and evil? Yes, as viewers we enjoy Michael Corleone’s ruthlessness and cunning, but he’s a blight on America.

Fiction gives us permission to admire villains, but Rosenbaum is taking this license back to the real world. He despises Gore for being a plodder. He likes Bush the more he thinks he sees in Bush the thuggish Machiavellianism of the brilliant, sexy criminal boss Michael Corleone.

If that’s what floats Rosenbaum’s boat, fine. Me, I’m with Diane Keaton.