Sauce for the gander

How can a man who swoons over Ronald Reagan on a regular basis (and twice in this column he sets Ronnie as the standard) write this?

[Obama] was the newcomer and the stranger, he rose above the crowd on pure special effects: dazzling rhetoric, natural charisma and a magic carpet ride of transcendence and hope.

It worked for two reasons: Democrats believe that nonsense, and he was new.

Charles Krauthammer, like many conservatives, lacks that essential germ of morality that applies the same set of rules to himself that he wants to apply to others. This lack is why the morality of these particular conservatives, such as it is, is a pastiche of taboos that must be received from authority rather than reasoned about. It's also why they don't believe in the concept of law as binding even the king.

Approved messages

Tom Bevan "shake[s his] head when [he sees] people driving around my neighborhood with their faded Kerry-Edwards bumper stickers on." Huh? That's what's amazing?

It's the Duhbya stickers that amaze me. There goes someone with the courage of his convictions, I think. An idiot, but he's not backing down, so he has a real kinship with Duhbya.

Bevan is weighing in on South Carolina's 'I Believe' vanity plate. Of course, his source is an op-ed that elides the key fact that other religions can't get a plate with words on it and so are discriminated against.

Again, this is really simple: Christians can have their vanity plate if the law permits everyone else to have a vanity plate under exactly the same rules. Oh, and the rules can't be contrived to exclude everyone else. Ixnay on saying that whatever worldview is the majority (as if we didn't know) can have its plate.