You have to love the folks at the Weekly Standard and the National Review. They are so gleefully troglodytic. You can always count on them for an explanation of why we should nuke Iraq (summary: hey, you’ve got to get those bunkers somehow), a lecture on the danger of democracy (summary: the opinion of the people changes over time, and sometimes they start to dislike things that the author of the article likes), and even the occasional whine about gays being “freakish and disgusting”, disguised as a “Yuletide olive branch” (summary: have a Merry Christmas, fags!)

However, my favorite example of mainstream rightwingers run amok is “The Case for the Empire“:

Palpatine believes that the political order must be manipulated to produce peace and stability. When he mutters, “There is no civility, there is only politics,” we see that at heart, he’s an esoteric Straussian…

…the important thing to recognize is that the Empire is not committing random acts of terror. It is engaged in a fight for the survival of its regime against a violent group of rebels who are committed to its destruction.

Aside from glossing over the destruction of the planet Alderaan (well, they were harboring rebels — probably) and an unfortunate analogy between Emperor Palpatine and the “relatively benign” Pinochet (lucky for Pinochet — when your civilian murder rate only rises into the tens-of-thousands, you get downgraded from “genocidal fascist” to “relatively benign”), it’s not a bad article. That is, “not bad” in the sense of “not bad for the traffic to your website.” It seems these days nobody is too conservative and stodgy to pick up on the time-honored Salon strategy of baiting the Slashdot and weblog geeks. Heck, this geek fell for it.

I can’t help myself, really. I know perfectly well that anyone who spends any time reading “blogs” or journals will stumble across links like the “Case for the Empire”. But herdlike, I follow the rest of the “blogging community” (whatever that is). And usually I’m a week too late, which is a mortal (or at least a venal) sin in some blogging circles.

Nevertheless, although I sometimes fall short of blogging community standards, and I occasionally read more right-wing diatribes at one sitting than is healthy, please don’t worry about my immortal soul or anything like that. I’m not turning to the dark side any time soon. After all, I use a Mac, and as the show 24 has taught us this season, the Mac users are always the good guys. So there.