“But [Lou Dobbs’] relentless populist posing and anti-free market diatribes quite literally scare me.”

Come now, Jonah, do they truly, “literally,” scare you? Why, what do you think they will do to you? The Republican Party was anti-free-market for the first several decades of its existence, and things went along pretty well. If you’re genuinely scared of Lou and his legions, get yourself some guns. One of the great things about America is that you can.

So far as being scared of things is concerned, I try to emulate the example of Burt Reynolds in W.W. and the Dixie Dance Kings: “Only two things ah’m scared of, boss–women, and the po-lice.”

I’m fine with populism. (I think we’ve been here before, in re Bill O’Reilly.) I don’t mean I’d necessarily vote for a populist, though I might. (According to Jeff Hart, I did, when I voted for W.) It’s entertaining, though, and tells us things that the puffed-up, boring, deep-browed commentators in the broadsheet newspapers don’t tell us for fear we’d go out and break somebody’s windows–knowing, as they do, in their state of elevated enlightenment, that the great American public is a seething, unwashed mob of “easily commanded” yahoos.

I liked Farah’s piece, too. Good eye-gouging stuff. What do you want–for all our public discourse to be conducted at the level of a graduate poli-sci seminar? We’d all die of boredom.