I'm bored by this crap. So Horowitz et al. [archive.org] are idiots, and Volokh is bright—and that's faint praise—but anti-intellectual. I don't take Volokh seriously and never have but many people try to. I don't take them seriously either.

Tortured logic: The recent hubbub rests on the perceived difference between our free society and its client states. Liberals defend this country without considering the responsibility of the master for the behavior of his servants. I've never gotten the sense that DeLong understands the cruelty of the neoliberal policies he espouses and defends. If he were willing to sound like a realist I wouldn't mind half as much. I'll defend with reservations the nationalism of the weak, but what's the moral and intellectual principle behind defending the United States, or any other powerful country? I have more patience with the fact of nationalism than with its intellectual defense, as I'm more forbearing of the faithful than of priests.

My mother told me one of the reasons she divorced her first husband was that he had no sense of the tragedy of life. A few years later he was working for the Johnson Administration, and my brother and sister were getting invitations to fly down to the ranch on Air Force 2. Did their father learn anything from the dying king?

I don't know.
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From the journal of political literalism. "Interesting stuff"?  [archive.org] An absurd reaction to the obvious.