It seems that when Tom Tancredo got asked about the fact that the State Department called his plan to bomb Mecca and Medina to deter terrorism “reprehensable” and “absolutely crazy” he came up with this reply:

“Yes,” Tancredo answered. “The State Department — boy, when they start complaining about things I say, I feel a lot better about the things I say, I’ll tell you right now.”

It’s striking to recall how recently it was that this sort of “if the knowledgeable professionals at the State Department think it’s a bad idea, it must be the right thing to do” mentality was conventional wisdom among conservatives and liberal hawks — “Arabists” was a term of derision to indicate people without the vision and idealism necessary to give us a horrifying bloodbath in Iraq and call it democracy.

While I’ve been busy conventioneering, it appears that the House of Representatives passed a really unfortunate surveillance bill. Spencer Ackerman reports on the White House’s direct interventions to thwart a compromise and here’s Marty Lederman on the bill itself.

Anyways, the Democratic presidential candidates all seem opposed to this, but I’d put the odds of any of them actually taking action to reduce their own powers once in office at approximately zero percent. Then, perhaps, at some point years from now, some story will break about a truly abusive use of these surveillance authorities (just look at what Elliot Spitzer did with the State Police and imagine what uses an oversight-free mass wiretapping scheme could be put to) and there’ll be some kind of rollback.

Via Isaac Chotiner, Matt Continetti busts out what’s rapidly becoming my least-favorite argumentative tactic. He says that in response to the Pollack/O’Hanlon op-ed, “Antiwar Democrats immediately started dancing the Iraq shuffle, in which you ignore your opponent’s arguments, shift the terms of the debate, and attack his motivation and character.” He then supports that contention by . . . ignoring all the counterarguments that have been offered.

It’s a big, bad internet out there and it’ll always be possible to find all kinds of responses to any widely discussed event. And, yes, if you deliberately ignore the more substantive responses in favor of purely focusing on the derision — derision that will often be motivated by the fact that substantive responses are already widely circulating — you can “prove” that nobody’s grappling with the arguments easily.