Read this photo caption and tell me they aren’t.

UPDATE: Let me recommend this comment from “Wataru Tenga in Tokyo”:

I agree with those who have pointed out that the real weirdness is the New York Times stooping to the level of this drivel. Unfortunately, it happens all the time with regard to the Japanese. There are certain kinds of articles that appear with regularity about how inscrutable the Japanese are, but almost always reporting things that I, as a long-time resident of Tokyo, have never even encountered. Sure, you can find anything in this city if you dig down deep enough. I’ll bet I could find weird people in New York, too.

Sounds about right.

I believe I earned my reputation as a “reasonable liberal” defending Bill Bennett against some bogus charges of racism, but Dave Weigel reporting from the values voter summit, adequately demonstrates that Bennett definitely is a buffoon:

8:53: “We were at war with, let us say it, Islamic fascism.” He’s brave enough to say things the president says!

8:54: Bennett gives praise to our modern hero: “Not Leonidas of the 300 Spartans, but Petraeus of the 300 million Americans. Let us praise Him, Point him out to your children and say ‘There goes a nobel man.’ Perhaps even a recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. One advantage of giving David Petraeus the Nobel Peace Prize is that he has actually brought peace. And we honor peacemakers.

Let us praise him?

Daniel Benjamin tries to reassure me that the Bush administration won’t have the CIA send me off to Syria to be tortured, naming this myth number five about rendition:

5. Pretty much anyone — including U.S. citizens and green card holders — can be rendered these days.

Not so, although the movie “Rendition” — in which Witherspoon’s Egyptian-born husband gets the black-hood treatment and is yanked from a U.S. airport and taken to a North African chamber of horrors — is bound to spread this myth. A “U.S. person” (citizen or legal resident) has constitutional protections against being removed from the country through rendition, and there have been no incidents to suggest the contrary. In fairness, though, the ghastly case of Maher Arar — a Syrian-born Canadian citizen who convincingly says he was detained at New York’s JFK Airport, handed off to Syria and tortured — is way too close for comfort.

Not only is the Maher Arar case too close for comfort, but I don’t understand, in practice, what my remedy is. If, say, my little brother Nick got nabbed and sent to Syria to be tortured, he’d hardly be in a position to file suit — he be being held secretly in a Syrian prison. My dad or I might notice he’s gone missing and maybe Spencer could even rake some muck and figure out that he’d been sent by the CIA to Syria to be tortured and we could sue, thus availing ourselves of the “constitutional protections” to which Benjamin refers. But what if the administration invokes the state secrets privilege as they did in the Arar case? Then where are we.

Alternatively, consider FISA, which granted “U.S. persons” certain protections against electronic surveillance. Well, the administration just broke that law and when they got caught, congress seems inclined to respond with a combination of changing the law so they can do what they want in the future, and granting retroactive immunity to lawbreakers. Under the circumstances, I may have protections but they seem pretty worthless.