…this Reason article (”Praise Our Nobel Laureate, You Churlish Anti-American:” H/T: Instapundit) is still worth linking to, for two reasons. The first is this paragraph:

[NPR correspondent Don] Gonyea argues that because he is receiving the award for not being George W. Bush, and for changing American foreign policy by continuing super peaceful Predator drone attacks on the Taliban and pouring more troops into Afghanistan, this might “remind swing voters” that “he has done a lot for the United States around the world.” Well. Having Norwegian lefties reminding fence-sitting Americans that Obama makes Europeans swoon will probably be as effective as encouraging readers of The Guardian to write condescending letters to voters in Ohio, informing them that most people who pay a television license and subscribe to The New Statesman think George W. Bush is a mentally retarded Nazi.

The second reason is for revisiting the Guardian’s infamous Operation Clark County - which was easily one of the top five Left own-goals of the 2004 election. For those who weren’t paying attention then: the paper tried to micro-target a swing district in Ohio by having their readers send pro-Kerry letters to random voters in that county.  And how did that go?

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(Via Instapundit) One minor problem with it as a title, though.  When it came to the “Red Scare” (which is what Jesse Walker is referencing in his article at Reason Hit & Run), hysteria aside there actually was an organized Soviet Communist effort to destabilize the West.  I know that Jesse knows this, but it needs to be addressed, given that the point of his article is that there isn’t actually anything similar behind the Holocaust Museum attack.  But that’s just a quibble:

Why did the DHS report come under such fire? It wasn’t because far-right cranks are incapable of committing crimes. It’s because the paper blew the threat of right-wing terror out of proportion, just as the Clinton administration did in the ’90s; because it treated “extremism” itself as a potential threat, while offering a definition of extremist so broad it seemed it include anyone who opposed abortion or immigration or excessive federal power; and because it fretted about the danger of “the return of military veterans facing significant challenges reintegrating into their communities.” (Note that neither the killing in Kansas last month nor the shooting in Washington yesterday was committed by an Iraq or Afghanistan vet.) The effect isn’t to make right-wing terror attacks less likely. It’s to make it easier to smear nonviolent, noncriminal figures on the right, just as the most substantial effect of a red scare was to make it easier to smear nonviolent, noncriminal figures on the left. The fact that communist spies really existed didn’t justify Joseph McCarthy’s antics, and the fact that armed extremists really exist doesn’t justify the Department of Homeland Security’s report.

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