I should've known better

So I was going to take the day off, really, I was. Then, like an idiot, I read the Washington Post...

First off, Dan Balz ignores policy in favor of trying to figure out whether John Edwards is a breezer, a mudder, or a rabbit. He does pause long enough from the horse-race handicapping, though, for this rather startling reflection:

Edwards has offended many Democrats with his candidacy. They question his authenticity and see his shift from optimism to anger as the sign of an opportunistic politician.

Yes, because only an opportunistic politician could possibly have shifted from optimism to anger during the Bush years.

Elsewhere in this future fish-wrap, Michael Kinsley tries to play up the virtues of Ron Paul's libertarianism, coming to the heavily-waterboarded conclusion that libertarians are good because they force us to reexamine our own beliefs. Maybe, but only in the same way that telling a paranoid schizophrenic that Disney does not, in fact, implant chips into people's brains makes one grateful for one's own sanity. Of course, there's no mention of Paul's decidedly un-libertarian racism, homophobia, and misogyny, because polite people do not mention such things in the pages of the Post...

But they do talk about religion in politics, as in Paul Marshall's li'l number on how we actually need more religion in the public discourse. To be fair, he does say that said religious debate should be serious and well thought out, but now that I'm done being fair, the central support for this piece of codswallop is as good an example of the post hoc logical fallacy as I've ever seen.

Apparently, Marshall read a study (Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!) that advances the theory that countries with limited religious freedom are also economically worse off. Therefore, the logic runs, religious freedom must be tied to economic prosperity.

While this might be good news to Joyce Meyer and Creflo Dollar, it can pretty safely be counterargued that in some of the countries listed, and let's just randomly pluck North Korea and Burma as examples, the problem is not a lack of religious freedom so much as the presence of leaders with an iron grip on power who do not grasp basic economics (or who simply don't care).

And what of Saudi Arabia, arguably the most religiously repressive regime on earth? Marshall thoughtfully provides an addendum to his no-religious-freedom-equals-no-money formulation: "unless they have oil."

Someone, please, for the love of God, remind me to never read the Post on a Saturday again...