Somebody IM Kathryn Lopez!

On the advice of my physician, I do my best not to read the National Review, but a bit of it snuck up on me yesterday in the form of a Kathryn Lopez column reprinted in the Palookaville Evening Bladder (I can’t seem to find it online). She was going all damp and slurpy over Tom McClintock, the heir apparent to the Congressional seat of John Doolittle who is leaving under a—well, not such a cloud as a giant stink bomb of corruption and cronyism. McClintock, she suavely suggests, will be different. “Too good to be true?” she asks. “I don’t blame you for being skeptical.” And then this amazing sentence:

But as a sometimes DC-er who still gets a thrill stepping off Amtrak and seeing the Capitol building, I’m buying.

Whoa there, luvie. Amtrak? Hasn’t somebody filled you in on the agenda here—told you that Amtrak is at the head of the target hit list, right up there with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting?—Google "Amtrak" and "boondoggle" and you get 6,500 hits (link).

It may be that Lopez forgets herself because her off-duty persona knows that this is one of those programs that Congress is never likely to do anything about, and so conservatives can continue to rail against it, secure in the notion that they’ll be able to continue to enjoy its benefits. But she might want to be careful. McClintock is one “conservative” who also doesn’t get the message, and who once in a while actually tries to do the things the wingers say they want to do. Well, sometimes, but not always (link).