You know something? Sometimes it only takes six damn words to destroy the credibility of an argument, and I think we've run across an example worth preserving for the ages.

First They Came for the Jews

A prosecution under the Espionage Act threatens the First Amendment. BY DOROTHY RABINOWITZ

Monday, April 2, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

Ahem. You see, back in 2004, two AIPAC employees were indicted for receiving classified U.S. foreign policy information from the Rumsfeld / Feith / Wolfowitz / Leeden / Ghorbanifar connected Lawrence Franklin, who has since pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 12+ years in prison. According to the author of this latest apologia for conservative criminality, the entire prosecution can be bundled as cruel scapegoating, part and parcel of all the other horrible offenses against conservatives that U.S. prosecutors have slung over the past few years, such as charging Libby with the crime that he was convicted of.

Now, I realize that it's one of the guiding principles of conservatism that Israel gets to violate whatever U.S. and international laws it wants under the diplomatic doctrine of "screw you", and I realize further that espionage by friendly powers is so commonplace (France's industrial espionage efforts are at this point legendary) as to hardly require a yawn, and I will even freely stipulate that all individuals are innocent until proven guilty, but comparing two AIPAC employees getting charged in an espionage investigation with The Holocaust is the sort of thing that tends to get you branded, very correctly, as a flaming nut, whether you are scribbling in blog comments or writing for the Wall Street Freaking Journal.

I mean, sweet merciful crap. This is the exact sort of overpuffed, race-baiting bloviation that dulls people to (1) actual genocides, (2) actual racism, and (3) actual f--king common sense. In a tiny spark of probably misplaced graciousness, I'm just going to assume here that whatever the rhetorical faults of the presented apologia (and there are many), the author, Dorothy Rabinowitz, had nothing to do with that spectacularly dumb title, and that someone else horked it up for her.

Honestly -- did nobody on the entire WSJ's editorial staff figure that title as being, forget inappropriate and crass, let's just go with ill-chosen? Is it honestly the opinion of the Steadfastly Insane Wall Street Journal that two conservatives getting busted in an espionage sting is akin to genocide?

Gawd, people, you're one of the biggest newspapers in the country. Show some class.

I'll leave the rest of the editorial for others to pick apart (you'll notice, for example, that Rabinowitz has considerable disdain for Sandy Berger, whose Jewishness and need for a required race-based defense is apparently entirely cancelled out by his being a Democrat.) Sometimes, you only need six words to discredit yourself.