It is, as Monty Python’s King Arthur would say, a silly place. A place where we are told–without any evidence, mind you–that the likes of Ronald Reagan and Barry Goldwater would have “edited and redacted, reordered and revised with red ink” the Bill of Rights, rendering the Fifth and Sixth Amendments “merely suggestive measures to be administered based on the emotional whim of a carefully-harnessed fear and a fervently-stoked anger.” It is a place where the Tenth Amendment is just viewed as a curiosity; for this proposition, we have more evidence than we do for the assertions about Reagan’s and Goldwater’s views of the Bill of Rights in general, and the Fifth and Sixth Amendments in particular.

It is a place where Barry Goldwater is believed to be “the real sage” behind Sarah Palin. Would that it were so; Goldwater preached the kind of combination of libertarianism and conservativism that defines my own philosophy, while Palin has nothing of the libertarian about her. Goldwater believed in letting gays, lesbians, and bisexuals serve in the military, as do I. Palin does not. Vanden Heuvel Land seems also to believe that talk about “extend[ing] freedom,” and “cancel[ing] old [programs] that do violence to the Constitution or that have failed their purpose, or that impose on the people an unwarranted financial burden” constitutes an “extremist anti-Washington/anti-government stance.”

Welcome to Vanden Heuvel Land. You do not have the luxury to think critically.