“There seems to me no question that the Batman film ‘The Dark Knight,’ currently breaking every record at the box office, is at some level a paean of praise to the fortitude and moral courage that has been shown by George W. Bush in this time of terror and war. Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.”

Andrew Klavan, the Wall Street Journal today, “What Bush and Batman Have in Common.”

I love that—push the boundaries of civil rights. Here’s another quote that that construction reminds me of:

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. …Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

The readers of this blog are, as they say in a certain part of New England, wicked smart, and will need no citation for this quote.