Kristol's boosterism. . .

. . .for John McCain occasionally gives way to lucidity, as is the case in his piece for the January 2nd issue of the Weekly Standard, wherein he calls out the left-liberal establishment for its idiotic countenancing of various rabid left notions with regard to President Bush, the Patriot Act, and the Global War on Terror. Attributing the general tone of discourse from the left to a "Paranoid Style," Kristol sets out a few basic facts and poses some questions that ought to make any responsible member of the liberal opposition squirm.

And, as if on cue, the Standard-Times of New Bedford, MA has published the story of a young college student at UMass who claimed to have been visited by federal Homeland Security agents as the result of his request for a copy of Mao's "Little Red Book" through the school's inter-library loan service. It turns out the whole story was a hoax, perpetrated by a single student, apparently in dire need of attention.

The student's motivation remains a mystery, but in the interview on Thursday, he provided a glimpse.
"When I came back, like wow, there's this circus coming on. I saw my cell phone, and I see like, wow, I have something like 75 messages and like something like 87 missed calls," he said. "Wow, I was popular. I usually get one or probably two a week and that's about it, and I usually pick them up."

Hat-tip, Lucianne.com.

UPDATE: My schedule has prevented me from staying abreast of the issues to the extent that I would like. However, keen-eyed Ldotter IowaDad posted a quote from a piece by Sen. Edward Kennedy, recently published in The Boston Globe.

"Just this past week there were public reports that a college student in Massachusetts had two government agents show up at his house because he had gone to the library and asked for the official Chinese version of Mao Tse-tung's Communist Manifesto. Following his professor's instructions to use original source material, this young man discovered that he, too, was on the government's watch list.

Think of the chilling effect on free speech and academic freedom when a government agent shows up at your home -- after you request a book from the library.

Incredibly, we are now in an era where reading a controversial book may be evidence of a link to terrorists.

Something is amiss here. Something doesn't make sense. We need a thorough and independent investigation of these activities.

The Congress and the American people deserve answers now."

Teddy seems to have been sandbagging for the past 12 months, waiting until the last moment to turn in his submission for the Upper Class Twit of the Year Award.