THE MIGHTY WURLITZER, PLAYED BY MONKEYS.

Sometimes, when you're a busy professional propagandist like John Fund, the week's talking points sort of slosh together in your mind and you wind up with analogies like this:

Last week, New York’s ACORN mayor Bill De Blasio announced he is evicting Success Academy, a widely praised charter school from the Harlem public school building it occupies. Two other charter schools will be blocked from opening. He claims elementary-school kids wouldn’t be safe in a building with high-school students. His excuse is as absurd as the propaganda Vladimir Putin is using to justify the occupation of Crimea.

I understand his first draft included "stuck on stupid" and the Dark Enlightenment, but was trimmed for space.

Try to imagine a normal person reading that and thinking, yes, I see the connection. There's plenty to say about why most political writing is so incredible shitty, and one important reason is that the apparatchiks thus engaged aren't trying to clear a path to truth; they're just sticking pebbles in pieces of shit.

UPDATE. Hmmph! I wished to talk about style, but some commenters insist on addressing the charter schools issue, in which conservatives who squawk any time taxpayer money feeds a starving bum will suddenly burst into tears if a city refuses to use that money to prop up a charter school. Susan of Texas quotes from Fund, who complains that "charging the rent Mayor de Blasio’s backers envision [for the charters] would result in 71 percent of the city’s charters running deficit." "The free market fails again," Susan observes. She also observes that the charter in question isn't necessarily delivering value for money -- as does Diane Ravitch, via commenter mds: "When the New York State Comptroller attempted to audit Success Academy’s use of public money, Success Academy sued to prevent the audit..." I've seen some good charters, but this kind of thing ain't helping.

Also commenters are at least as interested in the "ACORN Mayor" sobriquet as they are in the Putin/Crimea analogy, which is what caught my eye. ACORN we will have with us always -- as a wingnut curse-word, if not as an actual living organization -- but comparisons of local expenditure issues to geopolitical military crises are as of yet rare, unless you count the Third Reich.