Like Mr Larison I wish Mr Salam had not cut this paragraph from this (excellent) piece on the popularity of the paranoid style:
This is well done and useful stuff. But it’s typical of Reihan’s generous view of matters that he should consider this mean-spirited and fret that it was needlessly harsh.So despite the fact that Obama has been a church-going Christian for most of his adult life, more than a tenth of the country believes that while roaming the streets of Jakarta as an elementary schooler, Obama met some wily bearded imam who lured him into his roving Muslim-mobile with delicious minaret-shaped candies and converted him to radical Islam. Dazzled by his obvious intelligence, and convinced long before David Axelrod that Americans were itching to elect a half-Kenyan youth as president, he also sold young Obama on the idea of keeping his Islamic zealotry under wraps. That way he could transform America into a radical Islamic caliphate without anyone ever noticing.
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