I’m going to have to take Reihan Salam’s side against Radley Balko in the recent dust up over the McCain campaign’s hiring of Weekly Standard blogger Michael Goldfarb. Pace Radley, I don’t think Goldfarb’s insane views on executive power reflect terribly badly on the campaign, given that he’s been hired as deputy communications director.

What reflects badly on the campaign is that Goldfarb is, even by the standards of ideological journalism, such a brazen hack, such an indiscriminate attack dog, that I don’t even think it makes sense to call him “dishonest”. He exists in a kind of Nietzschean realm beyond truth and falsehood. There’s probably nothing novel in considering this an asset in a campaign flack. Still, given how often we hear about “the kind of campaign Senator McCain wants to run,” I think we’re all entitled to raise an eyebrow when it becomes apparent that their chief qualification for PR guys is a congenital absence of the capacity for shame.