I see that (praise from Caesar!) Jeff Goldstein has some nice things to say about my January Reason story, allowing that I’m occasionally cogent when I’m “not acting like a polemicist for privacy absolutism.” Now, I recall arguing with Jeff about the NSA program on an Internet radio show once, so presumably he’s aware my actual position is just that secret invasions of privacy should have some sort of judicial oversight, which doesn’t strike me as a a terribly “absolutist” point of view. But it’s also a rhetorical move that, just impressionistically, seems to have become more popular over the last few years, where all positions further down the gradient than one’s own are lumped together at the far end of the spectrum. You see it with the rather broad use of terms like “isolationist” and “pacifist” to describe people who set a high bar for foreign wars, or perhaps even just opposed this latest one. I’m not sure how often it’s disingenuous, and how many people really think that anyone who opposed the Iraq war is literally a pacifist opposed on principle to war under any circumstances. My sense is that actual pacifists are pretty thin on the ground.