Bobo is a dodo.

I’ve been meaning to write something about David Brooks’ asinine Sunday column, Virtues and Victims (which Jessica aptly summarizes as “set[ting] it all straight for us silly lasses who had the audacity to think that rape was about anything else than the loss of chivalry”), but I haven’t gotten around to it, so go read Amanda, Jill, Echidne, and Lindsay instead.

Guys should be especially pleased to note that with splendid little passages like this one:

[I]t was believed that each of us had a godlike and a demonic side, and that decent people perpetually strengthened the muscles of their virtuous side in order to restrain the deathless sinner within. If you read commencement addresses from, say, the 1920's, you can actually see college presidents exhorting their students to battle the beast within…

…Brooks manages to cast all of you as, apparently, having an angel on one shoulder and a naughty little rapist on the other.

Why is it that so many conservatives seem to subscribe to the notion that each of us has within not only the capacity for atrocity, but also the real probability of committing any and all manner of offense without perpetual vigilance? A lot of us just don’t need to struggle to not be rapists or murderers or thieves. I am deeply troubled by anyone who feels compelled to frame arguments with the assumption that actively wrestling to keep such proclivities at bay is universal.