The only downside to Matthew Yglesias’s demotion from his perch at the Atlantic to ThinkProgress, the blog of the Center for American Progress, is that his abject silliness will now be on display to a smaller audience. Take, for instance, this post yesterday, on Robert Novak’s recent car accident:

This isn’t the first time Novak’s gotten in trouble with criminal driving. Fortunately, the 66 year-old man Novak hit has only minor injuries, which means Novak will probably only see a minor penalty. And that’s too bad. The penalties for this stuff ought to be much stiffer. Morally speaking, what Novak was doing here is no better than walking down a crowded street with his handgun, firing off .22 rounds at random. “He’s not dead, that’s the main thing,” says Novak but that’s just a coincidence.

I hate, incidentally, that coverage of this is using the euphemism that Novak is known as an “aggressive” driver. He’s a criminal. Cars are large, heavy, fast-moving objects that share space with delicate flesh-and-blood human beings — piloting them in an illegal manner is serious wrongdoing.

I hold no brief for Robert Novak. But how is reckless “piloting” (put down the thesaurus, Matt) of a vehicle in any way comparable to “walking down a crowded street with [a] handgun, firing off .22 rounds at random?” And if aggressive driving qualifies Novak as a “sociopath,” then what, “morally speaking,” do causing and then leaving the scene of a fatal car accident make Ted Kennedy? I await Yglesias’s condemnation of the senior Senator from Massachusetts.

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