Stupid Pet Tricks: Senator George Allen Version

Guest blogging at Talking Points Memo, Michael Crowley gives us this excellent post on Republican Senator George Allen's response to the Washington Post's piece on unaccountable factional militias take over of policing in Iraq:

When Republican senator/presidential hopeful George Allen was on ABC's This Week today praising the Bush administration for its training of Iraqi security forces, George Stephanopoulos suggested that the Post's story has some pretty troubling implications for that utterly essential element of our success there. Not to worry, Allen said -- factional divisions are nothing new:

[Y]ou have that even in our United States. We have local police, we have state police, and you have the FBI.

Got that? Bloodthirsty Shiite militiamen really aren't so different from, say, Virginia state troopers. To which a startled-looking Stephanopoulos objected: "They're not militias going out and killing people outside the law!"

It's amazing, come to think of it, that Stephanopoulos didn't burst into laughter. There may be reassuring responses to the Post's story, but Allen's certainly wasn't one of them. Let's hope someone in the White House has a better answer.