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Suppose we're tracking the unusual career of a hooker who, after a busy decade spent in an upscale brothel in Washington, enters politics herself and runs for a Congressional seat as a Democrat. Both as a candidate and as a congresswoman, however, she gleefully supports hard-line Republican positions on the controversial issues. When outraged liberals ask ranking Democrats why she is permitted to sabotage party policy, the Senators stand mute and red before the cameras, fingering their collars while their wives stare stonily at the ceiling tiles at the far end of the auditorium.

How would we account for the embarrassed silence with which this ex-hooker was allowed to defy the party line and torpedo its endeavors? The most plausible explanation is that the maverick congresswoman must have video of "professional courtesies" extended to key Democratic power brokers in the course of her previous career, and that the power brokers themselves, preferring to cover these episodes with a decorous silence, permit her some ideological deviation in exchange for her discretion. The second most likely explanation -- a distant second -- is that the same key Democrats who have the clout to terminate or advance her career secretly applaud her right wing stances, that inside those union-made undershirts beats the heart of a Goldwater.

OK, I concede. It's a very distant second.