'What Bush and Batman Have in Common'

Conservatives as superheroes?

Excellent op-ed by Andrew Klavan in The Wall Street Journal comparing George W. Bush's steadfast war on terror with the Dark Night's battle to clean up Gotham City. No, I'm not kidding. Read it for yourself.

Klavan writes:

Like W, Batman is vilified and despised for confronting terrorists in the only terms they understand. Like W, Batman sometimes has to push the boundaries of civil rights to deal with an emergency, certain that he will re-establish those boundaries when the emergency is past.

And like W, Batman understands that there is no moral equivalence between a free society -- in which people sometimes make the wrong choices -- and a criminal sect bent on destruction. The former must be cherished even in its moments of folly; the latter must be hounded to the gates of Hell.

"The Dark Knight," then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year's "300," "The Dark Knight" is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.

Read the full column, "What Bush and Batman Have in Common," at the newspaper's Web site.