Right, righter and rightest

The Cato Institute, which generally sees America's golden age as having peaked about 1835, is trying to cash in on a Libertarian view of 21st-century terror , Slate says. It's at least for something, which is more than one can say about our old fave Libertarian blog , where they all sound like the Statler & Waldorf of the Republican Party.

The final panel of the conference, "Communicating About Terrorism and Terrorist Attacks," could easily have been titled "What We Talk About When We Talk About Terrorism." The question was how best to tell a skeptical public that the risk of terrorism in America is actually quite small. "Terrorism in a lot of ways is not a very big deal," said one panelist.

It's not a quote you're going to hear any politician repeat anytime soon. Which is perfectly fine with the Cato Institute, thank you, the title of its conference notwithstanding. Like a lot of think tanks, Cato has had its flirtations with power. (Its chairman emeritus, for example, was a senior official in the Reagan administration.) But it's never quite reached the level of, say, the Heritage Foundation, which often published craven cheerleading for the Bush administration, or the Center for American Progress, whose executives began working on the Obama transition seven months ago. Cato'sdisenchantment with the Bush administration was evident while he was in office, and its hopes for Obama are limited.

Still, the guys at Cato are smart enough to know that they have a better chance of getting Barack Obama's attention on counterterrorism than on their plan to privatize the Post Office. Better for a think tank to focus on issues where its perspective is more likely to have some influence on whomever happens to be in the White House. Think-tank experts aren't stupid. They can play politics as well as the guys on K Street. But their true calling is not as partisans but as ideologues.