That impression is reinforced by Michael Lacy condemning as Nazism the enforcement of the secrecy of grand jury proceedings. So far from having been invented by Sheriff Arpaio and a handful of Arizona fascists, the secrecy of the proceedings of grand juries has been part of the common law since the founding of our republic and for centuries before that in England.

Michael Lacy’s condemnation of civility as opposed to civil liberty could not be more wrong. Civility is the recognition of everyone’s human dignity. Civility is the basis of our liberty, and indeed of civil society generally. The alternative to civility is not the witty bohemianism that Michael Lacy imagines, but the brutality and dehumanization of primitive societies.

Lacy’s snotty condemnation of civility and soccer moms fits handily with his finding profundity in comic books. He presents the reader with the portrait of someone frozen as a juvenile. I loved comic books and Mad magazine too. But then I grew up and became an adult. Michael Lacy seems not to.

He is certainly entitled to his opinion. And we are equally entitled to assign no value to it. There may be persuasive arguments for and against the policies of Sheriff Arpaio, but Michael Lacy makes none of them.