Amanda Marcotte puts her finger on a problem that seems to infect whiteboy hipsters across the country: Crank Disease, wherein you become convinced that a crabby conservative white guy with a racist past is going to be the savior of liberals and black people.
It’s worth pointing out at this point that supporting Ron Paul, even just a little, appears to infect the supporter with Crank’s Disease, where they’re making conspiratorial claims that we can’t assume that someone writing, “I, _____, am totally writing this,” actually wrote it. The longer you chew on that belief, the more likely you are to find yourself, a year from now, wearing camo and shooting up beer cans while complaining about a one world currency, which is of course, a totally different thing than your desire that the entire world trade in gold.
The Ron Paul variety of Crank Disease seems to turn clueless but otherwise benign whiteboys into vicious little pricks who lash out at any suggestion that he’s anything short of the Messiah. At the beginning of this month, I idly tweeted something about the racism in Ron Paul’s newsletters and immediately got a backlash from people who weren’t even following me. You would think I’d recommended a flash mob of disemboweling cats.







When you think about it, doing Doctor Who as a police procedural is pretty obvious, if not downright inevitable. While I steer away from the various Law and Order/CSI clones on television faster than a cloud of 
