Apparently Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert thinks that George Soros, billionaire hedge fund manager and strong supporter of the Democratic party, may really be getting his money from some sort of international drug cartel:

[Said] Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert on the August 29 edition of FOX Broadcasting Company's FOX News Sunday: "I don't know where George Soros gets his money. I don't know where -- if it comes overseas or from drug groups or where it comes from... George Soros has been for legalizing drugs in this country. So, I mean, he's got a lot of ancillary interests out there." When asked by host Chris Wallace if Hastert thought Soros "may be getting money from the drug cartel," Hastert responded, "I'm saying I don't know where groups -- could be people who support this type of thing. I'm saying we don't know."

No offense to Dennis Hastert, but even I have a pretty good idea of where George Soros gets his money. Aren't Republicans supposed to know these sorts of things?

I mean, really. Hastert has presumably read the USA Patriot Act; he was Speaker of the House when it passed. He probably also knows that every financial firm in the country, including Soros's, is required to scrutinize every dollar that comes in for possible unsavory activity. To know about the requirements under the Patriot Act and still slanderously insinuate on national television that nobody can possibly know where Soros is getting his money is the worst kind of clowning.

Reading Daily Howler every day has made me especially sensitive to this sort of thing. There are a bunch of conservative talking points that are so obviously bogus that you can only assume that the well-informed pundits who keep repeating them have a very low opinion of their audience's intelligence. (One glaring example is the old canard about Kerry's "voting for the $87 billion appropriations bill before he voted against it," which Rudy Giuliani dug up the other night. It gets an easy laugh, yes, but there's something sickening about all these politicians pretending to be completely confused by this weird vote when, in fact, it makes perfect sense to anyone who thinks about it for more than a few seconds.)

We need to hold ourselves to a higher standard.