The question for the day is, how stupid does a prominent wingnut have to be before he becomes an embarrassment to the Cause? I’m saying that if they didn’t hit bottom with Jonah Goldberg and Erick Erickson, there is no bottom.

Erickson found Elena Kagan’s undergraduate thesis, written in 1981. According to Erickson, it is proof she is a socialist. Erickson wrote, “This proves Elena Kagan is an open and avowed socialist. The woman declares that socialists must stick together instead of fracture in order to advance a socialist agenda, which Kagan advocates.”

I skimmed the thing; it’s a paper submitted to Princeton’s history department titled “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933,” and she examined economic, cultural social, and other reasons why socialism didn’t take hold in the city (and by extension in the U.S.) to the same extent that it did in other countries.

What it isn’t is an argument in favor of socialism. On page 126, she wrote, “The socialists’ was a sterile program, suited to a sterile party.” Not a ringing endorsement.

So if we find out that, say, Condoleezza Rice wrote a thesis about the Soviet Union (which she probably did), does that make her a Communist?

See also: Scott Lemieux, “Breaking!!!!! We Have Evidence That Erick Erickson Isn’t Very Bright!!!!!“