Speaking of NRO

Jay Nordlinger, NR's managing editor, is puzzled by Kerry buttons:

Surely they can assume that others will assume they're voting for Kerry — who's not, around here? So why do they wear the buttons? Are they trying to persuade those who look at their garments? But they're persuaded already.

In a later column, one of his readers explains it:

The Democratic party is the home of the drama queens of politics. The button-wearers — despite being surrounded by wearers of the same buttons — are showing their 'courage,' defying the henchmen of Ashcroft. It's almost sweet, in a pathetic way.

And another confirms it, in his way:

I used to wear a "Vietnamese-American Against Kerry" button until someone on St. Mark's stopped me and delivered a monologue on the Bush police state. When I brought up the real police state that my family lived in (including the re-education camps), he brushed that off and blathered on about Bush and the sorry state of the U.S. I decided to stop wearing the button because I couldn't take the blind idiocy.

Nor can I.