Wellsir, never thought I'd hear myself saying this, but...

...Michael Kinsley is partly right about something.

You construe me correctly. I never thought I'd be forced to say he was even partly right about anything. If you don't know Kinsley, he's a sniveling little far-left sock-puppet who seems to hate Jesus and anyone who might seem, however remotely, to have anything to do with Him or values derived therefrom. He used to be a co-host of CNN's screamfest "Crossfire." Listening to him was excruciating, and I tried to avoid it. Kinsley can't speak without a sneer, and proper sneering calls for a height which Kinsley never attained.

Kinsley's one of those kids in Junior High who sat at the back of the class and sniggered all through each lesson, seeing themselves as too smart to have to listen or learn anything. He never outgrew that stage.

Not that I have any strong thoughts or feelings about him or the nonsense he extrudes.

And then he had to go making some sense in his Time magazine essay God as Their Running Mate.

In it, Kinsley makes pretty short and effective work of religious candidates' attempts to distance themselves from their own religions. He says (and darn it, he's right) that you can't do that. If religion = the fundamental way you view the world (and it is), then you can't say your worldview doesn't influence your politics.

Because he can't help himself, Kinsley does make some idiotic, self-revealing statements along the way ("For me, any candidate who believes in the literal truth of the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Book of Mormon or the novels of Jane Austen is probably too credulous to be President"). But he also makes enough sense that he probably had to catch his breath after writing such statements as this:

If religion is central to their lives and moral systems, then it cannot be the candidates' "own private affair." To evaluate them, we need to know in some detail the doctrines of their faith and the extent to which they accept these doctrines. "Worry about whether I'm going to reform health care, not whether I'm going to hell" is not sufficient.

And this:

In the online magazine Slate a while back, editor Jacob Weisberg called Joseph Smith, Mormonism's founder, an "obvious con man" and wrote, "Romney has every right to believe in con men, but I want to know if he does, and if so, I don't want him running the country." Thus [another] argument that religion can't be a private affair for a presidential candidate: what a person deeply believes says something about his or her character, which voters may wish to take into account. Deeply religious people may find a candidate's ability to make that "leap of faith" admirable or even essential. Or they may find it offensive if it conflicts with their own faith. (Some devout Christians object to Mormonism's belief that the Bible is a mistranslation.) A skeptic may not want someone so credulous in the nation's top job.

So even Michael Kinsley has had his "broken clock" moment. A bit more contentful than Hugh Hewitt on the same subject.