Cynthia McKinney digs the hole a little deeper. Rather than back down in the face of well-deserved public criticism for blatantly kissing the ass of the bloated tick known as Prince Al-Walid bin Talal, here she is in your face again, this time trying to picture herself as a hero of free speech and a victim of censorship—with an op-ed piece in the Washington Post. Irony is clearly beyond her, as is shame.

At the National Review, Jonah Goldberg tries to parse some sense out of her “pi�ata of asininity, worthy of being whacked from any angle”: Cynthia McKinney�s Last Stand.

Let’s take the free-speech thing first. The idea that criticism equals censorship is pretty popular these days among Lefty intellectuals and journalists like Susan Sontag and David Talbot, but it’s an idea no less idiotic for their subscription to it. I think this must be the fifth time I’ve written about this, but let me say it one more time: Criticizing people for saying or writing stupid or wrong things is not a violation of free-speech rights but a celebration of them. Ms. McKinney thinks she’s a hero for saying unpopular things. But a bad idea doesn’t become a good one simply because it is unpopular.

Ms. McKinney wants to assume the mantle of a brave dissident, but she forgets that dissent is morally neutral. You can correctly call yourself a dissident because you like to kick puppies, but at the end of the day, you’re just a jerk who likes to kick puppies. Ms. McKinney decided to suck up to a deep-pocketed scion of an authoritarian theocracy in order to exploit a national tragedy for her own political agenda. Her decision makes her unpopular. It doesn’t make her the conscience of the nation.