Great minds, etc.

What I wrote last week:

The war against SUVs is one of those endlessly fascinating sideshows of American life, waged by people who are either uninformed or myopic or both. It seems that half the people on HuffPost raging against the Vehicle of Satan travel by private jet. And Andrew Sullivan, who seemingly ranks SUVs two notches below torture, betrays an almost touching ignorance of the duties and obligations involved in raising a family. When one mother wrote Sullivan to state, Look, I've got three kids, they legally all must be in child seats, and an SUV is pretty much the only vehicle large enough, Sullivan's incredible response was, Well, why not put them in a station wagon? The answer to that, of course, is that current child restraints are about as big as bathtubs, and that a mother and father could squeeze one or two of the smaller ones (infant-3 years) in a station wagon--and only if no else rode in the car. My youngest brother's three kids--two of them extremely tall for their ages--would not fit in his car were it not for the third row of seats. Beyond that, the saving in gas between an SUV and a standard mid-sized--a Taurus, say--is marginal at best, so even if a bachelor drives his SUV to work alone he's scarcely doing any harm, at least not enough for it to be anyone's business.

What my newly adopted hero, Mark Steyn, in a review of Frank Gaffney's book War Footing, wrote this week:

The telegram has been replaced by the email and the Victrola has yielded to the CD player, but, aside from losing the rumble seat and adding a few cupholders, the automobile is essentially unchanged from a century ago. Yet as long as industry "reform" is intended to force Americans into smaller, less comfortable, less safe vehicles, it's hard to see anyone taking it seriously. (As a world-class demography bore, by the way, I don't think it's coincidence that the only Western country with healthy birth rates is also the one that drives around in the biggest vehicles: the nanny state can't mandate bulky child seats and then require a young family to drive around in a Fiat Uno.)

Tears bedim these eyes.