Representative Ted Yoho and the Death of the Non-Apology Apology

Against all odds, Ted Yoho is going to be famous. Normally, politicians like Yoho — a perpetual back-bencher occupying a safe Florida seat who served four terms without significant accomplishments and then announced his retirement — leave the political scene quietly without anybody outside of their district ever able to recall their names. It is a big club, and Yoho seemed content to join it.

But last week, Yoho joined another, much more exclusive club: the club of people who make such intellectually and morally reprehensible arguments — and by doing so set up such spectacular rebuttals — that they achieve the dubious fame of being thoroughly trounced by people who, in the process, change the world.

An early member of this club was Sir Robert Filmer, the 17th century English philosopher who wrote Patriarcha, a defense of monarchical power that was so poorly reasoned that John Locke couldn’t resist responding with The Second Treatise of Government, perhaps the foundational text of both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. More recent members include Joseph Durick, George Murray, Earl Stallings, and the other Birmingham clergymen who wrote “A Call for Unity” — the open letter that will forever be remembered for the response it generated from Martin Luther King Jr., the “Letter from Birmingham…