If it's a matter of politics at all, it's a matter of the ethics of politics. The fact is that Jones is a communist, an identity (which like "fascist") carries deep and authentic historical and moral opprobrium. Today's communists want to ignore the mass murders, the gulags, the ideological strait jackets, the sheer viciousness of their (sometimes subliminal) heroes. But they are vicious enough themselves.

No, Jones is not a member of the party... if the party still exists today. Yet he does not wish America well, and all of his rhetoric points to a revolutionary stance. Which also demonstrates how stupid he is. If he thinks that the American people are eager, or even willing to take a revolutionary road to their future he might, for his own better sake, be placed in a funny farm. No, not a prison at all. (That's what he wants for his enemies.) How about a fantasy spa or a kurhaus, and maybe it should be The Magic Mountain?

Of course, Jones is also a racialist, yearning in a curious and ugly way for a time when American blacks received zero respect either as individuals or as blacks. As someone reminded my old friend and colleague Skip Gates at mid-summer, he lived in a country of which a black man was president, in a state (the Bay State) of which a black man was governor and in a city (Cambridge) the previous mayor of which was a black gay man and the present mayor a black lesbian. Old grievances are also passé. Certain reflexes just don't work any more. Sorry.

And last but in this case least: Wouldn't you know it? Jones also has been bitten by the anti-Israel bug. In the old days, when the Russians grasped that Zionism was the one force that could compel the exodus of British power--they called it imperialism--from the Middle East, the communists were for the restoration of the Jewish nation to its territorial home. As soon as the British left, the communists wavered in their support of the return and then they stopped wavering. All the way down to today. Jones' vulgar hatred of Israel is, alas, also a hatred of Jews.

A letter in Wednesday's FT responds to a news story in the paper's September 7 edition asserting that Jones was relieved of his post because he accused Republicans of abusing their congressional majority in the past. Nonsense, to be sure. The correspondent, writing from San Francisco, sets the context correctly: "Mr. Jones was forced to resign when it became clear that he was a complete crackpot who has for years and years said a lot of really crazy, stupid loonie-bin stuff. Very much like the kind of stuff, in fact, that Barack Obama's former pastor used to say each Sunday."

This raises an awkward issue. Part of the electoral enthusiasm for Obama came from just such people drawn to loonie-bin politics. That happens in every campaign. The difference is that, say, in Bill Clinton's race they were marginalized. And they certainly were kept our of office after the electoral victory, maybe even by Rahm Emanuel. And you didn't have to be from the far-far left to be shunted aside. Take Peter Edelman, politically respectable (he'd been an important aide to Robert Kennedy) and very smart. Or Lani Guinier, also very smart, maybe a little less politically respectable. With Jones, we were dealing with someone more like Bill Ayers or Jeremiah Wright. And an utterly ignorant Rashid Khalidi, which is an unimaginable Khalidi, a family so distinguished that I am almost intimidated when I write a word against this Columbia professor.