After a long, embarrassed silence for most of the day, National Review Online finally weighed in on the Bernie Madoff sentence. You will recall that our Bernie got a 150-year sentence for running a multi-million-dollar, decades-long Ponzi scheme. But NRO's Eli Lehrer says that punishing the guy makes no sense whatsoever:

Putting Madoff in prison, of course, does nothing to protect society. He harmed people through the bloodless act of stealing their money. So long as he doesn’t start an investment firm — something that’s not going to happen — he’s no threat to society. Deterring future cons along the same lines as Madoff’s, of course, provides a pretty good reason to imprison Madoff. But a longer sentence seems unlikely to change the deterrence factor very much. No high-living investment manager wants to spend any time in prison and the certainty of any sentence for fraud provides sufficient deterrence. Nearly all sophisticated white-collar criminals operate on the basis that they are too smart to get caught.

Weren't most of the victims rich investors who failed to do due diligence on too-good-to-be-true returns? And don't we suspect that some of them knew it was a Ponzi scheme but that they would be among the winners?

Of course! What investor wouldn't want to put his money in what he knew to be a crook's Ponzi scheme? Too bad Bush isn't still in the White House -- he'd probably be pinning the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Madoff's chest at this very moment.

Meanwhile, Ray Walser opines on the military overthrow of the democratically elected government in Honduras, an act which has been condemned by the OAS and the State department:

[T]he Obama administration is in a pickle. Utopians in the administration believe the Organization of American States, Hugo Chávez, Fidel Castro, and the State Department can all work comfortably together to put Zelaya back in power and, thus, "defend democracy." But "Mad" Mel's penchant is for mob democracy. And realists fear a restoration to power would only produce vendetta politics and populism of the worst sort. A few souls in Washington are leery about promptly delivering Honduras into the eager hands of Hugo Chávez and company.

Warts and all, the U.S. should find a way to recognize that the new government of Honduras has preserved constitutional order and that Zelaya is the problem, not the solution.

"Mob democracy": what an interesting phrase! It is, of course, an oxymoron -- unless you happen to regard democracy, and a constitutional government, as itself a form of mob rule. That has certainly been the National Review's editorial policy for the last half-century.

They are not necessarily against democracy, as long as the mob -- er, excuse me, the people -- don't make the wrong choices.