'When a man concludes that any stick is good enough to beat his foe with," warned G.K. Chesterton many years ago, "that is when he picks up a boomerang."

To appreciate the sort of recklessness Chesterton had in mind, you have only to read the latest denunciation of Bob Schaffer, the Republican running for the U.S. Senate, by ProgressNowAction's Michael Huttner (find it under the At Issue headline on today's editorial page or at RockyMountainNews. com). In Huttner's broad, lurid strokes, Schaffer is transformed not merely into a rapacious "oil industry executive . . . working to maximize his oil company's profits" - "oil," "executive" and "profits" being an unholy trinity in Huttner's eyes - but also a war profiteer "working against American interests."

To this point, it must be said, the portrait of Schaffer is a paint-by-numbers smear, which my column disposed of two weeks ago (April 30, "Smeared with oil"). What distinguishes Huttner's latest attack and qualifies it for a Chesterton boomerang award is its claim that Schaffer "led the company's delegation in Iraq to lobby local speculators for oil contracts."

Local speculators? Savor that contemptuous description of the Kurdistan Regional Government and, by implication, the historically oppressed minority that it represents.

Aspect Energy, for which Schaffer worked, negotiated with Kurdish leaders for the right to explore for oil in the north of Iraq. The Kurdistan Regional Government is no more a "local speculator" in Iraq than Gov. Bill Ritter is a "local warlord" in the United States.

Huttner's use of "local speculators" was no accident. The term appears twice in his letter without any hint as to whom the "speculators" might be. When I e-mailed him in wonderment, he replied, "I'm OK if you prefer to use Kurdish government."

He's OK if someone else prefers the relevant fact. Just don't expect him to volunteer it.

It is true that the Baghdad central government is not happy with the Kurds for having cut a number of oil exploration deals with small- and mid-sized foreign companies; indeed, the oil minister considers them invalid. But it is equally true that the Iraqis have yet to reach agreement on a final oil and gas law, and that a draft completed last year has been slammed by both Kurds and Sunni Arabs (for different reasons). Meanwhile, the parties continue to talk.

The activists at ProgressNowAction are free to support the Arab vision of a state oil company controlling future production in Iraq - and they are equally free to suggest that such a future would best serve American interests, although it's hardly obvious that it would. But in his zeal to discredit Schaffer, Huttner simply airbrushed the Kurds out of existence - and crossed the line between aggressive opinion and outright propaganda.

Get out alive

It's been a bad year for the reputation of the U.S. Penitentiary in Florence, what with the conviction last week of a prisoner for the grisly killing of his cellmate and a racially motivated riot one month ago that ended with two inmates shot to death by guards.

Suffice it to say that such episodes reinforce the popular impression of U.S. prisons - particularly those run by the states - as no-man's lands where the strong lord it over the weak. Yet whatever the truth of this view, it shortchanges a rather remarkable fact: Prison homicide rates, suicides and the number of riots have actually plummeted in the past 30 years, in apparent defiance of most experts' expectations.

Writing in a recent Weekly Standard, professors Bert Useem of Purdue and Anne Morrison Piehl of Rutgers recount this history: "In 1973, there were 63 homicides per 100,000 state inmates. In 1990, there were eight, and in 2003, the homicide rate dropped further to four."

That's not just a falloff in murder. It's a collapse.

Prisons might remain hellholes in some respects, but at least inmates can now expect to get out alive.

Vincent Carroll is editor of the editorial pages. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.