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- An emerging criticism of Elena Kagan is that she is the a product of an elite legal academic culture that is, in Paul Campos' words, "an intellectually bankrupt and politically corrupt insider game." This argument also has some purchase on the right, most conspicuously in today's David Brooks column, which condemns the same elite system that rewards students who have a "professional and strategic attitude toward life," leading to a blandness that comes with intellectual self-suppression. And of course, this is because of the liberal lock on academia, which not only produced Kagan but Barack Obama, as this Cato-at-liberty post demonstrates with its sneering contempt for "law made by Harvard, Yale and Chicago intellectuals." Or as Ezra Klein jokes, "Barack Obama picks himself for the Supreme Court."
- Sure, it's the Washington Times, but are we really supposed to take seriously an op-ed that begins with, "In a world characterized by growing threats to freedom and the U.S. Constitution, America's exceptional role, and indeed our country's very existence, is at risk." Not that I'd expect anything coherent from the likes of Ed Meese and Frank Gaffney (and an assorted rouge's gallery of "think tank" warmongers), but this is just pathetic. Clocking in at under 500 words, this would-be statement of principle alternates between the utterly banal and unimaginative ("9. A foreign policy that supports our allies and opposes our adversaries"), to the ridiculous ("4. A nation free of Shariah"). I assume serious conservative magazines will immediately question their relationships with the distinguished conservative think tanks that underwrite this nonsense.
- Reacting to the Mark Lilla essay noted yesterday, Jesse Walker observes that "this is how the world looks to someone who thinks a revolt against bureaucratic institutions is a bad thing." Leaving aside the question of where the "revolt" was during the previous several decades we somehow coexisted with the exact same bureaucratic institutions, it always strikes me as odd that libertarians single out the bureaucracy of the federal government as an egregious symptom of "big government." If you look around, bureaucracy is everywhere. In local government. In academia. In private enterprise. In fact, you could even say that bureaucracy is one of the defining features of modern society; indeed one of the defining features of any sufficiently complex society. Perhaps finding a way to lessen its dehumanizing aspects ought to be a priority, rather than imagining a fantasy world where it ceases to exist on account of inchoate Tea Party rage.
- Remainders: The new Maine Republican Party Platform highlights the degree to which the inmates are now running the asylum; Faisal Shahzad was not flagged as being on the no-fly list intentionally, Newsweek reports; according to The Washington Post, the ideal suburban home does not include poor people, immigrants, minorities, senior citizens, or childless households; I can only assume blind hatred of unions is responsible for poor conservative criticism of new union voting rules; Charlie Crist is my new favorite political chameleon; and at this rate Republicans will be fighting among themselves in 2012 over whether Copernicus or Ptolemy had the correct model of the universe.
--Mori Dinauer
