Is Republican Opposition To Education Predetermined By Conservatives' DNA? (Plus Bonus: Tonight's Default Vote)

Do you ever wonder why Republicans hate public education? A lot depends on which Republicans you're talking about. The Old Skool Conservatives just don't think wealthy men's taxes should go towards educating poor men's daughters. That kind of defines core conservatism. But the GOP New Skool isn't conservative; it's some kind of sick conglomeration of reactionaries, neo-fascists, racists and nihilists. They fear and oppose modern society in general; it almost makes no sense even discussing issues with them from the perspective of reason. They're pretty much against everything and, unless Limbaugh or Beck explained it within the last 24 hours, they probably can't tell you why. In their new book, Predisposed, academics John Hibbing, Kevin Smith and John Alford touch on the Republican anti-education bias while trying to explain that they just can't help themselves; it's in their DNA.

Former U.S. Senator and candidate for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination Rick Santorum once described his country’s universities and colleges as “indoctrination mills” for godless liberalism. These strong words reflect the widespread suspicion among conservatives-- and not just conservatives in America-- that universities are less focused on raising IQs than they are on raising left-leaning consciousness. As long-time college professors, we are dubious. Persuading students to stop updating their Facebook pages long enough to listen to a 55 minute lecture is challenge enough; persuading large portions of them to pledge undying fealty to a particular political belief system strikes us as a fool’s errand.

Still, this does not mean that conservative suspicions about faculty politics are without merit (most academics are left-leaning) nor that there are no historical examples of campus ideological indoctrination. The City College of New York in the mid-twentieth century, for instance, came about as close as any institution of higher education will ever come to fulfilling right-wing nightmares of academia. The faculty, already tainted with a hint of radical leftism, caused a scandal by trying to hire British polymath Bertrand Russell-- who apart from being a genius was a well-known socialist, pacifist and general promoter of avant-garde social ideas (he thought religion outdated and saw nothing morally objectionable about premarital sex). Scandalized citizens worried about Russell spreading his dangerous notions amongst New York’s vulnerable youth and sued to prevent his hiring. Astonishingly, the legal system obliged. State Supreme Court Justice John McGeehan ruled Russell morally unfit to teach, the upshot being that City College students dodged the bullet of taking instruction from a future Nobel laureate.

While successful at keeping Russell out, neither jurists nor citizens could prevent students from attending City College. This was unfortunate for champions of conservative rectitude in higher education; the students, if anything, were more radical than the faculty. Communists controlled the school newspaper, socialists sought the ouster of the Reserve Officer Training Corps, undergraduate left-wingers of various denominations issued manifestoes denouncing capitalism, cuts in education, oppression of the working class, imperialist wars, non-imperialist wars, imperialists in general, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt in particular, who was apparently considered by a surprising fraction of the student body to be an imperialist, right-wing, war mongering, oppressor of the working classes who was not doing nearly enough for education.

Ground zero for all this hard left-wing activism was the City College lunchroom, where radicals and political activists of various stripes (though mostly of a leftist hue) gathered to debate the finer points of Marxism, socialism, communism, Trotskyism, the Marlenites, and the Fieldites. The atmosphere and denizens of the lunchroom are fondly recalled in a semi-famous 1977 New York Times Magazine essay entitled, Memoirs of a Trotskyist. Apparently, it was a dive of a place, full of lower- to middle-class Jewish students, mostly sons of immigrants who had brought their left-wing politics from Europe (at the time anti-Semitism led to Jewish quotas at many American universities but not at liberal-minded City; as a result of this anti-Semitic prejudice in higher education City College ended up with such an astonishing concentration of intellectual talent that nine Nobel Prize winners graduated from the place between 1935 and 1954.

In the middle of the lunchroom was a counter selling milk, coffee and sandwiches; at the periphery were alcoves consisting of benches facing low refectory tables in rectangular or semi-circular spaces. There were a dozen or so of these alcoves and each was the turf of a particular political, ethnic or religious group; for example, there was a Zionist alcove, a Catholic alcove and an alcove for the smattering of African-American students. The biggest “political” alcove was Alcove No. 2, home turf of the Stalinists. These were mostly hard core supporters of the type of communism practiced by the Soviet Union. Alcove No. 2 regulars glorified Joseph Stalin and apparently spent a good deal of their time torturing facts and logic into supporting their preferred portrait of Uncle Joe as a benevolent and wise protector of the proletariat. Alcove No. 1, just to the right as you entered the cafeteria, was also a political alcove, and also populated by leftists. These leftists, though, did not impose the same sort of ideological purity test required for admission into Alcove No. 2. They included a group of a dozen Trotskyists, a roughly equal number of socialists, a few followers of miscellaneous –isms and –ites, and a handful of right-wingers, which in this group meant they voted for Roosevelt and called themselves Social Democrats. Radical left-wing politics and ideology was constantly discussed and debated in Alcoves No. 1 and No. 2, and the students doing the debating took their arguments out of the lunch room, periodically mounting protest rallies, and carrying their interpretations of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky into classes taught by low-paid, liberal-leaning faculty.

If you believe conservative worries about higher education’s impact on political beliefs, then surely you would expect students marinating in City College’s left wing stew for four years to infect the body politic with their “godless liberalism.” You could even produce some evidence to support this belief. Julius Rosenberg, communist boogey-man number one of the McCarthy era, was executed in 1953 for passing on atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Before trying to advance the vanguard of the proletariat by giving commies the bomb, Rosenberg had graduated from City College with a degree in electrical engineering. More principled and moderate leftists who were City College alums included people like Irving Howe, who went on to help found the quarterly magazine Dissent as well as the Democratic Socialists of America. Still, Rosenberg’s lasting impact on politics was pretty much nil and Howe, for all his brilliance as a cultural critic, never managed to kick start a movement with any broad or lasting impact on politics.

That is not to say a movement failed to materialize from the radicalized, left-wing atmosphere of City College. A powerful and influential political movement was birthed, not in Alcove No. 2, but in Alcove No. 1 and not on the left but on the right. Alcove No. 1’s most lasting political influence was what came to be known as the neoconservative movement. As such, its alumni and heirs influenced the politics of a generation, reshaped the policy orientations of a major American political party, and played an outsized role in promoting the interventionist foreign policies promulgated by the United States government during the very early portions of the twenty-first century, thereby molding American politics and radically altering other countries, from the USA Patriot Act to the war in Iraq. You see, a key player in Alcove No. 1 was Irving Kristol, described by the Daily Telegraph as, “perhaps the most consequential public intellectual of the latter half of the 20th Century." So great was his influence on politics that one U.S. president joked that anyone seeking employment at the White House should just show up and say “Irving sent me.” That president was Ronald Reagan.

At least two lessons seem to flow from the political legacy of the radicals of Alcove No. 1. First, institutions of higher education cannot indoctrinate leftist political beliefs for toffee, even at a gifted, radicalized, left-leaning place like mid-twentieth century City College. Several City alums who flirted with the politics of the radical left as students ended up all over the political spectrum as they got older and, it is fair to say, their most lasting political influence was not in promoting the left’s “godless liberalism” but in promoting the right’s “we are doing God’s will” nationalism. And regardless of whether they kept to the left like Howe, or drifted rightward like Kristol, their navigation of the political spectrum was not put on automatic pilot by their experience as undergraduates.

The second lesson seems even clearer; politics and political beliefs are fungible. They change based on time and place. The Stalinist-Trotskyist split did not just de-mark who was welcome into Alcove No. 1 or No. 2; it held a central, vehement and often violent place in the global politics of the hard left for decades in the first half of the twentieth century. Nowadays? Well, not so much. It is difficult to find a true dyed in the wool Marxist or Trotskyist evangelizing ideology on an American college campus these days. Those who do exist represent either amusing or irritating relics of the past rather than existential threats to the Republic and Trotsky survives in college students’ consciousness mostly in the names of punk rock bands. Moreover, an individual’s preferences can evolve over time. Many giants of neoconservatism started out as liberals who supported the Democratic Party. They ended up as conservatives in the high echelons of the Republican Party.

We generally accept the first lesson; colleges and universities stink at ideological indoctrination. There are enough counter-examples to keep an ember of righteous indignation glowing in certain circles, but you have to look pretty hard to find anyone doing this sort of thing with even moderate levels of success. Those who are any good at it are as likely to be on the right as the left; the academic neocons, for example, turned out to be a pretty persuasive bunch.

UPDATE: Suicide Caucus Enablers Surrender

So the Reid-McConnell deal passed today. First, at 7:30pm, Ted Cruz's half-assed filibuster got shut down 83-16. The die-hards were joined by Tom Coburn (R-OK) and Tim Scott (R-SC) for the final vote, which passed the deal 81-18. The Republicans who may have signed their own political death warrants:

• Dean Heller (R-NV)
• Chuck Grassley (R-IA)
• Ron Johnson (R-WI)
• Pat Toomey (R-PA)

Maybe Rubio too. Now let's see which Senate Republicans, besides Thad Cohran, get primaried by the fringe right-wing groups. At just after 10pm, the House took up the Senate bill and it passed 285-144. Boehner took the unusual step of voting for it himself. He was joined by 86 other Republicans (plus every single Democrat). Paul Ryan, who's in charge of negotiating the budget deal with Senator Patty Murray (D-WA), voted to go into default-- as did 143 other Republicans. 16 Republicans in swing districts who can be defeated next year for voting NO tonight include:

• Justin Amash (MI)
• Kerry Bentivolio (MI)
• Jeff Denham (CA)
• Sean Duffy (WI)
• Scott Garrett (NJ)
• Steve King (IA)
• John Mica (FL)
• Stevan Pearce (NM)
• Joe Pitts (PA)
• Tom Reed (NY)
• Dana Rohrabacher (CA)
• Ed Royce (CA)
• Paul Ryan (WI)
• Steve Southerland (FL)
• Mike Turner (OH)
• Tim Walberg (MI)

Elizabeth Warren has mixed emotions over the votes tonight:

I'm glad that the government shutdown has ended, and I'm relieved that we didn't default on our debt.

But I want to be clear: I am NOT celebrating tonight.

Yes, we prevented an economic catastrophe that would have put a huge hole in our fragile economic recovery. But the reason we were in this mess in the first place is that a reckless faction in Congress took the government and the economy hostage for no good purpose and to no productive end.

According to the S&P index, the government shutdown had delivered a powerful blow to the U.S. economy. By their estimates, $24 billion has been flushed down the drain for a completely unnecessary political stunt.

$24 billion dollars. How many children could have been back in Head Start classes? How many seniors could have had a hot lunch through Meals on Wheels? How many scientists could have gotten their research funded? How many bridges could have been repaired and trains upgraded?

The Republicans keep saying, "Leave the sequester in place and cut all those budgets." They keep trying to cut funding for the things that would help us build a future. But they are ready to flush away $24 billion on a political stunt.

So I'm relieved, but I'm also pretty angry.

We have serious problems that need to be fixed, and we have hard choices to make about taxes and spending. I hope we never see our country flush money away like this again. Not ever.

It's time for the hostage taking to end. It's time for every one of us to say, "No more."

Like Most Republicans, Paul Ryan Can't Think For Himself-- And Only Reads Discredited, Failed Economists

Econ 4 is the OccupyWallStreet of the economics profession. In fact, I first became aware of the group when I saw their statement of support for OccupyWallStreet and watched the video statement they several of the economists made about it. Both are here.

We support the efforts of the Occupy Wall Street movement across the country and across the globe to liberate the economy from the short term greed of the rich and powerful one percent.

We oppose cynical and perverse attempts to misuse our police officers and public servants to expel advocates of the public good from our public spaces.

We extend our support to the vision of building an economy that works for the people, for the planet, and for the future, and we declare our solidarity with the Occupiers who are exercising our democratic right to demand economic and social justice.

Don't expect Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, The Hermanator or Mitt Romney to sign on to the list of distinguished economists behind this statement. Don't even expect them-- nor the Republicans in the House like Eric Cantor, Paul Ryan and Fred Upton (to name just three of the worst) whose political careers are built on the edifice of protecting the special interests of the one percent at the extent of their own constituents-- to even understand any of this. To a shill like Paul Ryan, the study of economics begins and ends with the mediocre adolescent ravings in Ayn Rand's "greed is good" novels. Unlike, Rand-- or Ryan-- James Boyce of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst is a real economist. I'd like to quote his short statement about why he's backing OccupyWallStreet.

"One of the key issues is the extent to which governments get captured by relatively wealthy and powerful interests, who turn the government away from serving the public towards serving their particular set of interests."

But, let's me honest with ourselves, not all conservatives are as congenitally stupid and corrupt as Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor and Fred Upton. I want to quote from a 2001 Corey Robin article in Lingua Franca, The Ex-Cons: Right-Wing Thinkers Go Left. You've probably already heard of Reagan era war strategist Edward Luttwak, but let's catch up with him after he fled both the Nazis and the communists in Europe and escaped to America in his early 40s.

Edward, meet your worst nightmare, Bishop Romney

For most of his adult life, Luttwak waged a militant struggle against communism. Inspired by a strategic military vision that connected the Gallic Wars to the civil wars of Central America, he worked closely with the U.S. Defense Department as a consultant, advising everyone from junior officers to the top brass. But Luttwak was more than a cold warrior. He was a warrior, or at least a fervent theorist of "the art of war." Whereas generals thought victory depended on aping management styles from IBM, Luttwak made the case for ancient battlefield tactics and forgotten maneuvers from the Roman Empire. Luttwak urged the military to look to Hadrian, not Henry Ford, for guidance. It was an arduous struggle, with officers more often acting like organization men than soldiers. Once again, Luttwak found his preferred way of life threatened by the culture of capitalism.

Luttwak first gained notoriety in Britain, where he settled after receiving his undergraduate degree in economics at the London School of Economics. In 1968, he published Coup d'État: A Practical Handbook. The twenty-six-year-old author dazzled his readers with this audacious how-to guide, prompting a delighted John Le Carré to write, "Mr. Luttwak has composed an unholy gastronomic guide to political poison. Those brave enough to look into his kitchen will never eat quite as peacefully again." In 1970, Luttwak published an equally mischievous piece in Esquire, "A Scenario for a Military Coup d'État in the United States." Two years later, he moved to the United States to write a dissertation in political science and classical history at Johns Hopkins, conducting extensive research using original Latin, German, French, English, and Italian sources. The result was the widely praised The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire. While in graduate school, Luttwak began to work as a consultant to various branches of the U.S. armed services, ultimately making recommendations on everything from how NATO should conduct tactical maneuvers to what kind of rifle soldiers in the El Salvadoran military should carry.

When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980, Luttwak was at the top of his game. A fellow at Georgetown's Center for Strategic and International Studies and a frequent contributor to Commentary, he argued that the United States should accelerate the high-tech arms race, forcing the Soviet Union into a contest it could not win. Reagan's closest advisers eagerly welcomed Luttwak to their inner circle. Just after Reagan's election, Luttwak attended a dinner party in Bethesda, along with Jeane Kirkpatrick, Fred Iklé, and other luminaries of the Republican defense establishment. Richard Allen, who would become Reagan's first national security adviser, worked the crowd, pretending to dispense positions in the administration as if they were party favors. As the Washington Post reported, Luttwak declined, explaining over chocolate T"a Maria pie, "I don't believe scribblers like myself should be involved in politics. It's like caviar. Very nice, but only in small quantities." When pressed by Allen, he joked, "I only want to be vice-consul in Florence." Allen responded, "Don't you mean proconsul?"

The prep-school gladiator bonhomie evaporated before the end of Reagan's first term. Luttwak may have been an invaluable asset when pushing for more defense spending, but he made enemies with his loud-- and ever more sarcastic-- criticisms of Pentagon mismanagement. In 1984, he published The Pentagon and the Art of War, where, among other things, he depicted Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger as more of a slick used-car salesman than a genuine statesman. Military politicos struck back, dropping Luttwak from a roster of pro bono Pentagon consultants (he continued to do contract work elsewhere in the defense establishment). In 1986, Weinberger explained to the Los Angeles Times that Luttwak "just lost consulting positions from total incompetence, that's all."

But it was more than Luttwak's criticisms of Weinberger in The Pentagon and the Art of War that got him in trouble with the Defense Department. His real mistake was to go after the military's conduct during the Vietnam War. Luttwak downplayed the armed forces' favorite explanations for their defeat in Vietnam-- weak-willed politicians, the treasonous press, a defeatist public. He argued instead that America's warrior elite had simply lost the taste for blood. During the Vietnam War, he wrote, "desk-bound officers" were always "far from combat." Their penchant for "outright luxury" had a devastating effect on troop morale. Although Julius Caesar "retained both concubines and catamites in his rearward headquarters, ate off gold plate, and drank his Samian wine from jeweled goblets," when he was on the front lines with his soldiers he "ate only what they ate, and slept as they did-- under a tent if the troops had tents, or merely wrapped in a blanket if they did not." By contrast, American officers refused "to share in the hardships and deadly risks of war."

Pointy-headed bureaucrats also sapped the military's strength, according to Luttwak. Always looking to cut costs, Pentagon officials insisted that weapons, machinery, and research-and-development programs be standardized. But this only made the military vulnerable to enemy attack. Standardized weapons systems were easily overcome; having overwhelmed one, an enemy could overwhelm them all. When it came to the military, Luttwak concluded, "we need more 'fraud, waste, and mismanagement.'"

Top generals were obsessed with efficiency partially because they learned the methods of business management instead of the art of war. For every officer with a degree in military history, there were a hundred more "whose greatest personal accomplishment is a graduate degree in business administration, management or economics." "Why should fighter pilots receive a full-scale university education," Luttwak asked in The Washington Quarterly, "instead of being taught how to hunt and kill with their machines?"

The ultimate source of the military's dysfunction was its embrace of American corporate culture and business values. Like Robert McNamara, whom President Kennedy transferred to the Pentagon from Ford Motor Company, most defense secretaries were in thrall to "corporate-style goals." They sought the least risky, most cost-effective means to a given end. They preferred gray suits, eschewing "personal eccentricities in dress, speech, manner, and style because any unusual trait may irritate a customer or a banker in the casual encounters common in business." Officers were merely "managers in uniform," Luttwak told Forbes. But, he noted, "what is good for business is not good for deadly conflict." Although "safely conservative dress and inoffensively conventional style" might work in an office, they could be deadly on the battlefield; they squelched bold initiatives and idiosyncratic genius. Intimating that capitalism had colonized-- indeed destroyed-- spheres of society that were not strictly economic, Luttwak came perilously close to identifying himself with leading voices from the Marxist tradition-- Jürgen Habermas, Georg Lukács, even Marx himself.

While the Soviet Union still existed, Luttwak was able to channel his contempt for managerial and corporate values into proposals for military reform. The struggle against Bolshevism fully captured his imagination, speaking to principles of individualism, independence, and personal dignity that he had learned as a child of Jewish atheists. Luttwak's parents taught him, he says, that "you wanted your shoulders out walking down the street. The master of your fate. Not to walk hunched, afraid that God will punish you if you eat a ham sandwich." He continues: "There was a certain contempt about piety. Piety was not seen as compatible with dignity." Dignity, he goes on, "is what we were defending in the Cold War. It was ideological. It was very fitting for me to be in the United States, to become an American, because the Americans were and are the ideological people. They were perfectly cast to be enlisted in an ideological struggle."

But now that the battle against communism has been won, Luttwak has lost interest in most military matters; he no longer sees any compelling ideological reason to care about strategy and tactics. "Security problems and such have become peripheral, for all countries and for people, for myself as well. I don't engage my existence in something that is peripheral.... There was a compelling imperative to be involved. There isn't now."

...Military struggle may no longer hold any ideological allure for Luttwak, but his disaffection affords him the time and intellectual space to confront the enemy he has been shadowboxing his entire life: capitalism itself. "The market," he says, "invades every sphere of life," producing a "hellish society." In the same way that market values once threatened national security, they now threaten the economic and spiritual well-being of society. "An optimal production system is a completely inhuman production system," he explains, "because...you are constantly changing the number of people you employ, you're moving them around, you're doing different things, and that is not compatible with somebody being able to organize an existence for himself."

Although Luttwak writes in his 1999 book Turbo-Capitalism, "I deeply believe...in the virtues of capitalism," his opposition to the spread of market values is so acute that it puts him on the far end of today's political spectrum-- a position that Luttwak congenitally enjoys. "Edward is a very perverse guy, intellectually and in many other ways," says former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, one of Luttwak's early champions during the 1970s. "He's a contrarian. He enjoys confounding expectations. But I frankly don't even know how serious he is in this latest incarnation." Luttwak insists that he is quite serious. He calls for socialized medicine. He advocates a strong welfare state, claiming, "If I had my druthers, I would prohibit any form of domestic charity." Charity is a "cop-out," he says: It takes dignity away from the poor.

The only thing that arouses Luttwak's ire more than untrammeled capitalism is its elite enthusiasts—the intellectuals, politicians, policy makers, and businessmen who claim that "just because the market is always more efficient, the market should always rule." Alan Greenspan earns Luttwak's special contempt: "Alan Greenspan is a Spencerian. That makes him an economic fascist." Spencerians like Greenspan believe that "the harshest economic pressures" will "stimulate some people to...economically heroic deeds. They will become great entrepreneurs or whatever else, and as for the ones who fail, let them fail." Luttwak's other b'te noire is "Chainsaw Al" Dunlap, the peripatetic CEO who reaps unimaginable returns for corporate shareholders by firing substantial numbers of employees from companies. "Chainsaw does it," says Luttwak, referring to Dunlap's downsizing measures, "because he's simpleminded, harsh, and cruel." It's just "economic sadism." Against Greenspan and Dunlap, Luttwak affirms, "I believe that one ought to have only as much market efficiency as one needs, because everything that we value in human life is within the realm of inefficiency--love, family, attachment, community, culture, old habits, comfortable old shoes."

Imagine if one of the networks was smart enough to get Luttwak as a host for one of the 30-some-odd Republican "presidential" debate shows. How much more elucidating would it be for American voters-- even Republican-American voters-- to hear Luttwak questioning self-professed capitalist boosters like Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, than a string of questions from the war criminals and Koch-paid shills from the AEI? Or perhaps we should hope for a moderator like Irving Kristol or William F. Buckley, the intellectual godfathers-- pre Herman Cain-- of neoconservatism. Corey Robin quotes them in The Reactionary Mind admitting, as though they were describing Mitt Romney, that "American conservatism lacks any political imagination, which has always been, I have to say, a property of the left." That was Kristol. Buckley is even harsher: "The trouble with the emphasis with conservatism on the market is that it becomes rather boring. You hear it once, you master the idea. The notion of devoting your life to it [the way Romney, Ryan, Cain and Gingrich have] is horrifying if only because its so repetitious. It's like sex." I just threw up in my mouth.

Quote of the day: Is it possible that NYT op-ed chump-in-chief Andrew Rosenthal has the odious Bill Kristol mixed up with the sublime Billy Crystal?

"The idea that The New York Times is giving voice to a guy who is a serious, respected conservative intellectual - and somehow that’s a bad thing. How intolerant is that?"
--NYT Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal to politico.com

Rosenthal, it appears, knows Bill K. from his own days in the NYT's Washington bureau, when they seem to have done an inordinate amount of hobnobbing. Now you always have to worry about people who actually know transparently bogus people like our Bill and don't see through them, and sure enough, by the time Mr. Rosenthal is describing his Bill as "a serious, respected conservative intellectual," you know he's been totally hornswoggled.

It's like those people who claim to have known Chimpy the Prez before he made the big career change to defiling the White House, and tell us what a "nice guy" he is. No, he's not, and in all likelihood the reason theythink so is that whenever theyspoke to him, he mostly nodded in agreement and said things like, "You're so right." And they didn't even notice the blank glazed look in his eyes.

Just for the record, Andy, I can't imagine any rational acquaintance or detached observer describing Billy the K as "serious" OR "respected" OR "intellectual," and I like to think that no serious conservative would accept him into that fraternity either. All the guy is, and I mean all, is the son of a famous father who did a famous, even pioneering political crossover from left to right to become, as he's often referred to, "the godfather of neoconservatism," and has ever since shown himself to be a blithering idiot.

I suppose you could still call Irving Kristol an "intellectual"--just a very stupid and thuggish one. Little Billy has inherited (or acquired--I don't want to assume the primacy of nature or nurture here; the kid was probably doomed either way) the stupidity and thuggishness, with nothing to accompany them but his outsize lack of self-awareness. So no, Andy, we on the left aren't afraid of opposing views. We're just embarrassed for the NYT to see them lending space and credibility to a no-account, vicious pseudo-intellectual hooligan.

Note about the head on this post: I didn't meant to tar Billy Crystal with the suggestion that he's conservative, which as far as I know is far from the truth. But he is certainly worlds more serious, respected, and intellectual than Bill K., which makes him three-for-four on the Rosenthal Scale, where Bill K. finishes with an oh-fer.

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