Crap

Today's Washington Post has an article that made me laugh. Such archetypical leftist cant is rarely found anymore in its pure form. To wit:

Speaking at the Washington Convention Center, [Donald, ed.] Kagan's subject was right in line with the usual topics taken up in previous Jefferson lectures (a $10,000 honor sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities). He gave a stout talk, "In Defense of History," with lots of sideswipes at the old boogeymen of conservative academics. He got laughs for little digs at the relativists (who believe that other societies may have equally legitimate values and truths) and the multiculturalists (who think the traditional canon is not so weak as to bear with a little expansion). He saved especial scorn for poor deluded literary theorists and misguided historians who stray from the usual, worthy subjects: "high politics, constitutions, diplomacy, war, great books and ideas." Perhaps he was having a little argument with the Harvard poetry scholar, Helen Vendler, who argued in last year's Jefferson Lecture that poetry should be placed first among the various disciplines in the humanities. Nonsense, says Kagan.

[more from the article, ed.]...Kagan's book, and his life's work, have contributed to an environment in which fear of vague potential threats often overwhelms sane evaluation of real threats (Kagan went on and on about potential WMDs in Iraq in his book, though they were never found).

The author, Phillip Kennicott, makes absolutely no attempt to hide his views and by my lights calls Kagan a curmudgeonly old fool who hasn't learned anything about the world, is a typical neo-con/racist with no respect for other cultures or values, and is getting kicked in the arse by fate, as religion, and not history, becomes again the dominant mode of moral certainty in this country (in opposition to Kagan's stance).

Jeez, man. I'm going to write an op-ed to the Post. This smug little article really sucks.