(1:08 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

The Traditional Link Post

At Cliopatria, Jonathan Dresner links to a Stanley Fish column, in which he argues:

No doubt, the practices of responsible citizenship and moral behavior should be encouraged in our young adults — but it's not the business of the university to do so, except when the morality in question is the morality that penalizes cheating, plagiarizing and shoddy teaching, and the desired citizenship is defined not by the demands of democracy, but by the demands of the academy.

David Bernstein has a post at the Volokh Conspiracy about "the fact that George W. Bush has been pursuing some objectively liberal policies," although progressives are unwilling to give him credit and conservatives are in denial. (In this connection, see the Washington Monthly article from March 2001 on Reagan's liberal legacy.) Among his examples:

I've also discovered that Democratic propaganda on the Medicare prescription drug benefit has been so effective that some of my correspondents believe that the program is simply a giveaway to the drug companies, with literally no benefit to seniors. One correspondent even belived that theRepublicans have replaced a previously existing generous Medicare drug benefit with one that won't benefit a single senior.

The actual basis of the idea that the drug benefit is a giveaway to the drug companies is simply that there are no price controls as part of the package, and drug companies will therefore benefit from the plan. Yet physicians were among the primary beneficiaries of Medicare for its first two decades; their income soared as the government generously reimbursed basically any and all doctor visits from the over-65 set. Where are the retrospective condemnations of Medicare as a "giveaway" to the doctors?

Also at the Volokh Conspiracy, Tyler Cowen argues that the "starve the beast" strategy of cutting taxes to create pressure to cut spending has never actually worked, perhaps in part because "we have had two Republican Presidents, Reagan and Bush, who think that America is so great that deficits don't matter very much"; and Jacob Levy questions Jonah Goldberg's attempt to argue that liberals are ignorant of their intellectual heritage, by pointing out that the hard-core academic leftists with whom Goldberg would like to associate contemporary liberals "really aren't part of the intellectual heritage of a mainstream contemporary American left-liberal."

Josh Marshall finds patronizing and misleading Bush's remarks that "that the Iraqis are ready to 'take the training wheels off' by assuming power." But in perhaps his best line ever, Marshall muses that "the thought that an extra set of training wheels may now be available prompts the question of whether the Iraqis might be willing to hand their pair off to the White House." Meanwhile, Chun the Unavoidable disagrees, as always, with Timothy Burke, and congratulates himself for having "s[a]t in the library and read every damn word of the New York Review, the London Review, and even the thrice-damned TLS. All of it." He links to an article in The Nation on "the re-emergence of The New York Review of Books as a powerful and combative actor on the political scene." (One wonders when The Nation will become "a powerful and combative actor on the political scene.") I fully intend to pick up a subscription card for the NYRB the next time I'm at the dentist's office.

Matthew Yglesias contributes to the inadequacy of debate on religion in the mainstream media, arguing that he "honestly do[es]n't know" what the "upshot" of the simultaneous increase in irreligious and scary right-wing religious people will be. In a more helpful post, he draws on his postmodern intellectual heritage:

Flip over to, say, Instapundit and you'll see that Baudrillard simply spoke of the wrong Gulf War when he said it didn't really happen. Over there, it appears, the second Gulf War is just a social construction of the virulently anti-Bush US news media. Nevermind that the foreign news media paints a distinctly bleaker picture. Nevermind that some of the voices of bleakness (Bill Kristol, George Will, etc.) can hardly be said to be virulently anti-Bush or liberal. Just nevermind. Bad news can be dismissed because the media is biased, and you can tell the media is biased because they keep reporting so much bad news!

Wonkette chastises herself for being "the little blog who cried ass-fucking." Michael Podguski, the boy who would be president, is still depressed, and Scott McLemee reviews a book on Stalin and his circle. Slacktivist is on a roll with his Left Behind series, which should be finished by March of 2042. Via Tom Tomorrow via Atrios, our nation slips into utter, unforgivable depravity.

At John and Bell's, we finally find out what Belle would look like as a blonde. Buried deep within Lenin's Tomb, we find that Abu Grahib is being renamed Camp Redemption (story here). David Brooks, the idiot, finds himself "turning to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to cheer [him]self up." The Onion announces, several years too late, Rumsfeld's intention to fight terror with terror. Finally, as others have mentioned, one might want to check out the new art blog on the block, where there is a continuing series on "found art."

But seriously, even with all these links, I have to admit: wood s lot is better than me.

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