"Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor at The New Republic."

And by "literary," we mean that he endorses political candidates and says things like "when he picked Sarah Palin, he told the United States of America to go fuck itself."

I think I've found the ultimate in anti-Palin gas-baggery.

From Leon Wieseltier. Please read it and click through to read the whole thing if you suspect that my excerpt unfairly represents it. And then take my little quiz.

Whatever the Christian conservative way of life is, Palin is living it. And so her grotesque and fascinating candidacy broaches an interesting subject, which is the moral insufficiency of integrity. In its etymological origins, integrity refers to wholeness, to a coherent arrangement of the parts into a whole, to the consistency of the parts with each other, to the harmony of a thing or a being with itself. Integrity is a formal property, a consideration of structure. It is, in other words, contentless. It is indifferent to the substance of the elements whose internal relations are its concern, and neutral about questions of truth and falsity, good and evil. False ideas often add up; evil individuals often add up. A unified identity is not for that reason an admirable identity. It is all very nice to have the courage of one's convictions, but the convictions matter as much as the courage....

In the grammar of politics, the adverb is less significant than the direct object: not better politics, but better policies; not the form of politics, but the content. As for bipartisanship, it generally means your defection to my party. When a party stands for something, there is honor in belonging to it. And when the parties stand for antithetical conceptions of nation and government, bipartisanship is a dodger's daydream.

The quiz:

So what did you think of Wieseltier's little essay?
	Brilliant. Proof, once again, that Althouse is an idiot.
	Eh. Another essay. A little showoffy, but I can take it.
	That is the ultimate in anti-Palin gas-baggery.
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"A panic about the situation of the African American male raised into a truculent paranoid theology."

Leon Wieseltier reads Jeremiah Wright:

Jonathan Chait has a big article on netroots blogging in The New Republic.

I was going to blog about it yesterday, but it bored me too much. It's long. I read it. You might think I hate to waste the effort and not produce a post, but it's something I do a lot. Unless I find something interesting, I don't post.

You know, the first time I heard about blogs, I imagined there was some sort of requirement to note each article you happened to read, that "web log" was to be taken literally, and the idea was to keep a log on the web of everything you read on the web. I don't know what it is about me that I tend to perceive requirements, rules, and restrictions in activities where there is no governing body and no mechanism of enforcement.

So why am I posting? I'm seeing that a lot of people are talking about it and thought you might want to talk about it too.

Here's Chait's conclusion to get you started:

Conservatives have crowed for years that they have "won the war of ideas." More often than not, such boasts include a citation of Richard Weaver's famous dictum, "Ideas have consequences." A war of ideas, though, is not an intellectual process; it is a political process. As my colleague Leon Wieseltier has written, "[I]f you are chiefly interested in the consequences, then you are not chiefly interested in the ideas." The netroots, like most of the conservative movement, is interested in the consequences, not the ideas. The battle is being joined at last.

Sprezzatura.

Well, I see that The New Republic 's Lee Siegel has gone and gotten himself into trouble by participating in the production of blog comments in support of his own writing. The pseudonymous Sprezzatura went about slamming Siegel's critics, like Ezra Klein, who serves up the details and declines to gloat. And now TNR has killed Siegel's blog and suspended him from writing for the magazine.

The person I know with the best memory reminds me that in the past I've made fun of Lee Siegel's writing -- including once in a post with an update saying that the person I know with the best memory reminds me that in the past I've made fun of Lee Siegel's writing. So, I should be enjoying the poor critic's plight more than I'd realized.

Let's look at the old posts.

April 12, 2004:

"The marriage of comedy and politics is even more unhealthy than the marriage of church and state." So says Lee Siegel, TNR's TV critic. Too many metaphors: marriage and health. And unhealthy comedy is not going to kill anyone, whereas the diseases of the religion-state alliance have produced monumental evils throughout history.

But I agree with Siegel that right now politics is ruining comedy, especially The Daily Show (as I said here). Jon Stewart gets so much good press--the NYT never misses an opportunity to praise him--so it's really almost shocking to read strong criticism like this:

Stewart weighs down his jokes with a kind of Government 101 knowingness. He's not just funny about politics, you see, he's savvy about the way the system works, and he's going to help us through the maze. In Washington, "you have to cut through the partisan gridlock just to get to the bureaucratic logjam." Stop, you're killing me. But when it came to Richard Clarke and his controversial book, Stewart gave up even the pretense of being funny. ... Here was a slick, malleable, professional political advisor/operator, who had the choice of resigning in protest against an invasion of Iraq months before it took place, when such a protest might have had consequences, but chose instead to wait until his slighted ego burst at the seams--this Clarke, a true embodiment of human foible and folly, deserved to be manhandled by the spirit of laughter every bit as much as his accusations deserved to be defended by the spirit of truth. But like everybody else in public life, from politicians and pundits to performers and poets, Stewart wants to seem edifying and instructive. He wants to seem good.

Wanting to seem good is really bad for comedy. And, of course, picking a political side to be what is good is just bad for so many reasons. Siegel thinks Stewart is pandering to his audience, but I would think he's losing half of his audience. He's lost me. And (unlike Siegel) I was completely in love with him.

I'VE JUST GOT TO ADD: If I didn't independently agree with Siegel's opinion of The Daily Show, I would have been quite reluctant to trust him, because I think his instincts about comedy are a bit off, since he seems to have meant the following sentence to be taken seriously:

Politics hates the naked unbridled ego that laughter sets free; it hates it with the intensity with which laughter heaps its furies on the naked unbridled ego that hides behind the highflown sentiments of politics.

As Jon Stewart would say: Whaaaa?

From February 7, 2005:

Baby, you can't do my media criticism.

Here's the free link to get to Lee Siegel's TNR essay about why football provides the perfect showcase for ads. Assuming you want to get to it. It reads like this:

Last night, the brunt of the commercials during the first quarter were for cars, mostly SUVs and minivans. Even a very unexcited-looking Paul McCartney ("Thank you Super Bowl!" he kept shouting) sang, as the first of four songs in his halftime show, "Baby You Can Drive My Car." The interesting thing about a car is that it's a piece of property that you can inhabit while traversing, or entering, other people's property. That's what Brady's team was doing as it moved down the field. So what was happening in the stadium and what was occurring on the tube were mutual reinforcements of this illusion of sovereign motion.

Well, first, that really is not the interesting thing about a car. But second, what laughably tedious writing! The weird thing is that it reminded me a lot of the great old George Carlin routine comparing football and baseball.

Funnily enough, over at Klein's post, you can see that Sprezzatura said things like this:

There's this awful suck-up named Ezra Klein--his "writing" is sweaty with panting obsequious ambition--who keeps distorting everything Siegel writes--the only way this no-talent can get him. And I ask myself: why is it the young guys who go after Siegel? Must be because he writes the way young guys should be writing: angry, independent, not afraid of offending powerful people. They on the other hand write like aging careerists: timid, ingratiating, careful not to offend people who are powerful. They hate him because they want to write like him but can't. Maybe if they'd let themselves go and write truthfully, they'd get Leon Wieseltier to notice them too.

Ha! Lee Siegel is a ridiculously bad writer.

"Spielberg knows how to overwhelm."

"But I am tired of being overwhelmed. Why should I admire somebody for his ability to manipulate me? In other realms of life, this talent is known as demagoguery. There are better reasons to turn to art, better reasons to go to the movies, than to be blown away." -- Leon Wieseltier on "Munich."

I have no basis for an opinion on "Munich" specifically, but that statement hits home for me. It expresses so much of what keeps me away from the movies.

Constitutional thrills. For me, apparently, daylight savings means waking up in the middle of the night and seeing that the time is close enough to a reasonable hour to go ahead and get up. The NYT is here, I can check out the overnight activity on my blog. Hmm... someone came here after doing a Yahoo search for "this kind of very comprehensive supreme being, Seeger-type thing," a phrase Justice Breyer used to refer to God in the Newdow oral argument. This entry of mine is one of only three results for that. I'm surprised more people haven't commented on Breyer's striking locution.

One of the search results is just a reprint of Leon Wieseltier's article in The New Republic, "What America Can Learn From Its Atheists."

Citing United States v. Seeger from 1965, though he might have illustrated his speculation more vividly with the historical precedent of the Cult of the Supreme Being in revolutionary Paris, Breyer proposed that such a faith "in any ordinary person's life fills the same place as belief in God fills in the life of an orthodox religionist," and so "it's reaching out to be inclusive"--so inclusive, in fact, that it may satisfy a non-believer such as Newdow. Breyer suggested that the God in "under God" is "this kind of very comprehensive supreme being, Seeger-type thing." And he posed an extraordinary question to Newdow: "So do you think that God is so generic in this context that it could be that inclusive, and if it is, then does your objection disappear?"

Oh, yes, life would be so much more vivid if Supreme Court Justice's would stop being so stodgy as to prefer references to their own old cases! Please cite more foreign sources, Justices, because that is way more fun ... and it gets a rise out of Scalia.

Anyway, the only thing extraordinary about Breyer's statement is the idiosyncratic syntax. The idea itself is straight out of ... oh, how tedious ... some old Supreme Court cases. But Wieseltier is jazzed up by the way Newdow did not back down, even though, obviously, since he's trying to win his case, he wouldn't. Breyer was just asking for a response to the utterly predictable argument that generic ceremonial deism doesn't violate the Establishment Clause.

Newdow's objection did not disappear, because it is one of the admirable features of atheism to take God seriously. Newdow's reply was unforgettable: "I don't think that I can include 'under God' to mean 'no God,' which is exactly what I think. I deny the existence of God." The sound of those words in that room gave me what I can only call a constitutional thrill. This is freedom.

If only more ideologues could get the opportunity to do Supreme Court arguments, more constitutional thrills could be had by all. According to Wieseltier:

Breyer was advocating the Lockean variety of toleration, according to which it would be based on a convergence of conviction, a consensus about the truth, among the overwhelming majority of the members of a society. The problem with such an arrangement is that the convergence is never complete and the consensus is never perfect. Locke himself instructed that "those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the Being of a God." The universal absolute is never quite universal. And there is another problem. It is that nobody worships a "very comprehensive supreme being, Seeger-type thing." Such a level of generality, a "generic" God, is religiously senseless.

Except that Breyer wasn't invoking Locke's idea about freeing up the discourse so the individual can search for the true answer. Breyer was talking about an invocation of God that is too bland and generic to warrant judicial intervention. What Wiesentier is calling a "problem" is the central point Breyer's argument makes: no one's version of God is being preferred. And it isn't fair to Locke either, again quite obviously. Is the person who makes the first big step toward freedom and away from repression to be raked over the coals because his step was not big enough? Should we impute a blindspot that existed in 1689 to Locke's intellectual descendants of today? That's just sophistry. The ceremonial deism idea--even though it can be criticized as encouraging the ennervation of serious religion--is valuable because it allows courts to avoid excessive intervention in small matters. That ideologues can pump up small things and make them seem all-important is very old news.