National Insult My Intelligence Tour 2008

That Bérubé fellow is back.

“Michael, please,” says my imaginary interlocutor. “You know perfectly well that even the ‘high-end conservative pundits’ will slurp down any old slop they’re fed by the party. That’s their job. It’s degrading and dehumanizing, sure, and a lot of them can’t face themselves in the morning anymore, but you have to remember that the pay is awfully good.”

“What about Bill Kristol?” I asked my imaginary interlocutor. “I mean, he’s the very most hackiest of the hacks, but he’s also the child of two serious conservative intellectuals. Do you think he has any morning sickness about Palin-shilling?”

“The thing about Kristol,” I.I. replied, “is that after he’s dead, we’re going to find out not only that he has no vital oils but that he has no internal organs whatsoever. No higher-order consciousness, no pineal gland housing the soul. What’s in there instead? Just balsam wood from tip to toe.”

Funny, huh?

Than, in Bérubésqué fashion, he makes a good point.

But then a non-imaginary interlocutor said a most interesting thing. (It was a dinner for twelve people, and I didn’t catch his name, or I’d tell you.) He pointed out that the right-wing culture war against pointy-headed intellectuals does not extend to the judiciary. On the contrary, he said, it’s as if they’re willing to run a cephalopod and a bag of hammers for the executive branch (I don’t think these were his exact words), but they actually recruit and train all their intellectual firepower for the courts (those were pretty much his exact words). And, of course, he’s right: Scalia, Alito, Roberts—these are all graduates from Pointyheaded Liberal Elite Law School, Evil Genius Division, and the glaring exception, Clarence Thomas, was a Palinesque conservative-affirmative-action fuck-you payback for the rejection of Elitist Evil Genius Robert Bork.

And the right-wing noise machine got the memo, too: witness the fact that everyone on the right, even down to bottom-feeding shriekers like Michelle Malkin, duly took up their torches and pitchforks when Bush nominated Harriet Miers. I was wrong, I realize now, to have called Palin Harriet Miers 2.0. Because Harriet Miers was ridden out of town on a rail, in a matter of days, by many of the same people who are now digging in, doubling down, and rooting hard for Palin against the mocking liberal elites. When it comes to the highest court in the land, these right-wing hacks don’t put up with no second- and third-stringers.