A Picasso Of Asininity

While the conservative blogosphere, as well as some of the more conservative dead tree media, have been pleased to see that lifelong liberal David Mamet has “seen the light”. Writes Jonah Goldberg:

"As a child of the '60s," he recently wrote in a startling and lively essay for the Village Voice, "I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart."

But Mamet has changed his mind. The accretions left from wave after crashing wave of reality made it impossible for him to carry the load of his cognitive dissonance. For years he'd called NPR "National Palestinian Radio." He'd realized that while government may be incompetent, corporations at times myopic, and the military imperfect, seeing politics through the prism of a Thomas Nast cartoon (you know, where industrialists are cast as pigs in tuxedos feeding at the public trough) might not be as wise as, say, The Village Voice believes it is.

"I began reading not only the economics of Thomas Sowell (our greatest contemporary philosopher) but Milton Friedman, Paul Johnson and Shelby Steele ... and found that I agreed with them: a free-market understanding of the world meshes more perfectly with my experience than that idealistic vision I called liberalism."

However, some of his former political compatriots are aghast at his conversion.

Michael Billington might have a different response. "I am depressed to read that David Mamet has swung to the right," wrote the Guardian's theater critic of more than three decades. "What worries me is the effect on his talent of locking himself into a rigid ideological position."

This response is quite simply perfect, a Picasso of asininity, a Mona Lisa of moronic imbecility.

Excuse me? “Locking himself into a rigid ideological position”? Some of the most rigid, ideologically locked people I have ever come across have been those from the Left. For the most part they have been indoctrinated, some since they were children, and others through their post-high school years. They've been spoon-fed a morally bankrupt and politically corrupt ideology that has, in its many incarnations, killed millions through actions, direct or indirect.

Many of the conservatives I know did not grow up conservative. Instead, they went through an awakening all by themselves, with no coaching or indoctrination from those walking the halls of academia. In many cases they were liberals who were finally mugged by reality, realizing the political ideology they'd been following was a hollow shell, offering feel good platitudes, pseudo-intellectual political dogma, a piss poor understanding of our fellow humans and what motivates them, and little understanding of how the world works. The Left knows how they'd like to believe the world to be, but they don't truly understand what it's really like out there.

Welcome to the fold, Mr. Mamet.