LuminousVoid

There’s been a tiff lately between Juan Cole, Middle Eastern Studies Professor, and Jonah Goldberg, uh, pundit. They’ve been going back and forth. The latest salvo has been from Cole. Without getting into all the details, I want to give kudos to Cole for this bit, tangential to his argument:

Cranky rich people hire sharp-tongued and relatively uninformed young people all the time and put them on the mass media to badmouth the poor, spread bigotry, exalt mindless militarism, promote anti-intellectualism, and ensure generally that rightwing views come to predominate even among people who are harmed by such policies. One of their jobs is to marginalize progressives by smearing them as unreliable.