…and the unpersuaded yahoos:

…maybe that is what defines an elite: the lip-curled reproach to anything that has come before this privileged and smug generation—tradition, faith, heroic self-denial—and the illusion that their disdain is somehow a broader and more enlightened “love.”

For the most part, the “yahoo” non-elites do not begrudge the gentry their private jets, their private clubs, and their private schools. They do, however, begrudge them the superior dismissal of their values, and the constant attempts to control how others get to live their lives.

The ineducable masses begrudge the hectoring about their taste for “gas guzzlers,” from people who ride in limos. They dislike being dismissed as “provincial” or “parochial” by people who only associate with others of the same neighborhood and mindset. They are weary of being portrayed as less compassionate, less well-meaning, gosh darn it just lesser people because they believe in giving an equal-opportunity hand-up, rather than an impossible-to-sustain equal-hand-out.

The elites don’t want to be called “elite.” But they reinforce the perception with every tax-shelter they pursue, every privilege they grasp, every tax bill they can’t be bothered to pay until they’re forced to, and when they pretend that middle-class wages are undertaxed, greedy, ignoble, selfish, and unfair.

I wouldn’t mind quite so much if they were really, you know, elite, instead of someone who managed to get a piece of paper from Harvard or Yale.

If Barack Obama were a commercial product, his campaign staff would be liable for a false-advertising lawsuit:

On the intelligence claims, no proof has ever surfaced that any of the Obama brainiac hoopla was anything other than gratuitous accolades granted via affirmative action and white-liberal racial guilt. No transcripts. No professional articles. Nothing. Nada. From kindergarten through law school, not a single shred of evidence has ever surfaced to show that Barack Obama was ever even a good student, much less the brainy wizard of his advertisers’ imaginations. Since the candidate openly admitted to lots of high-school and college drug use, plenty of hoops-shooting, but nary a blip of organized sports rigor, it’s entirely within the realm of probability that those transcripts have been buried with the same malevolent intent as tobacco companies who deep-sixed their own negative research.

Tsk. Tsk. That would be one mighty big class action suit if politicians had to follow the same credibility rules they set for business.

Then, let’s take those godlike claims. The ones to end the rising of the seas and heal all the sick. Well, anyone who bought that overstuffed load of narcissistic hype is a candidate for the evolutionary throwback pail, but still, it was a heap of fraudulent advertising, the likes of which would put any American business on the bankruptcy auction block in a Chicago minute. The fact that the candidate did nothing to discourage such over-hyping garbage and the fact that he even indulged it to the nth degree would make him lawsuit-fodder in anyone’s book.

It would be nice if we could sue the media outlets that refused to vet him as well.

And on a related note, thoughts on Mad Men from James Lileks.

In which she unknowingly demonstrates her bigotry.