Two more quick observations from last night’s Wesley Clark event. Or, rather, one from the event, and one from dinner beforehand. Both strike me as fairly general principles about political discourse:
1) Your current political opinions are interesting in inverse proportion to the number of times you use the word “fascist” or variants thereof. Likewise “communist” and variants thereof.
2) A colleague observed at dinner that a really remarkable number of problems are, at their base, due to people failing to understand irony or metaphor. Or, in his more colorful phrasing, “People who can’t handle the metaphorical use of language are completely fucked.”
Of course, an interesting question would be whether these two principles are in conflict…