The rats and the sinking ship

From Variety, per Drudge:

At the same time, a few conservative hosts are joining in the chorus of Bush administration criticism on issues such as the Dubai port-management deal, lending some credibility to their claims that they don’t simply parrot Republican National Committee talking points. At the very least, political passions make for a lively debate, the life’s blood of programs such as Fox News’ “Hannity & Colmes.”

Both TV and cable talkers are also finding ancillary topics that play to a conservative base. The so-called “culture wars” and “liberal Hollywood,” for example, figure to get a vigorous workout in the wake of the Oscars…

I wonder how long the usual suspects can continue to beat that particular dead horse. There are a few ways in which the “culture war” is quite real, but for the most part it’s a means for Republican flacks to pull off a bait-and-switch, distracting their base from hard issues of economics and politics — politics as in what the government can do to you — and instead getting the base riled up about pop-cultural ephemera and impotent academic leftists. (Not all academic leftists are impotent, of course, but honestly, few enough students actually in sociology classes take their professors seriously; no one else does at all. Look to the law schools if you want to know where the real danger lies. For that matter, look to the Chicago School of Economics, too.)

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