Apologies for that last. Rather than waste your time on William Kris­tol and Leo Strauss, can I instead sug­gest you ease your Monday-​morning pro­cras­ti­na­tions with John Latta on William Logan on Frank O’Hara? Thanks.

Lured by the open­ing ref­er­ence to Leo Strauss, I unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cally man­aged to make it through William Kristol’s extra­or­di­nary Times column this morn­ing. Here’s how it begins:

Half a cen­tury ago the philoso­pher Leo Strauss remarked that the pas­sage in which the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence pro­claims its self-​evident truths “has fre­quently been quoted, but, by its weight and its ele­va­tion, it is made immune to the degrad­ing effects of the exces­sive famil­iar­ity which breeds con­tempt and of misuse which breeds disgust.”

What’s extra­or­di­nary about the column is that Kris­tol doesn’t misuse Strauss. Most people who cite that quo­ta­tion from Nat­ural Right and His­tory cite it as evi­dence of Strauss’s good­will toward Amer­i­can democ­racy. But of course it’s noth­ing of the kind; in fact it’s the open­ing salvo in a long, dense, and often decep­tive attack on the philo­soph­i­cal and polit­i­cal jus­ti­fi­ca­tions of democ­racy itself.

Which is why I found it fairly amaz­ing to see Kris­tol follow the Strauss­ian line through to its nasty anti-​democratic end, right there in the Op-​Ed pages of the New York Times:

Tumbling on the heels on that last story is this item from the No Good Deed Goes Unpun­ished Depart­ment: it turns out that Andy Martin, the orig­i­nal pro­moter of the Obama Muslim smear, has now decided to smear… that’s right, the person who called him out in the Wash­ing­ton Post: Danielle Allen.

Here’s some high­lights from the ridicu­lous press release that Martin put out today. If you have any ques­tions about the tal­ents, intel­li­gence, or reli­a­bil­ity of Prof. Allen, I hap­pily direct you here and here and even here.

Now, back to our reg­u­larly sched­uled buffoonery:

“In so far as my con­tact with the Post,” Martin will state, “Mr. Mosk accu­rately reports my role and, as far as I can remem­ber, cor­rectly reports our interview.

“But Mosk pro­duced an incom­plete form of jour­nal­ism. He writes a long arti­cle about Danielle Allen, but she is a very sus­pi­cious char­ac­ter to say the least.

…Read More…

The Wash­ing­ton Post has a nice story up about Danielle Allen’s efforts to trace the ori­gins of the Obama-is-a-Muslim smear.

I should start by saying that Allen is some­thing of a hero to many us who know her even slightly, and not just because she earned two doc­tor­ates by the time she was 29. I don’t know her at all well, but as Dean of the Human­i­ties Divi­sion at the U. of C. she was the uni­ver­sity offi­cer most directly respon­si­ble for Chicago Review.

Ben Smith at Politico takes a swipe at Allen–or at least the Post’s val­i­da­tion of her research–for coming too late to a story that’s already been cov­ered by him and others:

There’s some inter­est­ing stuff in the story about how a smear spreads, but I’m not sure where the two doc­tor­ates come in. Indeed, Allen could have made it to her key discovery—that the author of the smear was a mar­ginal Illi­nois char­ac­ter named Andy Martin—without even resort­ing to The Google. Chris Hayes (who, with Jonathan Martin and me, has been obsess­ing about this since last fall) tracked it back to Martin in his Nation piece last October.

This kind of turf-​guarding is fairly pre­dictable, espe­cially when it’s jour­nal­ists and aca­d­e­mics who are stand­ing on oppo­site sides of the picket fence. (Smith, joking about Hayes: “Give that man a Ph.D. Or two.”)

But Smith’s self-​confessed super­cil­ious­ness seems mis­placed.