Lots of emails about the chat with the president-elect the other evening. But the chat was off the record, and I'm a stickler for that shit. Also, you can't prove it didn't happen, the WF-Obama Summit Chat. But rest assured it is very good news that Obama is willing to hob-nob with a bunch of dirty fucking hippies as well as the mentally ill, a bunch of head-up-their-ass douchenozzles, and Rachel Maddow. I can't give details, but just allow me to say that the man is pretty much a commie (for reals!), and he thinks Andrew Sullivan's geyser-like gushing is very, very embarrassing for everyone involved.
UPDATE. Here's the unofficial list of the Important Opinion People from the Right on the one hand, and the Nowhere Especially on the other, with whom Obama has met:
George Will, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Larry Kudlow, David Brooks, Rich Lowry, Peggy Noonan, Michael Barone, Paul Gigot, E. J. Dionne, Eugene Robinson, Gerry Seib, Ron Brownstein, Frank Rich, Maureen Dowd, Andrew Sullivan, and Rachel Maddow.
With all due respect to Maddow, who is the only unexpected and arguably non-insider-y person here, this is a genuinely unimpressive A-List of American public intellectuals. Some (most) of these people are stone crazy, some (most) have a history of being spectacularly wrong. But pretty much all of them are lightweights. If someone wants to compile Krauthammer: The Complete Works, I'd imagine that tome would only have any value right now, in the sense that to get the book out, he'd have to stop writing altogether immediately, and that would be very welcome. But nobody's going to be teaching Krauthammer in decades to come, though he'll probably get cited in future dissertations for much the same reason I cited editorials from the Catholic Bulletin in my own dissertation: as evidence of just how bananas a particular time and place actually was.
It is genuinely appalling just how flat-out stupid the official discourse of the nation is, not so much because the people who produce it are stupid (though they often are), but because willful stupidity is so remunerative.
