IDIOT

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The arrogance of the pundit can be excused if s/he has something at least moderately intelligent, interesting or arguable to say. But that a grown man with enough brain cells to move on two feet should deliver himself of the following atrocity and live not to even be mocked or subjected to proper invective (not insult, for to call such a man a

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He could have more advantageously mentioned Edward Macdowell or George Gershwin, but then Gershwin was tainted by the touch of plebeian pop music, and one has to actually know music - and not just listen to the classics channel every now and then - to know Macdowell.

And while what I saw red about was the insult to the great generation of sixties artists, there was another piece of crap in the same article, right at the start. The article started as one of the many anti-Newt Gingrich pieces that nearly every conservative pundit has been writing in the last week or two. (Honestly, Gingrich is so hated by his own party that if I were a Democrat I would pray for him to win the primaries; then I could just lie back and watch his own party rip him to pieces.) But where did he take his polemic? Not, as more sensible people have done, to a damning comparison with Richard Nixon; no, he linked Gingrich with Bill Clinton and Dominique Strauss-Kahn as having committed the original sin of having grown up in the sixties! It's all about the sixties, you see. In fact, not that I follow the bastard a lot - he is neither the most colourful nor the most interesting of conservatives - one thing I can tell you is that no piece of his is complete without an attack on baby boomers or hippies. He must have been scared by a hippy's beard as a child. And one could, perhaps, even make a case - after all, I said something similar about Berlusconi and Strauss-Kahn - but when you get to the enormity of denying the artistic achievement of the sixties, while suggesting that nobody like Gingrich had happened before, then, mate, you have proved and stated in letters of gold hammered in marble that you are nothing but a pathetic idiot.