Harper’s Is Good This Month

by tristero

I’m reluctant to take the focus off Woodward’s incredible behavior – and for the record, I think Digby is absolutely right regarding his suspicions as to where Woody learned Plame’s name – but I want to urge folks to be on the lookout for the latest issue of Harper’s on the newsstand. They usually don’t post the articles online so you’re gonna have to buy it (or got to a library) but it’s worth it.

Lewis Lapham has a rant against the Bush Cheney administration’s corruption in the Katrina reconstruction that is so blisteringly furious it makes The Rude Pundit appear like that Gautama Buddha. Lapham collects in one place all the sickening details. The corruption is endemic, and the absence of simple human decency so profound, it’s enough to make a grown man weep.

In addition, Stanley Fish gives the clearest exposition I’ve come across of the intellectual and rhetorical hijinks behind the marketing of “intelligent design” creationism. He makes the point many of us have made, that there’s a cynical hijacking (and distortion) of postmodern arguments by the rightwing, but he is able to provide far more information on how this is accomplished than I’ve seen before. The article is probably similar to this lecture Fish has been giving entitled “Three on a Match: Intelligent Design, Holocaust Denial, Postmodernism.”

As I’ve discussed numerous times, the marketing techniques on display in the “intelligent design” wars are the template for numerous other far right cultural battles. Really, you shouldn’t miss what Fish has to say.