Conservatives Accused of Being Too Literary

This is a nice follow-up to our link a couple of weeks ago to Amity Shlaes’ article on college professors upset that Glenn Beck is “assigning” books — the wrong books! books that no young Newsweek intern fresh out of Princeton was ever assigned! — to his viewers, to help provide them with the ultimate politically incorrect guide to history. (Hey, that would make a pretty good brand-name for a line of books.)

On his blog recently, Kyle Smith wrote:

David Brooks evokes Dr. Faustus as Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal compares President Obama to the doomed title character in The Man Who Would Be King. Those danged conservatives — why do they have to be so literary? An Atlantic writer calls them “heavy-handed.”

William F. Buckley, the late master of the perspicacious quotidian textual formulation would love the irony.