Novelists are, apparently, nincompoops.

Slate has a "survey" up consisting of comments by American novelists on the election at http://slate.msn.com/id/2107890/. It is a remarkable document and reminds me again why I fled academia and teaching literature for the law. These people are remarkable ninnies, hysterical know-nothings who mouth the received wisdom of the left-liberal media-Hollywood-academia-Iowa Writers' Workshop cocoon. Joyce Carol Oates' comment is most illuminating, and recalls Pauline Kael's famous comment about Richard Nixon's 49 state triumph in 1972. Befuddled, Kael wrote, "None of the people I know voted for Nixon." Now Oates writes, "Like virtually everyone I know, I'm voting for Kerry. And probably for exactly the same reasons."

These people never talk to anyone who won't nod at them and say, "yes, yes, oh, yes, I agree, completely!" They don't even know the basic factual arguments that their arguments would need to deal with in order to hold any water at all. For instance, a writer named Dan Chaon (never heard of him) says he's "alarmed" by Bush's "attacks on civil liberties." Does he know that both Kerry and Edwards voted for the Patriot Act and that the Patriot Act only gives law enforcement the same tools for terrorists it has to fight organized crime? He says he's also alarmed "by the deliberate lies that brought us into a poorly planned war." Is he aware that Kerry, as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, saw the same intelligence Bush did and voted to give him authorization for the war? Is he aware of the fact that the Clinton administration made regime change in Iraq our national policy in 1998? He is alarmed by "tax cuts which (that?) so nakedly benefit the very few to the detriment of almost everybody else." Is he aware that everybody got a tax cut, that the top-end tax payers now pay a greater percentage of the total income tax than they did before, that many of the so-called "rich" are actually subchapter-S corporations that do most of the hiring in America, that nearly 50% of Americans pay no income tax whatsoever? Does he understand that the unemployment rates in high-tax, highly-redistributionist countries like France and Germany are nearly double the American rates? Chaon is also alarmed by "the ugly, merciless No Child Left Behind educational policy." Could he go back into the Senate records and find out that Kerry voted for it too? Finally, he is alarmed by "the reckless budget deficit." Does he know any history? Economics? Basic math? Can he figure out the percentage of GDP -- the only meaningful way to measure a deficit -- that the current deficit represents? Does he understand that it is not very large historically, and that running deficits to get out of a recession to stimulate growth is mainstream Econ 101 policy? (Oh, I forgot, he was probably an English major and never took an economics class.)

Here's the clincher. Chaon writes, "I find myself particularly repelled by Bush's professed 'Christianity,' even as his administration repudiates every value that Christ represents. He's probably not the Antichrist, but he comes as close as I've seen in my lifetime." So there we have it, at bottom the left is an irrational Manichaean worldview, Manichaean because it views the world as a battle of good versus evil, irrational because they are convinced that Christian conservatives are the evil enemy, and not the Islamofascists who murdered 3000 Americans in the heart of our biggest city.