Newt Gingrich’s symphony of resentment at the media last night for daring to bring up the question of his marital infidelity was utterly predictable. And yet, mostly because of CNN debate moderator John King’s inability to follow up in any way, it was wildly successful at neutralizing the issue, and will propel Gingrich to victory in South Carolina on Saturday.

Whenever conservatives get caught with their hands in the till they shout, “Class Warfare!” at those of us who would like to stop their looting. Thinking this a negative, they forget, I guess, that the American democratic experiment was and is just that: a class war.

It has always been about equality vs. aristocracy. It was in the beginning, is now, and will always be.

It’s a shocking historical juxtaposition. The pro-democracy movement known as the Arab Spring is in significant part a consequence of rising literacy and declining birth rates in the Mideast. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the Right is mounting a direct assault on education and a renewed war on contraception. This ought to tell us something.

We were idling away the evening on the balcony, drinking wine and talking about everything from the Keith Richards book to Medicare cuts. Our neighbors – she a world class blues singer; he an accomplished painter, musician and entertaining raconteur – were just paying a warm, old-American style social call.

But when I happened to mention that many today consider our generation, the Sixties generation, a failure, I set the singer’s eyes ablaze and we took off on a lively historical survey of the last few decades.

One of the maddening riddles of American life is why a country with an egalitarian ethos and the world’s oldest democratic system could allow itself to become a grossly unequal land of haves and have nots in recent decades – a society with a pattern of income distribution now closer to that of Brazil than, say, Germany.

Look no further for an answer to the riddle. This alarming new book by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson offers up perhaps the best explanation so far of how the U.S. got on the path to plutocracy.

A woman so stupid she married Jonah Goldberg is the person Sarah Palin chose to ghost”write” her editorial collage of American exceptionalism.

Welcome Dave Neiwert and John Amato, Hosted by Watertiger. [As a courtesy to our guests, please keep comments to the book.  Please take other conversations to a previous thread.  - bev] Over the Cliff: How the Obama Election Drove The American Right Insane To say that the election of the first African-American President of the [...]

I’ve seen people variously describe the Gulf of Mexico catastrophe as “Obama’s Katrina” or “Obama’s 9/11,” but neither of those entirely works for me as a parallel. True, the government was woefully unprepared and ineffectual in 2001 and 2005 too, but that was because Bush was the worst president ever, not because industry lobbyists crusaded to cripple FEMA and airport security. Bush’s incompetence left the door to tragedy wide open, and Katrina and al Qaeda breezed right through it.

The New York Times front page editors waste our time with an above the fold piece in which Peter Baker ponders how unusual it was for President Obama to say “I was wrong,” since none of his predecessors could manage much more than “mistakes were made.” But wrong about what?

Conservatism, it appears, is being Reinvented, and this is a Fun Thing.