I remembered reading this from The Village Voice in 2008 while I was reading this in The Weekly Standard from last week about David Mamet’s conversion of the left to the right, liberal to conservative. The first article, an essay actually, by Mamet himself, had the better title: “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead’ Liberal.” The second is the story of what’s happened since.
Read both. Maybe–if you find yourself on the left bank–you’ll be persuaded to convert too. After all, his family looks happy.
The Economist gets the thumbs up for the best line of the week. In an editorial titled “Damned,” the magazine laments the possible loss of DSK’s ideas because of his fall from grace. “They are more important [than him,” the editorial says. And why? Well among other things, he stood to become the first Socialist Party candidate to win the presidency of France since François Mitterrand ate Ortolan Bunting.
That’s important because DSK apparently knows something his party doesn’t (bolding mine):
The danger now, as Socialist alternatives line up, is that the party sloughs off its modernising aspirations and reverts to type. Unlike parties of the left in Britain or Germany, France’s Socialists have yet to digest the sour reality that wealth needs to be created before it can be distributed. Their draft manifesto includes a jaw-dropping pledge to reverse France’s minimum retirement age, which has only just been raised from 60 years to 62. The Socialists’ reflex is to tell the French that they need to be “protected” and “sheltered”. However, the French cannot for ever defy the laws of economics and protect themselves with costly benefits that only pile up huge public debts for future generations. France’s tragedy is that Mr Strauss-Kahn, who understood that, misunderstood so much else.
Comments (0) 
Themocracy