…is the title of an essay published in the Village Voice this week, by the undisputed greatest living playwright, David Mamet. If you, like me, have alternately enjoyed and been sickened by the Hillary/Obama circus of 2008, you need to read this essay, in which an entrenched, lifelong lefty reveals how he came upon the light-bulb realization that he had converted over to the right side (pun intended), while listening to NPR (the “National Palestinian Radio”). He is not the first.

I have mostly stayed away from politics in this blog, especially where Iraq is concerned, as it is impossible for me to currently have a fair view of that topic. But when an icon of the left explains with clarity, cogency, and depth the silliness that inevitably led him away from the histrionics of modern liberalism (”dark forces arrayed to thwart the delivery of benevolence to fragile masses”), I had to take note. Warning: there is a single bad word in this column (the mother of all bad words, so to speak, but one which, I am obliged to confess, may have passed somewhere around the vicinity of my brain in the exact situation Mamet describes).

By the way: there is a new Iraq entry below.