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“...both David Gergen and Ed Rollins echoed the current mantra that the “old” noble McCain is gone, and a “new” nastier one has emerged..” ~ V D Hanson

Gergen, Rollins, and the rest of the losers can get a glimpse of themselves in this mirror, and it ain’t pretty:

At the forest’s edge
http://newcriterion.com/archives/26/03/at-the-forests-edge
by Anthony Daniels

In his essay, The Empire of the Ugly, the great Belgian Sinologist and literary essayist Simon Leys recounts the story of how, writing one day in a café, a small incident gave him an insight into the real nature of philistinism.

A radio was playing in the background, a mixture of banal and miscellaneous chatter and equally banal popular music. No one in the café paid any attention to this stream of tepid drivel until suddenly, unexpectedly and inexplicably, the first bars of Mozart’s clarinet quintet were played. “Mozart,” Leys says, “took possession of our little space with a serene authority, transforming the café into an antechamber of Paradise.”

The other people in the café, who until then were chatting, playing cards, or reading the newspaper, were not deaf to the radio after all. The music silenced them, they looked at each other, disconcerted. “Their disarray lasted only a few seconds: to the relief of all, one of them stood up, changed the radio station and re-established the flow of noise that was more familiar and comforting, which everyone could then properly ignore.”

Here is the conclusion that Leys draws:

At that moment, I was struck by an obvious fact that has never left me since: that the real philistines are not those people incapable of recognizing beautythey recognize it only too well, with a flair as infallible as that of the subtlest aesthete, but only to pounce on it and smother it before it can take root in their universal empire of ugliness. [snip]

Strategic Intention and Mass Man
by J. R. Nyquist
http://www.financialsense.com/stormwatch/geo/pastanalysis/2008/0314.html

“..There recently appeared an essay by Anthony Daniels, http://newcriterion.com/archives/26/03/at-the-forests-edge published in The New Criterion, http://newcriterion.com/ in which he summarized Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset’s notion of “mass man” as the man “who goes from distraction to distraction, who is prey to absurd fashions, who never thinks deeply….” In the first decade of the twenty-first century this is all too familiar. In 2008 we live in a society dominated by “mass men,” overtaken by mass psychology, mass media, mass schooling and the mass ignorance presently crowding in around us.
Today’s mass audience cannot distinguish the important from the trivial. What needs to be acknowledged, and one day will be acknowledged, is the very real distinction between “low-minded” and “high-minded,” between moral courage and venial conformism, between thinkers and fakers. This is what it comes down to. [snip]