should probably just be a comment somewhere but I'm having an Elvis Costello moment here, thinking for once over a long arc my aim is true. I think you have to have been an Ayn Rand freak 40 years ago (like I was) to see that in an exquisite concatenation of ironies, Clinton's speech last night was a Howard Roark-John Galt speech. Just by TELLING THE TRUTH he totally pantsed Romney-Ryan and the mainstream media. Roark did this at the end of The Fountainhead in a jury speech that got him acquitted for blowing up the housing project that the "second-handers" had prostituted, and Galt did it at the end of Atlas Shrugged when it was time for him to take over the world. (At least that is how I remember it.)
I actually agreed with Andrew Sullivan last night that it was liberating to hear Clinton speak the truth, liberating in the same way, strangely enough, that those old Rand books worked for me. How wonderful it was to think that Clinton's invocation of "cooperation" as the highest expression of the human spirit was as "objectively" true (it's still embarrassing sometimes to recall my "Randiness") as I used to feel about that old proud selfishness.
And not to go overboard on the literary allusions, but I thought the two plus two is four line was a conscious reference to the Orwellian nature of modern Republicanism, recalling Winston Smith's primal certainty that freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two is four.
One thing I know is true, and there has to be a recovering Randian out there that will testify: Karl Rove IS Ellsworth Toohey.