Jim Sleeper on Larry Summers On TPMCafe.com, Jim Sleeper writes smartly about how American conservatives spend more time taking aim at straw men and stereotypes than in addressing real issues that might make conservatism feel more relevant to modern life.

It’s a lot more fun to blame Columbia liberals for inviting Ahmadinejad than to show that American national-security strategists and savants nurtured, funded, armed, elevated, and stimulated the Iranian mullahtocracy from 1953 through the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal of 1985 and beyond. ...Similarly, it’s more fun to blame silly professors in California for cancelling a speaking invitation to Lawrence Summers than it is to expose the cheap fiction that as president of Harvard he was a brave, brilliant educator martyred on the altar of political correctness.

I think that's exactly right; the fable of Larry Summers' victimhood has some power, because it conforms to stereotypes that the right has and promotes about the left. But while in the short term the promotion of this fable may score conservatism some points, in the long run, it makes its advocates intellectually lazy and disengaged from deeper, truer problems. It's easy to bang the drums about political correctness and how the left has taken over our campuses—but in the end, it does no one any good, conservatives least of all.  ¶ 8:12 PM