Alan Wolfe on Schmitt
Alan Wolfe's essay on the little known philosopher Karl Schmitt (found via Brett) is worth reading, even though it rehashes the familiar theory that liberals are interested in fairness, while conservatives are just interested in winning. But Wolfe also gets a couple of things wrong:

[Republicans] have recently gotten far out of the sheer element of surprise, leaving the news media without a vocabulary for describing their ruthlessness . . .

Actually, the news media do have a vocabulary for describing their ruthlessness. The problem is that they don't use it, partly because another ruthless Republican tactic is to call the media liberal and biased, and partly because they really do seem clueless. In 2000, for example, they could have given us the back story on Karl Rove and George W. Bush, but the media didn't do any historical research. And, of course, the American news media isn't really focused on news in the sense that the rest of the world uses that word.