Dana Milbank is a simpleton

Dear Mr. Milbank,
I am still trying to wrap my brain around your recent offering "Is it
wise to be so smart?" from the May 30 edition of the paper.

Apart for your kooky imaginings of Iowa hog farmers, references to the
great thinkers of our age, like "Schwartz from Germantown" and
thinking Abe Lincoln is somehow "esoteric", there really wasn't much
of the actual Gore book presented. In fact, I think you were able to
summarize (incorrectly) the whole thesis of the book in about one
sentence. Here it is: "The Bush administration has manipulated the
facts on the Iraq war and a range of other policies, the public has
been easily manipulated, and Americans watch too much television."

Brilliant!

Would you like to see how a real journalist might do it? Someone who
is literate perhaps?

Someone who knows the difference between Adam Smith and Thomas
Jefferson? Someone with a nodding acquiantance with learning or
history or facts? Well, here for the record is Jonathan Alter over at
Newsweek:

"Gore starts from a trenchant premise that our means of processing
information and finding rational solutions are badly corrupted by
television, a theme he has been exploring since college. Without any
misplaced nostalgia for a pre-TV age, he argues that the "marketplace
of ideas" that grew out of the rise of the printed word and the
Enlightenment has been largely supplanted by a medium best suited to
stoking fear, which is, he notes, "the most powerful enemy of reason."
The human mind, Gore writes, is now nearly hard-wired to respond to
emotional but fundamentally trivial human-interest stories on TV."
(Or apparently also in the Post.)

You can read the rest here, and you should.

Isn't it amazing the way he organizes words so that they form coherent
thoughts? And that the thoughts he writes actually have something to
do with the book he is discussing?

You may need to consult a dictionary for some of the difficult or
"erudite" words, like "trenchant", "premise" and "supplanted". You
should not feel ashamed to do so. Writers should know what words
mean. Also, "medium" here refers to a means of conveying information,
not something of middle size.

But you will eventually get the hang of it. Keep trying.

Trenchantly yours,
V. Publius

P.S. I cannot possibly improve on Jonathan Alter's review of The Assault on Reason, however, I would like to quote just one brief passage that occurs on page 248:

"I believe that the viability of democracy depends upon the openness, reliability, appropriateness, responsiveness, and two-way nature of the communications environment. After all, democracy depends upon the regular sending and receiving of signals -- not only between the people and those who aspire to be their elected representatives but also among the people themselves. It is the connection of each individual to the national conversation that is the key. I believe that the citizens of any democracy learn, over time, to adopt a basic posture toward the possibilities of self-government. ... My generation learned in our youth to expect that democracy would work. ... Many young Americans now seem to feel that the jury is out on whether American democracy actually works or not."

Crass, self-centered, pedantic, smug, erudite, and esoteric
or
cogent, clear, straight-forward, prescient, compelling and principled?

I ask you.