Dinner Music For a Pack of Hungry Cannibals

When Jared Lee Loughner went on his rampage, Slate's Jacob Weisberg assured his readers that the reasons for the shooting included "inflammatory language about tyranny, betrayal, and taking back the country." Apparently it would have been safer to stick to inflammatory language about cannibalism, as in Weisberg's new column, which informs us that "A Congress dominated by mindless cannibals is now feasting on a supine president."

Credit where it's due: That may be a silly line, but it isn't a bad turn of phase. Since I don't subscribe to the theory that political violence is caused by pundits' metaphors—and since I disagree with virtually all of the arguments that constitute the rest of the rant—I'm happy to declare the sentence the high point of Weisberg's article.

The low point? Behold the soul of the frustrated technocrat:

At the level of political culture, we have learned some other sobering lessons: that compromise is dead and that there's no point trying to explain complicated matters to the American people.