Taibbi: “All over, ‘smart’ lost its luster. ‘Smart’ bombs turned out mainly to be efficient machines for creating civilian casualties, ‘intelligence’ became a synonym for grotesque security oversights and mass law-breaking, and commercial media especially became a place where the ordinary person could see the almost total moral uselessness of advanced degrees. In one of Sandel’s most interesting passages, he talks about the conclusions the average person drew from watching the increasing vapidity of ‘ what passes for political argument’ in public discourse: ‘Citizens across the political spectrum find this empty public discourse frustrating and disempowering. They rightly sense that the absence of robust public debate does not mean that no policies are being decided. It simply means they are being decided elsewhere, out of public view…’”#