Just a Few Monday Links

* We live in a time of noblesse oblige without the oblige — wealth disguised as merit and merit as a pretext for malice. Nobility dodges, nobility punishes. Nobility pretends it is not nobility, and tells us to take out short-term loans.

* On writing, and then revising, a dissertation: As much as you may hate what you’re writing at this exact moment, you will only feel a more precise and exhausted loathing toward it later on.

* Ezra Klein: Five thoughts on the Obamacare disaster.

* Histories of the Tea Party from Jacobin and the New Yorker.

* Kevin Drum steals my bit: Can America Survive Parliamentary Norms in a Presidential System?

* To my tenured colleagues.

* And MetaFilter considers “League of Denial.”

I’ve Got My Pipe Because We’re Going to Speak About Schoolish Kind of Things

In 2007, Beck, then the host of “Glenn Beck,” on CNN’s Headline News, brought to his show a John Birch Society spokesman named Sam Antonio, who warned of a government plot to abolish U.S. borders with Mexico and Canada, “and eventually all throughout the Americas.” Beck told Antonio, “When I was growing up, the John Birch Society—I thought they were a bunch of nuts.” But now, he said, “you guys are starting to make more and more sense to me.”

A secret history of Glenn Beck, by way of Robert Welch, Willard Cleon Skousen and the John Birch Society. From the New Yorker.