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.”

GOP Gone Wild

Utah Republicans have thrown out sitting Sen. Bill Bennett on the grounds that he’s merely ultraconservative in a state that now demands superultraconservativism from its politicians. (I guess the Tea Party wasn’t kidding when it claimed to have taken over the state GOP.) Bennett is apparently threatening a scorched-earth write-in campaign, but it’s still Utah: the Democrats won’t win no matter what.