"not to get panglossian but I think..."

not to get panglossian but I think these hearings are helping the Ds become the party of wholesomeness and patriotism and the Rs the party of grievance and pettiness. that would be a disaster watershed moment for the party of Reagan.

— Harry Litman (@harrylitman) November 19, 2019

Who's Litman? His Twitter profile says: "Washington Post columnist. Former US Attorney, DOJ official.Teach con law at UCSD and UCLA. Practice law @CCWhistleblower. Exec. prod. & host, @talkingfedspod."

This tweet is such a perfect example of cocooned liberal self-love. If there is one thing that has given me energy from Day 1 of this blog, it is my aversion to cocooned liberal self-love.

The word in that tweet that really gets me is "wholesomeness." Imagine staring at Adam Schiff for hours thinking, oh, that is so reassuring, he's so gosh-darn wholesome.

I like the "panglossian," and not just because I'm elite-educated enough to know what it means. Click my Voltaire tag to check my credibility. But I looked up "panglossian" in the OED anyway, in the hope of finding some good quotes. The best one is from Thomas Hardy (1922): "Should anything of this sort in the following adumbrations seem ‘queer’—should any of them seem to good Panglossians to embody strange and disrespectful conceptions of this best of all possible worlds, I apologize; but cannot help it."

Absorbed in the OED, I looked up "cocoon." When did the silky larva-spun case break out into the butterfly of figurative usage? The OED says1865 (D. Masson Recent Brit. Philos.): "That power of thinking which has involved itself in such a vast cocoon of wonders." And 1870 (J. R. Lowell My Study Windows): "The mind can weave itself warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts."

ADDED: I clicked on my Voltaire tag and noticed this drawing of a bust of Voltaire (which I scrawled many years ago at the Louvre and blogged in the first year of blogging):



And I got something out of this previously blogged Voltaire quote: "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." I don't know if that's patriotic and wholesome, but it's great support for the proposition that Donald Trump does not rule over us. You can totally criticize that guy as much as you want. It's strongly encouraged!