With two feet of Winter Storm Juno snow still on the ground, this morning I’m watching Nashua get a second blanket from Linus. (You don’t often get an opportunity for a pun like that; I couldn’t resist.) But the blogosphere has no snow days, here we go.
This week’s featured article collects what I see as the highlights of an interesting argument, the one touched off by Jonathan Chait’s article on political correctness. And by the way, what is political correctness anyway? Is it a real thing, or just an insult that conservatives throw around? (People I agree with argue both positions.)
In the weekly summary, I finally have to admit that the 2016 presidential campaign has started, at least on the Republican side. Suddenly, it isn’t just pundits speculating about whether possible candidates will announce that they are thinking about forming committees to study whether they should start raising money for a run. With the Iowa Freedom Summit and the Freedom Partners candidate forum now in the past, we have seen undeclared-but-really-running candidates trying out their stump speeches in front of real audiences, and putting the results on YouTube where we can all watch. And there was also that weird ramble by Sarah Palin, which I’m not really qualified to comment on since I’m not a psychiatrist.
But we won’t have Mitt Romney to kick around this year. We liberals who don’t have a quarter of a billion dollars will just have to pick another victim for our politics of envy. (The official Weekly Sift program of the 2016 race will appear next week.)
Also, the EU is trying to figure out what Greece’s turn to the left means, and whether the fever will spread to Spain. And there was another one of those nobody-cared-about-this-stuff-when-the-First-Family-was-white pseudo-scandals about Michelle not wearing a scarf to King Abdullah’s funeral. Texans demonstrated against the pending Muslim takeover of their state, and a bunch of other strange stuff happened.
And snow. There’s been lots and lots of snow. (Did I mention that already?)
The political correctness article should be out by 9 EST, and the summary by noon.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
A software problem is going to delay the first article by maybe 15 minutes.
I think the phrase “politics of envy” is mistaken; envy is an emotion one feels because another has what one wants for oneself. I don’t envy Romney his wealth. I don’t like the policies that allowed him to achieve that wealth at the expense of others, and keep it by finagling tax laws written by his friends. Calling it “envy” implies a simple resentment of success, and that’s thd line republicans like to take. We should not play into their hands by seeming to accept that viewpoint.
Maybe the snarkiness of my usage wasn’t as obvious as I thought.
Anyway, I agree with the content of your comment: In Romney’s 2012 campaign rhetoric, liberal concern about inequality was just an expression of envy, and any attempt to reduce inequality was “punishing success”. I thought that was ridiculous at the time, and I still do.