PAUL RYAN'S COLLEGE MENTOR KEEPS IT CLASSY

For his latest New York Times column, Bill Keller went to Miami University in Ohio, Paul Ryan's alma mater, to talk to William R. (Rich) Hart, a libertarian economics professor who was an early mentor of Paul Ryan. Hart's ideas, not surprisingly, sound more like Rush Limbaugh talking points than economic ideas derived from academic study:

"Not green energy," he said with disgust. "Fossil fuel energy." ...

"My view of the N.A.A.C.P. is, you can't represent a group of downtrodden if you don't have a permanent group of downtrodden to represent." ...

"I don't know how I would have handled the 47 percent comment ... I would have stressed from the outset the need for policies to end long-term dependency by so many on government handouts, policies that wean them off the taxpayer dole and make them productive elements of society -- make them givers rather than takers."

But this, to me, is what's truly revealing about Professor Hart (emphasis added):

"Do we want to become a sort of European socialist welfare state?" he asked when we chatted in his office, decorated with Elvis and Nascar memorabilia, with Paul Krugman's economics textbook demoted to a doorstop.

Isn't that charming? Prior to greeting someone from The New York Times at his office, the professor either neglects to remove a Times writer's book from a place of contempt or pointedly positions it in that place of contempt. I'm sure he regards this as a brave, defiant act, a gob in the eye of what he sees as liberal orthodoxy, but it's just rude. It's small-minded. It's infantile.

The professor, by the way, is 65 years old; he's not some young hothead.

I know right-wingers would shout "Jeremiah Wright!" in response. Yes, Reverend Wright was a spiritual mentor to Barack Obama, and yes, his language has at times been intemperate. But Wright's anger is a response to a life in which he's seen rampant racism, much of it violent; maybe he has trouble acknowledging that the present is not as bad as the past, but the past he's responding to was pretty awful. What's upsetting Professor Hart? A lifetime of marginal tax rates he's found a tad too high?

And yes, I'm sure there are rude items in the office of Bill Ayers, but he was never actually an Obama mentor, except in the Fox-induced hallucinations of wingnuts.