Daaavid, I yam your Faaather...

Welcome to the dark side, David Mamet! I don't know if my liberal friends have ever considered the Cambridge-dwelling playwright to be one of their team, or at least not for some time--if Glengarry Glen Ross had the sense of the American Tragic of Willy Loman, The Edge dared to suggest that its billionaire protagonist was a billionaire precisely because he was a man of superior abilities and ethics.

So it's less than a surprise that Mamet announced in today's Village Voice that "I am no longer a 'Brain-Dead' Liberal:"

As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the fuck up.

Needless to say, even if he is now referring to Thomas Sowell as "our greatest contemporary philosopher," Mamet is still casting that mannequin named Rebecca Pidgeon in his movies, so I must withold judgment on the "brain-dead" part of his claim.  ¶ 6:45 PM