What 99 Seats Said

For my money, the last word on the arts/service conference call brouhaha.

And one last depressing thought of my own: I share Mirror Up to Nature's fear: that if the right's partisan trolls are going to freak about something this innocuous, and so superficially connected to the endowment and not at all connected to its grant-giving, what will happen if they start "following the NEA grant money trails to find a connection to something salacious"? It's worth remembering that the last NEA funding controversy, in the mid- to late 1980s, came well before the age of YouTube and social media, let alone Fox News.)

UPDATE: I spoke too soon. The incomparable Ian David Moss has an uncharacteristically, and to my mind righteously hot-tempered summation of the cynical opportunism behind this "scandal."