The mind of Dante

I fairly lazily skimmed Harold's column earlier today under the assumption that I'd agree entirely with the substance of it*, but ultimately settled on the closing paragraph, with which I couldn't disagree more strongly:

Lynne Cheney is right about the necessity of the classics. It takes a Dickens, or a Dante, to understand the moral malignancy of the president and his men.

Really? I'm pretty sure I understand the moral malignancy of this president quite well, but am also pretty sure that I have, generally speaking, sub-Dante and sub-Dickens intelligence and insight.

*(confessional note: I do this way, way too often in the morning, and it's a terribly ineffective way to blog.)

Update: OK, out of guilt I did a more thorough reading of Harold's column, and, as it turns out, it's a withering critique of the administration's gutting of CHIP. Everyone should give it a look. Still, while I too see powerful literary analogs to the Bush presidency in the writings of Dante and Dickens, I think that all one needs to understand the White House's moral malignancy is a working brain, a dash of liberalism, and, perhaps, a bit of experience seeing what happens to those on the receiving end of this sort of institutional abuse.