Rigid, and not in a good way

The scholar and critic Todd Gitlin's just published an excellent polemic on the president's narrowmindedness. It's a great complement to the Suskind piece which Elise recommended earlier. Not to spoil it, but Gitlin's an excellent writer, and here's the crux of his argument: "His rigidity is the shell of his thoughtlessness. Dogma protects him from the perplexity that he finds deeply disturbing. He pumps himself up with bluster. Recycling slogans is only incidentally a stratagem; it is the mind of the man."