A couple of readers have written in to take issue with my comment “that a quick glance at a candidate’s publications, fields of interest and so on will be more than enough to reveal his or her political leanings,” including one citing a list of publications so obscure that they made my head spin. I’m no philosopher, however, and maybe these titles would have sent more of a signal to somebody better trained in this singularly pointless discipline. Another correspondent, making a similar argument, recalls going to a medieval philosophy conference where “absolutely everyone besides [him] thought Bush was evil and Ashcroft unspeakable.” He was surprised. He shouldn’t have been. Medieval philosophy mixed ignorance with magical thinking, obscurantism, economic illiteracy and absurd and obsessive dogmatism. No wonder it appeals to the Left.