"Dotty" Dotty of CBS's Presidium On the Couch

I guess it wasn't enough yesterday for James Taranto to take aptly-named Dotty Lynch to the woodshed for her condescending remarks about how less heroic today's generation seems to be than her own, whom she apotheosisizes [sorry] as that immortal band of heroes that skedaddled to Canada or went underground to avoid military service around thirty years ago.

Taranto says that popular demand from readers requested a further deconstruction of this pretentious self-important personage who obviously adored[s] Andrew Heyward, the fired TV News Chief who was cashiered along with his agitprop-in-chief Gauleiter, Danny Boy Rather, when CBS News ratings kept tanking due to a combination of abhorrent ideological content and Rather's personal weirdness.

Taranto outlines the difference between the truly selfless abdication of white privilege which the American civil rights provoked and the very self-indulgent scurrying for the woodwork that Vietnam War protesters demonstrated by "speaking cowardice to power."

By contrast, expediency was sufficient to create a mass antiwar movement. Half-baked pacifistic and anti-American notions were all it took to make young people feel justified in acting on their own self-interest, and to bring about, in less than a decade, an end to the draft and an American retreat from Vietnam.

But this could not endure. With the threat of the draft gone, those who had opposed the war out of self-interest moved on and got about the business of living. That left only a tiny core of true believers, who exaggerate their own importance because so many of them hold important positions in elite institutions like the media and academia. They will likely go to their graves wondering when they'll get another Vietnam.

George Bernard Shaw said it ninety years ago: "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." [Major Barbara?]

The latest codicil for MSM mavens like dotty Dotty might be: "Those who can't do, and can't teach, propagandize."