http://www.huffingtonpost.com/howard-fineman/obama-romney-debate_b_1784446.html

Great quote from Howard Fineman on Huffington Post, August 16, 2012

Well, for one, Ryan turns out, upon closer inspection, not to be a purifying ideologue, but rather a young, power-hungry, ladder-climbing trimmer — less Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman and more Karl Rove and George W. Bush.

Another great post and quote from “The Leiter Report”
http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/

Robert Hockett (Cornell) writes:

I thought that this passage in the Rand book review was the most accurate of all:

“Rand’s particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes her so popular and so American, is the way she managed to mass market elitism — to convince so many people, especially young people, that they could be geniuses without being in any concrete way distinguished.” (Fourth full para. at page 8.)

In short, she is the Lumpen-“philosopher” par excellence. My better half was asking me, just as I began to read this review aloud, what could possibly account for the popularity of this ridiculous woman. I hypothesized that it was the way in which she afforded a sort of vicarious self-flattery to narcissistic imbeciles. Then I began reading, and upon finding the just-quoted sentence, smiled with Randian self-satisfaction!