Last year, Joan Didion's writings on U.S. politics were brilliantly eviscerated by Joe Klein in the New Republic:

Didion's political essays seem very dated now. They are artifacts of the most placid and prosperous moment in American history, a time when allegedly serious news organizations and journals of opinion turned to cynics and stylists--people who knew little about politics and nothing at all about policy--to make pronouncements about public life. These people practiced a form of theater criticism, assuming and sometimes even asserting that politics was a lesser branch of show business, that politicians were merely actors reading lines, that political performance consisted only of public speaking and image-making; while the quiet work of governance, the true work of elected officials, was largely ignored. This was, almost by definition, a flagrantly superficial conceit. It is probably finished now. When reality visits, there is no need for political fictions.

Unfortunately, her fatuous preaching has continued with respect to the aftermath of September 11 and the proposed war in Iraq. Andrew Sullivan has a wonderful demolition of her views and though-processes, or lack of such:

She doesn't seem to grasp that people who differ from her views about this might also have read history, theology, sociology, philosophy, and so on. Does she think that Bernard Lewis or Fouad Ajami have not devoted years to inquiring into "the nature of the enemy we faced"? Does she think that my own post-9/11 essay, "This Is A Religious War," was devoid of any historical or philosophical analysis? Does she think that John Keegan and Victor Davis Hanson are uninterested in military and diplomatic history? The sheer intellectual snobbery of Didion blinds her to the real scholarship on the other side of the debate. Which makes life easier for her, but it doesn't help shed any light for the rest of us.
Perhaps this is a function of being in a liberal intellectual cocoon. When the only educated people you know hold identical views to yours, it's an easy step to assuming that all those other mysterious creatures out there who disagree with you are simply dumb anti-intellectual jingoists. The cocoon blinds Didion in other ways as well. Many times in the piece, she recounts going out into the country to talk to real people about 9/11. She doesn't seem to realize that the people Joan Didion might meet in bookstores -- the ones who have come explicitly to hear her speak, no less -- might not be completely representative of the country as a whole. Memo to Didion: Get out a little more.

There's much more.