AS BEN RHODES SAID, THE AVERAGE REPORTER IS A 27 YEAR OLD WHO LITERALLY KNOWS NOTHING:

This from the Washington Post sounded awkward to my ears, but standards of cultural literacy change:

“Flake routinely catalogs Trump alongside evil and danger — at one point, he compares the Republican Party trying to make peace with this president to a German scholar who sold his soul to the devil.”

“A German scholar who sold his soul to the devil”? Just write what the senator did, “Faustian bargain,” trust that your readers will get it, and trust that anyone who doesn’t can look it up online. (“Many years ago I read a piece on WF Buckley that described his writing style as ‘Look it up, serf,’” a friend commented when I posted about this on social media last week.)

In the article we linked to last night titled “Monkeeing Around with Culture,” Joseph Buttom of the Washington Free Beacon wrote, “I can’t decide whether Phillips gave her gloss because she herself had to look up the meaning of what she considered an obscure phrase, or whether she merely thought that readers of the Washington Post wouldn’t know the meaning of the image from Goethe’s Faust.”

Given Rhodes’ infamous quote about the Democrat activists with bylines he spoon-fed his talking points to, my money is on the former.