Two nights earlier, Hillary, clad in a gold, leopard-print, full-length evening gown designed by Oscar de la Renta (at whose villa in the Dominican Republic the Clintons had recently vacationed), was the beneficiary of an insult to first lady Laura Bush. The occasion was the swank, $3,500-a-seat gala opening in New York of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's exhibit of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis' clothing at the Costume Institute. Mrs. Bush wisely attended only the cocktail party and departed before Hillary's arrival for dinner, so presumably she did not hear honorary chairwoman Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg gratuitously hailing Hillary for having "interpreted the role of first lady for our times."

Only Rush Limbaugh hit back at Caroline with the force that she deserved. Listening to his radio show in my car on the way back from classes, I cheered loudly (as at a great football play) as Limbaugh in one of his trademark flights of Roman oratory unleashed zinger after zinger, climaxing in an electrifying indictment: Caroline, charged Limbaugh, was honoring Hillary for imitating the depressing example of her own mother, Jackie Kennedy, who "looked the other way" and allowed herself to be personally humiliated and the White House to be profaned by the adulterous antics of a crude philanderer.

I feel genuinely sorry for those who are so blinded by narrow partisanship that they cannot appreciate Limbaugh's energy, intelligence and satiric skill. They live in a box with bags over their heads. Though he and I hardly agree on politics (I voted for Ralph Nader last year and may go Green again in 2004), I respect Limbaugh as a political analyst and deft rhetorician who is a master of the microphone and who knows how to engage and challenge a vast audience.

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In other news last week, I was delighted to hear that Mayor Rudy Giuliani, rightly derided for his "decency" panel to oversee the arts, has called for abolishing the New York City Board of Education on the grounds that it has irreparably failed to educate the city's students. This is exactly the kind of extreme tactic that may be necessary to reform American education at both the primary and secondary levels. Only a cutoff of funding will break the stranglehold of an education establishment interested more in social engineering than in learning.

The problems in contemporary college education were well illustrated by the blizzard of bumper stickers I recently saw on a car in downtown Philadelphia. Pasted to the back window were decals from Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; plastered on the rear bumper and trunk were these proclamations: "Friends don't let friends eat meat"; "Feminism is the radical notion that women are people"; "Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty." There you have it: an expensive higher education based on sloganeering, on pat, trite phrases that substitute moral posturing for political reasoning. It's elitism masquerading as egalitarianism.

Public attention is focused on the wasteland of primary education when some maladjusted kid rakes his school with gunfire. But the amount of drug-taking that goes on, dished out by the nurse or cadged on the fly from junior suppliers, is also symptomatic of a profound malaise in the culture. Missionary planes are being shot out of the sky over Peru in a grandiose, wasteful drug war that will never be won as long as so many Americans need to anesthetize themselves to get through the day.

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