"There's nothing political about American literature," says Laura Bush, who has held three literary symposia--one on Twain, one on the Harlem Renaissance, and one on women writers of the West--at the White House over the past year. As so often happens when it covers the arts, the New York Times is unintentionally hilarious on the subject of Mrs. Bush's apparent literacy and possible taste. It describes the shock left-wing writers and scholars have experienced upon receiving invitations to come to the White House to speak ("Justin Kaplan, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of Mark Twain who says Mr. Bush has a 'troglodytic' approach to social and economic problems, was so surprised by his invitation from the White House to a symposium on Twain that he told the aide in the first lady's office he would have to get back to her"). And it describes the even greater shock of those same scholars upon discovering that Mrs. Bush isn't just bumbling about in American culture like a Texas longhorn in a china shop. Here's the best part:

Participants have also been surprised by the choice of authors, who are always selected by Mrs. Bush. When Patricia Nelson Limerick, a leading historian of the American West and the author of the influential revisionist history "The Legacy of Conquest," was asked to speak about the Western writers Willa Cather, Edna Ferber and Laura Ingalls Wilder in September, she had to read Ferber's "Giant" for the first time ó and came away stunned.

"It is quite a penetrating, mocking portrait of Texas rich people, and particularly of people making their money in oil," Ms. Limerick said, adding that she at first could not imagine that the first lady, with her roots in Texas, would have selected such a book for White House discussion. But when Mrs. Bush spoke in her opening remarks at that symposium of Ferber's shock at "the swaggering arrogance of men in 10-gallon hats," Ms. Limerick knew that Mrs. Bush was no stranger to the themes of "Giant."

"I did Mrs. Bush a terrible disservice thinking that maybe she didn't know, that she thought these were all little houses on the prairie," Ms. Limerick said.

The Times thinks it is reporting a remarkable event: a rare sighting in the Republican stratosphere, a sort of cultural UFO (Unheard-of Female Object), a Republican--and a Texan!--who reads!! And who is capable of insight! Possibly even self-awareness! Possibly--just possibly--self-satire! Gawd. We academics all know that the only reason nice Southern women like Laura Bush become raging reactionaries married to oil-slick imperialist "troglodytes" like Dubya is that they are ignorant, uncultured rednecks who don't know any better. They are mystified and unenlightened, traitors to their sex who have been hoodwinked by the misogynist ideology of the right. And we all know that when it comes to culture--true culture, the high culture of arts and letters, the culture only left-wing intellectuals can properly appreciate (or hate)--Republicans, particularly rich Texan ones, are as dumb and stunted as they come. And yet, it seems that Laura Bush may actually have a brain, and may even be able to use it for non-partisan, non-conniving ends. What a story! And so it makes the New York Times. Trouble is, that's not the real story. The real story is the self-aggrandizing narrowmindedness of an intellectual left--I include the NYT under that heading--that can be as shocked as this when it encounters a reality that does not fit its nasty little myths.