Generally speaking, I find it pretty off-putting when people who write about arts and culture delve into politics.

Sometimes, they can provide a fresh, unadorned, average-guy kind of perspective, which Leonard Pitts does at his best. Or perhaps I should say, did at his best. I remember finding some of his earliest op-ed columns refreshing. I haven’t gotten that impression from him for a long time.

You know how I can’t stand political rhetoric from either the left or the right that does nothing but set forth a doctrinaire worldview, and is utterly dismissive of people who disagree? Arts writers-turned-political columnists are among the very worst offenders in this category. Too often, their columns are about little other than how awful, stupid, evil and vicious conservatives are (particularly, for whatever reason, cultural and/or religious conservatives).

Up until now, I thought the worst of this genre was Frank Rich of The New York Times. I was glad, several years ago, when the NYT decided to indulge him to an absurd degree by allowing his columns to run twice as long as those of other opinion writers, meaning they were too long for me even to consider putting them in the paper, which in turn meant that I didn’t have to read them.

But for sheer unrestrained, hyperemotional, puerile ranting and raving about someone of whom the writer disapproves, Mr. Rich must now take a back seat to Jason Farago, writing in The Guardian today about portraits of world leaders painted by former President George W. Bush. An excerpt:

Many good artists do bad things. Cellini and Caravaggio were both murderers; Schiele and Balthus had a thing for young girls; and more than one contemporary artist I could name has been tied up with tax evasion troubles. So just because a painter has – for example – the blood of up to 136,012 dead Iraqis on his hands does not, in itself, prove that he lacks talent.

George W Bush, whose nightmare presidency unleashed its latest aftershock this week when his dauphin John Roberts gutted our already minimal campaign finance laws, has been painting these past few years, and at his presidential library in Dallas he is exhibiting two dozen portraits of fellow world leaders. The show opens Saturday, and it has a title: The Art of Leadership: A President’s Personal Diplomacy.

“Diplomatic” is actually not a bad word to describe the orientation of these paintings. They are not bad so much as cautious, vacant, even servile – paintings by an artist anxious, or perhaps incapable, of doing anything that might leave a mark….

This seems the literary equivalent of a murderer who is unsatisfied with merely killing, but keeps stabbing his victim over and over with the butcher knife.

Sorry. That was my attempt at writing the way Mr. Farago does. Evidently,  I’m not very good at it (it was even grammatically awkward — don’t ask me to diagram it)…