Charles Murray would recognize the Sandra Fluke we all met at Nancy Pelosi's dog and pony show as the very model future denizen of the "archetypal upper-middle-class" enclave described in his recent Coming Apart. This alarm-clock owning, well put together, marriage and childbearing-deferring young woman seems well on track to permanent residence in Belmont, Murray's term for the places where the new elite tend to live. She exhibited the civilized, but self-assured and poised demeanor, down to that  annoying slightly breathy dropping of the voice at the end of her sentences that marks a woman who has punched the proper baccalaureate and professional school tickets.

Like a true aspiring Belmonter she embraces civic involvement, which, in her case manifests itself in joining the struggle to foist some form of liberal orthodoxy on the rest of us -- in her case the notion that "access" to contraception is a problem for women in this country. Her willingness to pick up and carry the banner of a lie, even if subjecting herself to a little derision and criticism for doing so, is just the kind of individual initiative that will set this successful striver apart from all the also-rans at Georgetown Law. 

Her Beau Geste will not go unnoticed or unrewarded. Something tells me Ms. Fluke's first job after graduation will relieve her permanently of the nagging fear that she will not be able to pay for the contraceptive of her choice. Sandra Fluke will thus join the long line of those like our President himself, who chose to enter the charmed precincts of Belmont through the vocation of promulgating the lies necessary to sustain progressive politics.

In Ms. Fluke's case the greatest betrayal is joining in the great elite conspiracy Murray calls not preaching what you practice. Take a good look at Sandra Fluke; she is no one's victim. She appears to be a gutsy, ambitious striver who put in the library and class time to finish her degrees. But she did more than just show up on time for class, regardless of what many of us may think of her actions. In the manner of successful people, she grasped an extraordinary opportunity for advancement that presented itself in the form of Nancy Pelosi's political requirements of last week.

But successful individual striving is not the story Sandra Fluke chooses to tell all the little girls of Murray's down and out Fishtown. She has, instead, thrown in her lot with those whose goal is to convince those little girls that the deck is stacked hopelessly against them, and that they can only get what they need through the beneficence of a nurturing government. For so doing she has already been rewarded with a congratulatory phone call from the President of the United States.

Rush Limbaugh used a word to describe Miss Fluke that upset a lot of people. If understood in a political rather than behavioral sense, that word does not seem an unreasonable characterization.