Yesterday, Politico scoffed:

File this under: Did Harry Reid just say that?

In the middle of his tirade against House Republicans' "mean-spirited" budget bill on the Senate floor Tuesday, the Senate Majority Leader lamented that the GOP’s proposed budget cuts would eliminate the annual "cowboy poetry festival” in his home state of Nevada...
“The mean-spirited bill, H.R. 1 … eliminates the National Endowment of the Humanities, National Endowment of the Arts,” said Reid. “These programs create jobs. The National Endowment of the Humanities is the reason we have in northern Nevada every January a cowboy poetry festival. Had that program not been around, the tens of thousands of people who come there every year would not exist.”

Michelle Malkin's site joined in on the scoffing, along with a bunch of other conservative blogs. But here's the thing: Last year, I wrote about cowboy poetry for The Poetry Foundation, and I found a culture that was definitely worth preserving:

Back when civilization was still a tenuous experiment, poetry was the most efficient way to impart information and educate large groups of people at once. As its utility faded and its artistry increased, poetry evolved into something else. But back when America was still figuring itself out, and pushing at its edges to see what else was out there, poetry again regained that spirit of old. Cowboys wanted stories to depict the morality that organized religion, with all its trappings of cushy East Coast life, couldn’t offer them in the West, where a rougher, more natural law was in command. Cowboy poetry reflected that morality; and those poems, and the traditions of those poems, still survive.

I understand that Malkin and her ilk are beyond hope, but I would like for news outlets to stop sniggering at arts funding cuts; every art is essential to someone, and diminishing anyone's favorite artform with this kind of condescension is not at all cool.