Gloom pervades Greater Wingnuttia. K-Lo brings tea and cakes to the 101st Chairborne, organizes a sing-song to buck up the lads: "Read the Turner interview. Read VDH. See American Carol. Have a great weekend. Fight on! We still have weeks before Election Day." In a similar mood, Jonah Goldberg farts off some book recs:
Then there's the mammoth new collection Arguing Conservatism from ISI. I keep picking this thing up and find I can't stop reading it. It's pretty heady stuff, but such a great example of how seriously conservatives take their intellectual tradition and how fiercely we argue over our dogma.
Nobody doubts that conservatives take themselves extremely seriously. Go ahead, try to stop them. "Conservatives" have constructed an alternative reality for themselves, a Moron Matrix, and just will not swallow the Red Cheeto. An "intellectual tradition"? Feh, they have marketing, a fandom, an inane, insane, semi-secular, logically circular pseudo-religion complete with "dogma."
When an "intellectual tradition" has fucked up as grotesquely as NRO-standard "conservatism" on pretty much every front -- economic, military, political -- you might expect there to be some reassessment of basic principles. But since "conservatism" of the NRO brand is all about providing employment for hacks who couldn't survive in the marketplace of ideas without enormous subsidies, what you have is parasitic larvae like K-Lo & Jonah desperately clenching their fear-puckered spinarettes in hopes of squirting an extra layer of protective wingnutty goo onto their ideological cocoons. And that's understandable -- if they actually had to go out and get a job their glistening pink abdomens and utter incompetence would be a poor defense against predators. "Go see An American Carol! Please?" Hee hee. I guess even after the scam is busted, no con artist likes to see a mark walking away -- at least, as long as the mark has a few last bucks left in his wallet.
Finally, you may also inquire as to why Jonah would have to keep on "picking up" a book that he "can't stop reading." The answer of course is that he is a past-master of flatulent prose.