Grasping Reality on TypePad, by Brad DeLong

A bunch of stuff. This is, I think, the most worth reading. It's a big problem. It's a big problem that we have had ever since Newt Gingrich launched his assault on the George H.W. Bush GOP, and the George H.W. Bush GOP responded by surrendering unconditionally:

• A Proposed Pecking Order for Honest Conservatives http://www.bradford-delong.com/2007/06/a_proposed_peck.html: As far as honest conservatives are concerned, it's a difficult question. Those I usually suggest... I find dismissed as "not typical conservatives. We want a representative of the conservative point of view. Someone like Larry Kudlow or Ramesh Ponnuru."... Those who reject my advice are (as is almost always true) making a mistake.... We want an "honest conservative"--a conservative intellectual adversary we can respect, who is also intelligent. But their first move is to define a "conservative" as a public supporter of the Bush regime and its deeds. That means, I think, that they are searching the empty set. Slavoj Zizek applied this to the puppet regimes of Eastern Europe under the iron curtain: "The Trilemma: Of the three features—-personal honesty, sincere support of the regime, and intelligence—-it was possible to combine only two, never all three. If one was honest and supportive, one was not very bright; if one was bright and supportive, one was not honest; if one was honest and bright, one was not supportive..." But it applies just as well to the Bush regime...