From First Things (While You're There, Don't Miss The Anchoress)

Another rightist (& Catholic, we suppose) has removed his head from the darkness, wiped all the stuff from his eyelids, seen what is surrounding him, & started to worry. This is beginning to be standard procedure (see the Brooks column, mentioned in the depths there) among other-side-of-the-aislers who have to appear intellectual & rational to draw their paychecks. This one amused us because it veers into "foundational" crap (We said Catholic, remember?) which points out the incompatibility of whatever thought goes on over there, cutely described as "libertarian populism inflected with social conservative attachments — an unholy hybrid of Ayn Rand, William Jennings Bryan, and Morton Downey, Jr." Which leads to the author's concern about cults & personalities. Worth a read (we all like our prejudices confirmed) but if it hadn't been for this kind of shit

The American right has begun to mimic the left in adopting a perverse form of political syncretism. A decade ago we’d mock well-intentioned, but misguided, liberals for being so intent on advancing their cause that they’d gloss over the views of their nutcase, extremist radical allies.

or this

The result is that the conservative movement is becoming increasingly ineffective, insular, and irrational — in other words, we’re becoming the mirror image of the political left.

we might not have bothered, but fuck you, Joe Carter, whoever you may be. Once you've pulled that beam from your gawd-fearing eye, could you please elaborate just a bit on the monolithic left's nutcase extremist radical allies of a "decade ago?" Let's see, radical extremist nutcases, 1999, uh, Republicans impeaching the President? Anarchists at the WTO meeting? Really, what?

And (You must have noticed.) a Catholic calls "the political left" irrational. And "insular." A Catholic. Sure. In Carter's Bizarro World all of the left is busily crying over its Vapor-Rubbed upper lip while getting marching orders from the foaming-at-the-mouth-liberal fascisti of NPR. And it is a Bizarro World. "Conservatism has never exactly been a bookish movement," he types. So ... he wants to make conservAmericans read.

But it doesn’t have to be this way, does it? Isn’t it possible that we could create a movement where people read books—real books, not insta-books ghostwritten for a former Morning Zoo DJs or brick-sized political novels about narcissistic atheist industrialists? Is it too much to ask that ideas be presented to us in a sober manner rather than like a dramatic reading of the apocalyptic Left Behind novels? Shouldn’t we hold our pundits and politicians to the same standard of behavior—no screaming, lying, talking gibberish, or fake crying on national television—that we expect of our children?

Uh, do you live in this country? Have you lived here long? Are you (like The Anchoress) cooped up in a monastic cell somewhere, the merest of slits admitting light & air? Jesus.