[x]

This is just the standard, garden variety smear. You can see it in the reference to David Duke that Foer just couldn't resist slipping in. It must have made a great excitement and commotion at the New Republic, since for months they haven't been able to use Nazi slurs against their new Zionist allies at the National Review. I notice Foer left out the obligatory reference to Chomsky, but Alexander Cockburn is a good stand-in

I suppose Foer does have a point about Taki. I agree with the poor little rich Greek about just about everything, but I'd do just about anything to avoid spending any time with him. That the British aristocracy doesn't simply confirms what people have always believed about them.

But I'd turn around Foer's argument. What ideology isn't exhausted now? What political magazine isn't boring and hackneyed? National Review and the Weekly Standard may be increasing circulation by stoking the war flames, but their philosophy and principles are getting ever more threadbare as they embrace empire. Dittos for the Weekly Standard. Of course antiwar.com and lewrockwell.com are jokes, but who really pays much attention to the political articles in the New Republic? The point seems to be more to generate a buzz and influence a small circle in Washington or New York than to cast any real light on what's going on in the country or the world. The Nation? The American Prospect? No signs of life there. So long as they go on about the "stolen election" their appeal is bound to be radically limited (assuming that is, that Bush copes well with the war and the economy).

So yes, Buchanan will have trouble with his new magazine, but that's not because of anything unique to his ideology. It reflects a more general ideological confusion or malaise in the country today. The New Republic has new Wall Street backers to cushion his berth against the bumps, but that's no reason to be smug about things.

[Torie]

You are simply too much a gentleman to get much pleasure out of a good old fashioned rather well done bash piece, which I think has an element of truth, but is by no means a road map of anything of consequence.

Having said that, I agree with you in large part (as usual), particularly on the bit that ideologies are in a bit of a funk these days. The dirty little secret of course, is that, except at the fringes (and a totally ineffectual effort by some on the religious right to impose a stern parenthood that is going nowhere, and is losing steam steadily), there is a broad consensus on most matters of real consequence in the US now, and so of course flame wars, and personalities, and demogoguery take up the vaccuum.

Of course, as this nation moves more to socialized medicine, which is inevitable, given that the price tag is so high, things may revert a bit back to a politics that we haven't seen for a long time. But the right will lose that one. And innovations in medicine will be degraded, and my hopes of living to 120 will go out the window. Ain't that a shame?