The Tao Of Robert Stacy McCain

Freddie DeBoer analyzes the Malkinyest of Malkin Award winners:

[This is] the central contradiction of the movement conservative pundit, men who regularly mock nerdy philosophizers when they are, in fact, nerdy philosophizers. Robert Stacey McCain isn’t, actually, some character from a Bruce Springsteen video. He’s a writer and thinker, a guy who pals around at Washington magazine parties and think tank frou-fras. He is most assuredly not one of the Ordinary Americans he is here glamorizing. This was the glaring idiocy of the Sarah Palin boosters within the conservative intelligentsia from last year, people decrying liberal elitists when in every material way, they themselves resembled those liberal elitists far more than they resembled what they believed Palin represented. It takes a special lack of self-knowledge to write an insidery, navel-gazing post about how much you hate navel-gazing insiders, but then, it takes a special lack of self-knowledge to regularly decry intellectualism underneath a quote from Arthur Koestler.

Dreher has much more:

If you have to descend to the level of trash-talking vulgarian to prove your bona fides with the Common Man, then fine, in the aristocracy of character, I'll keep working toward being an elitist. It is hard to imagine the conservatives I admire the most, and wish to emulate -- men like Wendell Berry and Russell Kirk -- being very impressed with Mark Levin's crude shtick.

I draw the line at urging the mass-murder of innocents myself.