Republicans in a bookstore?

More proof that conservatism is intellectually bankrupt...

For many years now, conservatism has stood for nothing more or less than a fear and hatred of new ideas, new things, new people. The few times they have ventured out into the plain of intellectual endeavour, they have sunk into a quicksand of philosophical dishonesty, hiding behind stilted vocabulary and logical fallacy like Buckley, behind Hollywood imagery like Reagan, behind fallacious economic argument like Laffer, behind dangerous fiscal policies like Greenspan and Friedman, behind irrelevant historical references and absurd bowties like George Will. Three times this year, the Republican party has essentially proved their intellectual barrenness by launching a self-proclaimed rebirth of conservative leadership, which, in each case, involved nailing a suggestion box to the wall and waiting for their supporters to come up with the new ideas.

Here’s another example.

If you go to your local bookstore and go to the Politics section (or Current Events, or whatever they call it in your neighborhood), you will notice that the Republican wingnuts are going like gangbusters, absolutely loading the bookshelves with book after book after book attacking the Democrats.

Right now you can go to the local Barnes or Borders and get books written (or more like ghost-written) by Bush, Gingrich, Rove, Hannity, Ventura, Palin, Romney, George Allen, Nugent, Malkin, Ron Paul, O’Reilly, George Will, Huckabee. Beck alone has 4-5-6 of them out there.

The most energetic, of course, is Ann Coulter, who is so filled with spittle-spewing hate that she can hardly get through a year without popping out a book, each one with a title aimed at inflicting as much bile and insult upon the Democrats as her puny little powers can muster:

Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America.
Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right.
Treason: Liberal Treachery from the Cold War to the War on Terrorism.
Godless: The Church of Liberalism.
How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must): The World According to Ann Coulter.
If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans.
High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton.

Book after book tries to whip up anger over the insidious Democratic plot to Destroy America As We Know It:

The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency
Obama Zombies
Losing Our Religion: The Liberal Media’s Attack on Christianity
That’s No Angry Mob, That’s My Mom: Team Obama’s Assault on Tea-Party, Talk-Radio Americans
Enemy Within: Saving America From The Liberal Assault On Our Churches, Schools, And Military
The Manchurian President: Barack Obama’s Ties to Communists, Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists
Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Change
Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder: Savage Solutions
National Suicide: How Washington Is Destroying the American Dream from a to Z

And more books are aimed at peddling the illusion that Obama is trying to silence them so liberals can win the battle of ideas, which is pretty absurd when you see how many books have been openly published and sold on the topic:

The New Thought Police: Inside the Left’s Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds
Fleeced: How Barack Obama, Media Mockery of Terrorist Threats, Liberals Who want to Kill Talk Radio, the Self-Serving Congress, Companies that Help Iran, and W… (the title’s so long it runs off the page)
Liberty and Tyranny: A Conservative Manifesto
Lies the Government Told You: Myth, Power, and Deception in American History
Conservative Comebacks to Liberal Lies: Issue by Issue Responses to the Most Common Claims of the Left from A to Z

One school of “thought” is the insinuation that Obama = Muslim = Terrorist:

Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America
Terror and Liberalism
The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America

But they start to get vague when it’s time to tell us what they would do if they regained power. The last time they had power they trashed the joint, so now when they write about their plans for the future in their ideal world, its does get a little vague, and when they do delve into detail, they end up with foolishness like dismantling the Fed or the IRS:

Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right: How One Side Lost Its Mind and the Other Lost Its Nerve
The Coming Insurrection
Ayn Rand, Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal
The Fair Tax Book
End the Fed

So what’s the problem?

The overwhelming majority of their “philosophy” is “we hate Democrats”. Other than that…essentially substance-free. And these people, believe it or not, are the leaders of the conservative intellectual movement: the rest of the conservatives are even more ignorant and dishonest than they are.