Prometheus 6

Because I can't legally drop the whole op-ed on you and am less pleased with Mr. Zinsmeister than even Mr. Frank here, the Quote of Note is every link in the editorial. I'm sureyou can find the full text out there somewhere.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/MonaCharen/2006/05/26/
a_great_pick_by_bush
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0312.wallace-wells.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/
2006/06/12/AR2006061201479_pf.html
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.16200/article_detail.asp
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.16057/article_detail.asp
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.17122/article_detail.asp
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=American_Enterprise_Institute
#Personnel
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.6073/pub_detail.asp
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.17148/article_detail.asp
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.16192/article_detail.asp
http://www.taemag.com/issues/articleid.16307/article_detail.asp
http://www.taemag.com/issues/issueID.153/toc.asp
http://www.pinballrebel.com/game/cola/ads/coke/coke4.htm

[TS] Thus Spake Zinsmeister
By THOMAS FRANK

In their more grandiloquent moments, conservative publicists will say that the decades-long Republican ascendancy in American government has been an intellectual achievement, that the G.O.P. prevails because it is the “party of ideas.” And, indeed, during the last three decades a cottage industry of conservative institutes and foundations has grown into a powerful quasi-academy with seven-figure budgets and phalanxes of “senior fellows” and “distinguished chairs.”

While real academics dither and fret over bugbears like certainty and balance, the scholars of the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute act boldly in the knowledge, to quote a seminal conservative text, that ideas have consequences. Luckily, the consequences are for other people.

Now upon the national stage steps one Karl Zinsmeister, formerly the editor of the American Enterprise Institute’s flagship magazine and now the president’s chief domestic policy adviser. In right-wing circles he is regarded as an intellectual heavyweight. What his career really shows us, though, is the looming exhaustion of the conservative intellectual system; its hopeless addiction to dusty, crumbling clichés; and a blindness to the reality of conservative power so persistent and so bizarre that it amounts to self-deception or, in Zinsmeister’s case, delusion.