Having a whack

A textbook anti-Rand smear job has appeared at 'New West' that's worth a read just for the many sober responses. Here's a sample:

Why this second-rate novelist and third-rate thinker became such a paragon to the Me-First, America-Second crowd is a mystery with a simple fact at its core: Rand, with her mindless anti-Communism (anti-communalism of any sort, really) and her triumph-of-the-will fantasies, gives every soulless shark in a suit the intellectual trappings to disguise the naked materialism and deep amorality of their world-view. If any political philosophy has been as thoroughly discredited in the last 20 years as Marxism, it’s "objectivism": the huge budget deficits, triumphalist foreign policy and disgraceful health-care system that characterize 21st-century America can all be traced straight back to Ms. Rand’s tiresome grandiloquizing.

I understand – every movement, particularly one as intellectually poverty stricken as neoconservatism, needs its godmother. I just wish they’d come up with something more original.

Yeah, me too -- and that's just my objections to the smear; whatever happened to sharp, witty, intelligent smearing? One commenter suggested the article could be used for a fun drinking game: "Every time you spot a logical fallacy, factual mistatement, disregard or insensibility to context, or simple misunderstanding by the author of the arguments he is dismissing out of hand, take a drink. Have the medics on hand."

Linked Smear: The philosophy that ate Baghdad