R.S. McCain has some advice for “Harvard intellectual snob” Ross Douthat.

• 1. Stay to the right of the Left. Don’t try to get into a one-upmanship situation where you’re trying to outdo them in multicultural enthusiasm. You can’t win that fight.
• 2. Avoid arguments with Paleos. Those guys play for keeps and (as Joan Jett said) they don’t give a damn about their bad reputations.
• 3. Keep your friends close, and your Neocons closer. This is the flip-side of my advice about the Paleos. Whatever your quarrels with the Neos, avoid making any outright enemies, or next thing you know, you’re an “Unpatriotic Conservative” and NRO will dump you like yesterday’s garbage.

He also writes “Conservatives are your friends. Liberals are not your friends and don’t want to be your friends. Never risk alienating conservatives by attempting to appease the liberals.”

I would reject his advice. I have no desire to appease liberals, but I also have no problem siding with them when I believe that they are right. Also, I can’t see why Douthat should feel the need to keep Neocons close, as long as he isn’t employed by National Review or the American Enterprise Institute.

Strangely, he uses an old tussle with me to illustrate the second point:

Also, I suppose the little thing between me and Clark Stooksbury could be viewed as violation of Rule 2, but Stooksbury started that. Stooksbury is a fan of Dreher, and I panned Crunchy Cons, so Stooksbury considers me evil. But if I’ve made a mortal enemy by criticizing the Buddhist economics (!) of Crunchy Cons from an Austrian perspective, I don’t know what can be done to remedy the problem. When it comes to economics, Mises and Hayek are right and Buddhists are wrong.

He must still be smarting from the fact that within a three month period in the pages of Chronicles two years ago, I gave a mostly positive review of Rod Dreher’s book while being far more critical of McCain’s. What he doesn’t get is that Dreher and Myself are Southeastern Conference elitist intellectual snobs–he of LSU and me of Tennessee–so I naturally praised his book. But I hardly see myself as someone who “play[s] for keeps” in the blogging/punditry world–I don’t have sufficient energy or desire to even respond to about 95% of the things that irk me over the course of a day.