Update: Riehl World View has Levin’s response. It’s fascinating.

Every now and then I have to lower myself to deal with the undeveloped minds of kooks like Rod Dreher.  I don’t know Dreher and as best I can tell, most nobody does.  He has a column for a Dallas newspaper and created his own blog site, from where he writes love letters to himself and wonders why his brilliance is lost on the multitudes (while, of course, claiming to represent them and speak for them).

It continues in this vein. Read it all if you have a strong stomach. (via Dreher)

Robert Stacy McCain dissents from Rod Dreher’s choice of conservative icons (all in refrence to Mark Levin’s ravings that i noted over the weekend). First McCain asks, “Wendell Berry? WTF? Since when is Wendell Berry an icon in the conservative pantheon?” Thankfully, Berry isn’t remotely a conservative in a sense that McCain would recognize—a talk-radio addled high school sports fan, marching behind warmongers and supply-siders while shrieking “Wolverines!” R.S. ought to put aside his normal reading and peruse some Bill Kauffman. It would be an education.

McCain then states:

Russell Kirk once said, in a lecture at the Heritage Foundation, no less: “Not seldom has it seemed as if some eminent Neoconservatives mistook Tel Aviv for the capital of the United States.” Only a real troublemaker, a mixer, would have said such a thing. Kirk was a cultural eccentric, a man who cherished his status as an outsider, an anachronism, disdaining all things modern and “mass.”

I can’t imagine how he equates Kirk’s statement with Levin telling a caller that “I don’t know why your husband doesn’t put a gun to his temple. Get the hell out of here.” The big difference I notice is that Kirk’s statement has actual content. I also note that Kirk was addressing a conservative audience and criticizing a part of the movement. Hardly consistent with shouting “Wolverines!” as if politics were no more than a team sport.

P.S. I must admit that I liked McCain’s description of Dreher as “the bearded Church Lady,” and I’m guessing that he hasn’t read Dreher’s Becoming Barbarians.