Shorter neoconservatism: Culture matters when it vindicates our opposition to domestic policies we wouldn’t have wanted to support anyway, but it is absolutely irrelevant when it undermines the argument for the interventionist foreign policy we want to pursue.

Elsewhere, Ross and The Plank’s Isaac Chotiner notice pundit conflict-of-interest problems, citing the most recent and egregious example of boosterism posing as analysis in Niall Ferguson’s assessment that McCain is the only man up to the challenge of understanding the value of the navy, which might be related to Ferguson’s close ties to McCain.  As a remedy to this sort of unethical punditry, it may be necessary to have the political equivalent of some enormous Henry Blodgett/Merrill Lynch-style scandal of irresponsible flacks boosting for interests in which they have a personal stake.  Just as this sort of unethical stock boosterism contributed to the boom in the late ’90s followed by the implosion of the NASDAQ, which ushered in new rules of public disclosure for analysts on business channels, these pundits are contributing to the creation of a market full of dangerously overbought candidates whose stock can only go down at a rapid rate once their loyalists are no longer able to artificially inflate their value.  In fairness to Ferguson, however, he was flacking for imperialism and war a long time before he joined up with McCain, so there’s a kind of integrity about his unethical behaviour.