Ho ho ho. It’s that time of the year when we’re all accustomed to reaching down and coming up with enough scratch to give friends and family a joyous Noel. So please make sure you’ve got National Review on your Christmas list.

Most political magazines — I’m talking about the kind David Kahane reads on a regular basis — are models of Stalinist orthodoxy. The arguments may change over time, but while they’re “raging,” everyone makes sure he’s in lockstep with the rest of the tovarishes. You want your message straight, no chaser, you know where to look: Think of Katrina vanden Heuvel having a serious heart-to-heart with E. J. Dionne Jr. and Rick Hertzberg about spending other people’s money — hell, spending your money — and you’ll know what I mean. You don’t know whether to die of the dudgeon, the humorlessness, or both.

Not here, not us. Over at the Corner, where Dave and I hang out and mix it up, we get into collegial fights all the time. You want disputation and confrontation? We got your heterodoxy right here, pal. For example, check out my buddy Andrew McCarthy’s ferocious dissent from the Editors’ instantly controversial dismissal of Newt Gingrich and other Republican presidential candidates in favor of Huntsman, Romney, and Santorum. One of the great things about NR and NRO is that we’re like Forrest Gump’s famous box of chocolates: You never know what you’re going to get.

Except that, of course, you do. You know you’re getting the best conservative writing anywhere in America — not some earnest blog scribble by well-meaning, pugnacious amateurs, but incisive commentary by a host of professional writers, not unfamiliar with the bestseller lists (you know who they are), whose command of the mother tongue is second to none.

You’re also getting front-line political reporting as good as and better than anything in the bien-pensant mainstream media. Christian Schneider in Wisconsin, the Ground Zero of the leftist anti-democratic temper tantrum, coming to a ballot box near you next November. Katrina Trinko on the campaign trail, chronicling triumphs and pratfalls alike. Ed Whelan keeping an eye on our robed masters on the courts. The Great Geraghty, crunching numbers and gazing into his crystal ball while cracking wise. And green-eyeshaded Kevin Williamson, on what it’s all going to cost us, both now and later.

But professional writing doesn’t come cheap and neither do editing and bandwidth, not to mention the cost of offices, phones, and dead trees. Subscriptions come nowhere near covering the cost of magazine production, and in the virtual Obamavilles of the ad world, it’s still Tent City out there. As for NRO — which five days a week produces nearly as much original content as WFB’s fortnightly — it’s free, for crying out loud. And we know you’re reading. Just ask Alexa.

So please pony up, because you know you want to. Because we know you want to. Because freeloaders belong over there, on the Left. Because it’s the Right thing to do. And because there’s no time like the present.

No suggested donation, no holier-than-thou support levels. Whatever you give is between you and the personal deity of your preferred faith tradition, if any. From the privacy of your computer or your smart phone, you can hit the tip jar here, and continue to make it possible for Andy to argue with Ramesh, for Jonah to argue with everybody, and for Derb to say I told you so.

What, you want a second Obama term? Then you know what to do.

— Michael Walsh is a journalist, author, and screenwriter.