It’s that time again. As we approach the Recovery Summer II of our continuing discontent, it’s time once again to man — or woman — up, dig down, and rally to the side of your favorite magazine, National Review.

We know these are tough times. In the third year of the Obama administration, almost nobody in the private sector is better off than he or she was before the fall of 2008. The Left’s clean sweep of the presidency and both houses of Congress that year got us down — but not out. Two years later we retook the House, and we are now poised to take back both the Senate and the White House in November 2012.

In short, the wind’s at our back — but we can’t do it alone. We need your help.

You know you want to, you know you should — so just do it. I’ll wait . . .

There, that was easy, wasn’t it? And, remember, you can do it as often as you like!

Now, here’s what you get for your donation, delivered straight to your mailbox, your computer screen, or even your Kindle or smart phone:

Mark Steyn, Jonah Goldberg, Andy McCarthy, Victor Davis Hanson, James Lileks, Rob Long, John Derbyshire, Jay Nordlinger, Kathryn Jean Lopez, Deroy Murdock, John Miller, Jim Geraghty, Kevin D. Williamson, Ed Whelan, and the capo di tutti capi himself, Rich Lowry, among many others. That’s quite a lineup — the finest group of writers I’ve been associated with since the glory days of Time’s back-of-the-book sections under the late Martha Duffy in the early 1980s.

I mean, where else can you find not only the trenchant political analysis and witty and elegant writing that our founder, William F. Buckley Jr., was famous for, but also peerless number-crunching, electoral crystal-ball gazing, Chinese-language lessons, Star Trek and South Park jokes, satire and parody, and an ongoing primer in sharia law and the Islamic threat to the West, all in one place? We are warriors here at NR and NRO, but we are happy warriors, engaging our opponents and adversaries with facts, common sense, and a striking lack of four-letter words or personal invective.

But that’s not even the best part.

Even more important than helping America’s foremost journal of conservative thought — both in its legendary dead-tree edition and its younger sibling, National Review Online — you get to become part of the team. Not as a kibitzer (although that’s okay) but as someone with skin in the game, a player in biggest match of our American lives. Whether you’re a casual reader, an avid letter-writer, or a cyber sentry in NRO’s new comments sections, this is your opportunity to get a mitt and get in the game. To put your money where your heart is.

Because we’re all in this together. Politics ain’t beanbag, as Mr. Dooley famously said, and writing ain’t — or at least ought not to be — free. So what better investment can you make in the future of the country we all love than to be part of the struggle against the big-government collectivism that currently imperils not only our future, but that of succeeding generations, who deserve a chance to inherit the American Dream?

As one of the new kids at the Corner, let me tell you why I’m here: because of Bill Buckley. No, I never met the great man in person, but as a young college student trapped in the raging belly of the beast known as the campus unrest of the late Sixties and early Seventies, I stumbled upon such early classics as The Jeweler’s Eye and The Governor Listeth and immediately knew I had found a beacon of light shining through the tear gas, a clarion trumpet cutting through the chants of “Hey, hey, LBJ,” and “The people, united, will never be defeated.”

Somewhere out there are hundreds, no thousands, no hundreds of thousands of new conservatives like I once was, yearning for the truth as they struggle to cast off the liberal cant of their youth and learn to think for themselves. We need all the help we can get — and they need friends.

One of those friends is you.

— Michael Walsh is a journalist, author, and screenwriter. As NRO’s “David Kahane,” he is the author of Rules for Radical Conservatives.