Given my, uh, skepticism about Crunchy Conservatism, lots and lots of readers want to know why I haven’t weighed in, especially since we have something close to a Crunchy Con E.S.T. session taking place elsewhere on the site.

My short answer is I’ve been too busy to read the book beyond randomly leafing through it. A slightly longer answer is that Rod is a friend of mine and I wanted to give not only the book a fair reading, but give it a fair chance to be rolled-out on Rod’s terms. Not that I have the divine power to destroy books, but since Rod is a former colleague and his National Review ties are a big part of the book’s rationale, I thought it’d be unfair and unkind for me to muddy the waters. Books are very, very hard to write and when friends and colleagues succeed at it, there’s an unwritten code that you don’t try to mess things up.

Now, all that having been said, I’ve now started the book and I am vexed by what I’ve read so far. Vexed and perturbed. I’m not that far along, but I already see an army of strawmen lined up on the ridge line. It’s well-written and lively with some interesting insights and all that jazz. But at the broader level it is, again, vexatious and perturbing, too. I will try to finish the book by the weekend and next week I will chime in.

Until then, I advise you to buy the book too, so you can join the debate. And while you’re waiting for Amazon to deliver it, you can read the Crunchy Con blog where you can learn that crunchy conservatives breastfeed their children and take them to museums and ballet lessons, presumably unlike those mainstream conservatives who feed their infants Tab® and let them watch porn and run with scissors.

I kid, I kid because I love.