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BONEHEAD INTELLECTUALS. I'm not going to reinvent the wheel here. John Derbyshire's assault on conservative talk radio is here. It is also competently fisked here. Which means that if you're interested, you can read up on the flap created by this inveterately grumpy National Review contributor and then come back for my few additional comments.

Blaming talk radio for the present misfortunes of conservatives is just plain idiotic. According to his own voluminous c.v., Derbyshire is a Brit who first lived in the United States in 1986. He cannot know what it was like growing up in this country before the Reagan administration terminated the Fairness Doctrine. The only broadcast on which you could hear conservative voices was Firing Line. And it may be news to Derb, but you didn't have to be a lowbrow to object to much of Buckley's presentation. He was so self-consciously intellectual, so enraptured by his own vocabulary and semantic complications, that even genuine intellectuals frequently felt like smacking him on the back of the head. Brilliant? Yes. Also often laughable. That conservatives in the population at large did not respond eagerly to conservatism as an elaborate gentleman's game does not make them lowbrows or deny them qualification as the middlebrows Derb claims to value.

Populism is an extremely argumentative term to throw around. By connotation at least, it usually refers to political movements which organize and manipulate the have-nots in an effort to extort benefits from the haves. It implies simplistic rabble-rousing rhetoric, phony "common man" leadership, and continual resort to the ugliness of class warfare. That's not Rush Limbaugh's shtick and it's not his audience, either. Limbaugh tapped into a huge population of "the Forgotten Man" intellectual conservatives claim to speak for, the ones who pay the bills for the social engineering delusions of liberals. But oddly enough, they're too busy living their lives and paying the bills to have much patience with the inside baseball affectations of the National Review. To them, politics is not an abstract philosophical debate that mutters on through the centuries in panelled drawing rooms and stylish cocktail parties. Someone who figures out a way to reach the people who are paying the bills is not a populist. He's an educator, a communicator, a common sense analyst, and, yes, an entertainer. He expands the political base among the competent doers on which the whole nation depends. That's a far cry from the populist bomb-throwing of a Huey Long or William Jennings Bryan.

Of course, not all conservative talk radio hosts are of the same caliber. Just as not all National Review contributors are quite as brilliant as Buckley even if they're ostentatious about wrapping themselves in his mantle. What's strange is that some of Derbyshire's charges indicate that he hasn't actually listened to talk radio any more than the liberal haters have. It's absolutely not true that Limbaugh and Hannity defended everything Bush did. Their objection to his spending, to his failure to veto outrageously wasteful legislation, was almost a drumbeat. But they knew, as so many intellectual conservatives seem to have forgotten in the past year, that the alternative waiting in the wings was worse, disastrously worse. Now we have Obama. Our country is vanishing down the rabbit hole at truly terrifying speed. And this is to be blamed on Limbaugh and Hannity? I don't think so. And quoting turncoat Christopher Buckley's disdainful sneer at comparisons between his father and Limbaugh in the course of making such a wrongheaded accusation is frankly odious.

Derbyshire can be smart, insightful, and thought-provoking. This time he is none of the above. He's being an ass.