DO THE RESEARCH (Also via Betsy's Page.) Michael Skube discovers too much sound and fury and too little substance in the ongoing ideological struggle. Professor Skube visits the bookstore and what does he see: "A sampling: 'Useful Idiots: How Liberals Got It Wrong in the Cold War and Still Blame America First.' 'Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right.' 'Let Freedom Ring: Winning the War of Liberty Over Liberalism'." What does he conclude? "It would serve conservatism better if some of these best-selling authors -- no one would call them writers -- trafficked more in ideas and less in impulses." Methinks he doth protest too much. He's confusing pundits and popularizers with serious thinkers (Richard Pipes, the Kagans father and son, Friedrich Hayek, Paul MacAvoy, Milton Friedman, Bruce Ames, Bjorn Lomborg after he got mau-maued for doing some research come to mind, and I beg your forgiveness if I missed one of your favorites or didn't name you) and it is those ideas -- not to mention the abject failures of Social Security, public assistance, affirmative action, U.N. sanctions, Amtrak, and the designated hitter rule -- that provide a ready market for the popularizers. Skube grasps some of this: "It required only liberalism's self-mutilation from the '60s through the '80s for a majority of Americans to realize what they were not. They might be Democrats or they might be Republicans, but they were not liberals." But his ending is totally unconvincing. "If some have traded civility for braying boorishness -- and they assuredly have -- they've effected an unflattering reverse image. The same contempt and hubris that did liberals grave harm now is reflected back at them. With the tables turned, conservatives of a certain stripe are proving themselves as capable of ignorance as anyone in the faculty lounge." Get some viewpoint diversity into that common room, and then, perhaps, it will be time for malice toward none, charity toward all.