News noted

* Lawyer tries "D&D Defense" (ICV2.com)

* When North Korea Falls (Robert D. Kaplan, in The Atlantic)

* GOP and Man at Yale (Daniel McCarthy, in The American Conservative).

The intellectual dexterity that once distinguished campus conservatives has given way to mindless Republican boosterism.... The time when Young Americans for Freedom wore badges blazoned with the slogan “Don’t Immanentize the Eschaton” has long passed. Now College Republicans parade in shirts proclaiming “George W. Bush Is My Homeboy.”

I'd suggest that this is the result of conservatives' uncontested dominance of all three branches of the government, plus the existence of conservative-blinkered media channels which permit those of a conservative bent to take their positions for granted, as self-evident truths which need no logical or evidentiary justification. The college conservative of 1960 needed to intellectually justify his dissent from many of those around him; the college conservative of today may have grown up getting all his (or her) news from conservative-friendly media mills in which the ideas such as "the free market automatically solves all problems" or "homosexuality is intrinsically wrong" are assumed to be self-evident at such a fundamental level that they need not even be stated, much less defended. Any contrary ideas from college faculty can safely be dismissed as "campus liberalism", and thus need not be taken seriously. And mindless boosterism is really all that is required for the go-along-to-get-along style of networking that rising young stars in business and politics gravitate toward. In fact, a too-intellectual disposition, prone to asking awkward questions and taking inconvenient stands on principle, is not particularly useful when dealing with a dominant establishment of any kind.

Perhaps it's inevitable that every movement which attains dominance thus becomes intellectually lazy.