Shills, Paid and Unpaid by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.: "But if it doesn't turn out right, these paid intellectuals can always repudiate what they said or did: after all, they were paid to take the position they did. One is reminded of the interesting experiment in social psychology conducted by Festinger and Carlsmith in 1959. They found that the more people were paid to say things they don't believe, the more likely these people will be to repudiate the opinions later. On the other hand, those people who are induced to lie without personal benefit are more likely to stick to their opinions. In other words, it's not those who lie for money we should worry about it; it's those who lie for free who are the real danger.

Which raises a question more profound than why Gallaghar and Williams did what they did: what excuse do the rest of the Republican intellectuals have for their behavior? Day after day, they crank out the most absurd articles and treatises in defense of the indefensible so long as it is being pushed by the Bush administration. They wallow in their hatred of what they consider leftism even as they work to build a state with the size and power that hardly any leftist in the country would call for or even welcome. Those of us who were embarrassed by the slavish tendencies of the left in the 1990s to defend Clinton were unprepared to see the same behavior on the right, but with far more intensity."

(Via Lew Rockwell.)