Four years ago at this time, Instapundit was in full-on GOP shill mode, desperately doing his best to get Bush re-elected, such as by promoting obviously misleading stories.

Now, the magic seems to be gone. Sure, Insty hasn't linked to anything pro-Obama that I've seen, and he's linked to plenty of anti-Obama things, but there's something missing: the fire. He just doesn't seem to be all that concerned about a victory by the furthest left president in U.S. history. In fact, he refuses to push a highly effective plan to prevent that presidency.

Instead, he's certainly noticed a lot of Amazon sales lately, hasn't he? I'm going to guess that only 10 or 20 percent of his readership knows what he's doing: those links to Amazon contain his personal code, and if someone clicks on of the links and buys something he gets a cut. But, he also takes it a step further: sending clicks through an Amazon redirect that isn't necessary but at the same time probably sets their cookie. Nothing wrong with that (more or less), it's just that instead of trying to milk the cow perhaps he should be concentrating on protecting the whole damn farm.