McArdle counters Drezner:
Believe me, people were obsessed with the dollar during the Bush era, too. Obsession with the value of the currency seems to be baked into the DNA of the right for some reason. If it's not the sliding dollar, it's gold buggery or petrodollars.
A large segment of the right ascribes almost magical properties to fixed currency, like the ability to keep the government from borrowing too much money. This is belied by the long history of government's on commodity or currency pegs borrowing a great deal of money, and then defaulting and/or revaluing. It is also belied by the fact that the government cannot actually borrow a ton of money in the expectation of inflating away the debt, because neither the bondholders nor the Fed are particularly likely to go along. But for a lot of the right, still, what is good for the US dollar is what is good for America--and what is good for the US dollar is simply being worth as much as possible relative to other currencies.
Is it possible to be a conservative any more without being this crude?