The New York Sun, home of the hilarious and enterprising Eli Lake, will likely publish its last issue on Monday, Gawker leaked yesterday. Editor Seth Lipsky declined to comment on the news when asked for a confirmation by the New York Observer, but I’d bet my meager City Paper paycheck that the Sun sets in the next week (a little secret: I know an employee who’s out looking for a new job as I type).

And I have to say that it all makes me very sad. [Insert bitching & moaning over the state of print journalism here.]

The closing of the flamboyant Sun leaves us fiscal conservatives digging through the mechanical WSJ and the ever so prim Financial Times for our insights. But what Gawker calls “the death of East Coast intellectual conservatism” is hardly a death, or even a hibernation. Smart money musings and small government sentiments have made their way to the web quite nicely, and the ranks of readers have swelled in the wake of Paulson’s ever-so-stinky bullshit bailout bonanza. There’s even a new site for cultural “reactionaries,” which is what I call myself when I’m not gorging on Munsters-themed porn. (Haven’t you heard? Reacting is the new black!)

But the real tragedy is that a future without the Sun means one less voice—in print or on the web—arguing against the fuckwits on The Washington Post’s editorial page, all of whom recognize the “economic crisis” as an opportunity to spend other peoples’ money. (Hey, Anne O. Krueger, Trotsky called—said he wants you to return his trousers and that book of econ theory you borrowed.)