I have a headache. It might be forced-air related due to being entertained at three holiday celebrations in two days, feted by people who either heat their houses to 80º as a rule or turned the heat up to be thoughtful, not to mention driving with my wife, who sets the car heater to "Smelt". But it's probably from a couple day's worth of reading "conservatives" of all those factions David Brooks keeps insisting are regularly duking it out over every possible issue line up almost to a man behind their boy and whatever the latest excuse for spitting on the Constitution is.
So here, from Professor Bérubé's comments, the observations of rootlesscosmo (livejournal page here), which I couldn't have said any better anyway.
I think most of the nominal pillars of “conservative” faith were never more than packaging for their real beliefs. Opposition to “big government” was never a principle; it was a way of wrapping racism, anti-unionism, anti-regulation and vigilantism (the gun nut routine) in Jeffersonian drag. Simultaneously, government could never be too big as long as it was fortifying the Mexican border, silencing doctors and public health professionals on matters that might enhance women’s freedom, disrupting and spying on even the mildest, most pacific Left groups. In short what calls itself “conservatism” has been--at least since the Goldwater era--a piece of rotten hypocritical cant. That’s why, unfortunately, calling attention to its hypocrisy now, as Earnest does with regard to the NSA spying practices, is a wasted effort. I’m sorry he was deluded, but if he imagines the people responsible can be made to feel shame for deluding him, he’s liable to be disappointed as well.
Is there a "conservative" "principle" left standing?
[Because we can all use a break from maintaining our high dudgeon over the latest Bush outrage...]
ReplyDeletemy wife, who sets the car heater to "Smelt"
Ah but think of what you have to look forward to. When the snow melts and the streams run again, she can put the vent setting on "Trout". In summer she can run the AC on "Crappie" or "Bass". And in the short run, we can breathlessly anticipate February, when it's shad, shad, shad.
Is there a "conservative" "principle" left standing?
ReplyDeleteIsn't using the words "principle" and "conservative" in the same sentence an oxymoron? ...Though I suppose that since you qualified them with quotation marks you can be excused.
This particular incident should expose, once and for all, just how naked is the hypocrisy, the rabid, partisan ideology, that drives the Republican party here in the beginning of the 21st century. Rather than jumping to the defense of the Constitution, the rule of law or the American people, the remaining members of the Cult of Dubya's Personality choose instead to defend Dear Leader, defying not only logic and rationality, but the law of the land itself. They are a sick, sad and pathetic lot, far larger than they should be in a supposedly educated nation, and it is only thanks to them that we are in -- and probably will not get out of soon -- the mess we are in.
anybody who tosses Wonkette into a "Leftist" mix is intending to fudge the data
ReplyDeleteIn that same vein, this guy has instapundit in the running for best left-wing blog.
Damn, that should have gone into the thread above. Sorry.
ReplyDelete