I’d be flattered to be the subject of such a long rant, but the doc does them all the time. The woman doesn’t know the meaning of moderation, and her site has turned into quite the hate-talk destination. I pity her patients.

The liberalism I grew up around was pretty indistinguishable from it, really. When the liberals and conservatives in my town got together to decide how to meet the community’s needs, bipartisanship was generally assumed.

People could talk across the aise because they got it that they were all in the same building, so to speak.

If what’s going on in the current administration is conservatism, we’d know what went on in Cheney’s secret oil meeting.

We’d know who committed the felony of outing Valerie Plame and we would have a firing, a trial, and a conviction.

We’d be looking for Bin Laden instead of looting Iraq on transparently false premises and building permanent bases there.

We’d know what “caging” votes means and we’d be prosecuting the criminals who’ve made our electoral process so slimy.

And we’d be taking care of our school system, overhauling health care and cleaning up our carbon act because conservatism means to *conserve.*

What I got out of GFW’s column was that conservatism means the gated are the chosen people.

Galbraith was right: “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.”

Wordsmith @ 49

Ditto…I could feel it even with my parents, who were Republicans, who were crying. I was in 5th grade. Our teacher told us; she was crying. In fact, they all were crying – which freaked us out.

It just broke something.

I was sixth grade and the principal came to the door and told us. That night I saw my father cry for the first time at the shots of the casket being taken from the plane in DC…

Mr. Peabody @ 68

Bustednuckles @ 60

It would be interesting if someone put JFK and Shrubs speechifying side by side just to see how this country has bounced off of the bottom of the barrel.

doesn’t Letterman do that regularly?

Yes, his “Great Moments in Presidential Speeches” runs nightly and contrasts FDR and JFK with numbnuts. It would be hilarious if it weren’t so sad … but that’s the point. Strangely enough Scarborough ofter reruns it on his show too ??

Will paints liberals as a dirty word once again. The last time I checked, we live in a liberal democracy, one that this administration is attempting to impose on other countries. But what really is left out of his column is that BECAUSE there are groups of people, conservatives is what he labels them, that are out to get what they can get, and with the ends justifying the means, that we have transparency, regulation and government to provide these protections. I love how Will and the others continously cite the Founding Fathers for their principles, as a group, where a little more than 10 minutes of reading the Federalist Papers would show the stark contrasts between Madison and Hamilton ( and Jay for that matter), that the Founding Fathers he refers to as his authority to grant conservatism as glory and gold included one, Thomas Jefferson, probably the most influential, smartest and most revered of all, specifically constructing a wall between church and state to preclude any sort of continous, running majority getting “theirs while they can, and completely sanguine as to the different outcomes.” The Founding Fathers relied on Locke, Voltaire, among others, philosophers that articulated theories that governments are necessary, sometimes necessary evils, but necessary nonetheless to avoid any sort of power to be held by one particular group. They believed in a Hobbesian point of view, and constructed the Constitution, Bill of Rights and other documents to reflect the fear of certain groups getting what they deserve and the consequences be damned.

Will paints liberals as socialists in this column. Liberals are those, in my book, who value transparency in government, nominal regulation of those with power and money due to their natural, Hobbesian instincts, strong middle class society and cultural mores (yes, that means upper class people are alright–it takes upper class people to define middle class people, anyway) and the enumerated freedoms found in the Constitution and Bill of Rights. I know that George is a big baseball fan, but I guarantee that he was one of those dorks that I would pick last for my baseball team. And you know what, maybe that makes me a “conservative” in his eyes, because when I did pick guys like him last and plop them in righfield to pick daisys while me and others went to winning the game, I guess I was “sanguine to the outcome” of that decision, too.

So, as an esoteric side bar, to whom do we owe thanks that the modern day pundit feels absolutely no responsibility for fact, logic or reason of any sort?

Even the prototypical crypto-fascist Nazi (Mr. William F. Buckley Jr.), made what I would call an honest intellectual attempt at logic. I would not agree with most of his base premise, but he at least attempted to construct syllogism which followed from his stated facts. When did it become ok to just make shit up?

Is it all Fox New’s fault?

Nah, Will has been doing this for decades. I used to read him just for the amusement of picking out the obvious logical flaw that undermined his entire argument (there’s at least one in every column!) After a while it just became too easy.

In the immortal words of Charles Pierce, “Oh, Lord, did you have to make the fish so big and the barrel so small?” *g*

Hugh, kathleen, ET:

I appreciate all your comments. I was really into MSM (as it’s now known) in those days. I had just started working, as it were, with alternative and progressive media in 2000. So thanks for straightening me out. (No kidding.)

{{{{Biodun}}}}

41%. You really couldn’t make this stuff up!

*Sigh*…George Will’s latest attempt to define something he isn’t and claim that his style of conservatism is anything more than an expression of extreme self-interest.

Which reminds me of an old joke, worth revising and retelling…

A boy selling puppies out of a little red wagon camps out in front of the White House…George Bush, delighted at the boy’s entrepreneurship, strolls out to speak with him.

“Say, what kind of puppies are those?” says Bush.

“Republican puppies, sir,” says the boy. George Bush, delighted with the boy’s response, hands him a ten-dollar bill.

A week later, the same boy with the same puppies camps out in front of the White House again. Sensing a possible photo opportunity, George Bush approaches the boy again.

“What kind of puppies were those again?” asks Bush.

“Democratic puppies, sir,” says the boy.

Bush says, “What? Last week you said they were Republican puppies.”

“Yes sir,” replies the boy, “but they’ve opened their eyes since then.”

Ain’t that the truth!