An insightful homily from an extremely good new theo-blog.
NADER ANNOUNCES …: …for the presidency of Iraq. Sunnis and Shiites denounce “spoiler.”
RAINES AND MOORE: Left Coast blogger Lee finds some uncanny similarities between Howell Raines’ worldview and Michael Moore’s. Of course they see the world the same way: America as a con-job on the permanent poor. Western Front blogger, however sees nothing that different in Raines’ worldview:
While Raines’ partisanship is blinkered, it is also entirely unremarkable. If you take Raines’ mien as something singular or asymmetric, I would submit, respectfully, that you are missing something about contemporary liberalism in places like Manhattan or Seattle or Amherst.
I am a conservative (of some kind) and I work daily for people who could have said everything in Raines’ column today – and much worse… I can tell you without any hesitation that outing myself even as a nominal conservative would be professional suicide in my milieu. So my choices are
1) keep your mouth shut and adopt a de facto “Don’t ask, don’t tell” policy when you are in professional company, or
2) abandon any reasonable hope of finding either regular work (as a freelancer) or advancement (in a full-time job).
Of course, it’s not a lot better being a conservative and favoring, say, gay civil rights. Try getting a job at a conservative institution with those views. But most conservatives don’t control institutions like universities, publishing houses, major general interest magazines, or Hollywood. They police their own openly partisan institutions – not others’ or the public realm. As another reader wrote me: “I can in fact imagine being a conservative employee of someone who could write a column similar to Raines’. It’s called being an employee in the political science department of a state university.” I’m afraid she’s right.
The Dish 