Month: November 2008

Kevin Walsh loves Drudge’s design. Althouse seconds:

There’s something about Drudge that makes us want to look at it all the time. The sense that this is what the news looks like right now feels so right, even if you know it’s wrong. Even that wrongness is part of the addictive power. Everything works exactly as it should.

Many years ago, on a pilgrimage to meet the Yoda of the web, Drudge told me how proud he was of how ugly his site was. He vowed never to change its tabloid crudeness or its sublime simplicity. It remains a model of economy and panache. Remember: only two people really run it. Think of how many people contribute to HuffPuff, how bewildering the design is, how impenetrable it can seem to a newcomer. But Drudge is as accessible and as simple as ever. It’s a brand he created out of thin air. And changed the media for ever. By courage and sheer hard work.

If only he hadn’t screwed up the election coverage. He missed the story. Drudge never used to miss the story. But he’ll recover.

Netanya, Israel, 4.25 pm.

Ross makes an important point:

This problem is not, repeat not, a matter of conservatives needing to abandon their core convictions in order to win elections, as right-of-center reformers are often accused of doing. Rather, it’s a matter of conservatives needing to apply their core convictions to questions like "how do we mitigate the worst effects of climate change?" and "how do we modernize our infrastructure?" and "how do we encourage excellence and competition within our public school bureaucracy?" instead of just letting liberals completely monopolize these debates, while the Right talks about porkbusting and not much else.

I agree we need to get much more policy-specific. I haven’t, really, and the big difference between my book and Ross’ and Reihan’s is they get in the policy weeds. I felt and still feel that the deeper philosophical questions need confronting first if we’re talking about a revived conservatism, as opposed to a revived Republicanism. But I hope to lay out an agenda for the right in the coming months and air the policy questions more thoroughly.

Conor gives some advice on the GOP’s media future.

Goldblog starts a contest.

Jon Henke defends libertarianism from Mike Huckabee:

This is easily as contemptuous, as offensive as anything Kathleen Parker has written about social conservatives.  So, yeah, a columnist express disdain for social conservatives.  Cry me a river.  We libertarians had a social conservative Governor and Presidential candidate call us the "real threat" and "smug", and brazenly misrepresent our views before calling our message un-American.

Social conservatives have to realize that they need the fiscally conservative, socially moderate/tolerant voters if they want to be a part of a winning coalition.  The limited government message won revolutionary victories for Republicans in 1980 and 1994; it is the only viable organizing principle for the current Republican coalition.

Another call for the leading gay groups to understand that they were a reason for the success of Proposition 8. But they are incapable of self-criticism. Which is why their strategy has remained all but unchanged for twenty years, while the gay movement has had to bypass them to succeed.

A reader makes a point that isn’t made often enough:

I am another gay man who has no problem with a church refusing to conduct a same-gender marriage rite.  What I don’t understand is why the conservatives/fundamentalists can’t get it through their collective skull that their insistence upon enforcing in civil law their particular interpretation of theology is also an excercise in religious discrimination. 

The Unitarians have been marrying same-sex couples for some thirty years, and likewise some congregations of the United Church of Christ, the Metropolitan Community Church, and I’m sure a number of other religious groups I don’t even know. Why do the fundamentalists get to discriminate with the force of civil law against the U/U, the UCC, and the rest? When did they get the right to have their religious interpretation enshrined in civil law at the unavoidably explicit expense of the others ‘ interpretation?

When did they get the right to be the government’s de facto Department of Inquisition?

This struggle is not just between secularists and Christianists. It’s also between Christians.

"…placed in the middle of a rapid stream, we obstinately fix our eyes on the ruins that may still be descried upon the shore we have left, while the current hurries us away and drags us backward towards the abyss," – Tocqueville.

"History is now and England," – Eliot.