Category: The Dish

A new metaphor for Goldwater-style conservatives, wondering where the biggest threat to liberty now comes from.

We’re into the final week of submissions, and this one is a late sleeper. Pat Benatar’s "Love Is A Battlefield." It’s lame until around halfway through at which point it becomes hilarious.

Click here to see the other entries…

The Jewish state will recognize same-sex marriages entered into in other countries in a 6 – 1 Supreme Court decision. The contrast with the murderous homophobia in the Arab-Muslim Middle East could not be starker.

Jeffrey Hart, Dartmouth College legend and one of the architects of the American conservative movement, has long disowned the policies of George W. Bush and the current Republicans. His latest essay is brutal:

Recall the Eisenhower Republican Party. Eisenhower, a thoroughgoing realist, was one of the most successful presidents of the 20th century. So was the prudential Reagan, wary of using military force. Nixon would have been a good secretary of state, but emotionally wounded and suspicious, he was not suited to the presidency. Yet he, too, with Henry Kissinger, was a realist. George W. Bush represents a huge swing away from such traditional conservative Republicanism.

But the conservative movement in America has followed him, evacuating prudence and realism for ideology and folly. Left behind has been the experienced realism of James Burnham. Also vacated, the Burkean realism of Willmoore Kendall, who aspired, as he told Leo Strauss, to be the ‘American Burke.’ That Burkeanism entailed a sense of the complexity of society and the resistance of cultures to change. Gone, too, has been the individualism of Frank Meyer and the commonsense Western libertarianism of Barry Goldwater.

The post-2000 conservative movement has abandoned all that to back Bush and has followed him over the cliff into our calamity in Iraq. On top of all that, the Bush presidency has been fueled by the moral authoritarianism of the current third evangelical awakening.

Hart wrote me recently to say: "Your term ‘Christianists’ is immensely useful." This from the man who was a conservative when Dinesh D’Souza, Laura Ingraham and Jonah Goldberg were in diapers.

A Baptist minister reiterates what many of us have been saying for years. Maybe some will finally listen when it comes from him.

Maybe we should move on, but this email struck me as interesting:

A possible explanation (not an excuse, there is a difference) for Michael Richards’ rant is one I have often observed. It is that when one person makes another person extremely angry, in this case by interrupting the routine of a washed-up former celebrity, the offended person, in his rage, says not necessarily what he truly believes, but rather what he believes will hurt that person the most. Therefore, it’s possible that Richards was not, in a Freudian slip, revealing his inner racist; but rather was saying that which he felt would most offend the person who offended him. Only the people who know him best know which is the case. The only thing I know is that this episode won’t end his career. "The Michael Richards Show" already took care of that.

If you want to go to seminars on Christianity while cruising in absolute luxury, Hugh Hewitt has the trip for you!

Well, we have had "coercive interrogation technique." Now we have "severe etiquette malfunction." That’s John Derbyshire’s term for screaming out the n-word and having fantasies of lynching, because your stand-up act is having a rough night.

Twenty five years ago, he was for it.

William F. Buckley may see some of his progeny falter – the conservative movement, for example. But his actual genetic progeny, i.e. Christopher, is as brilliant as ever. I hadn’t watched "Thank you For Smoking" in the movie theaters, but we netflixed it the other night and I had a ball. Rare to find actually sophisticated political humor in Hollywood. It takes a conservative … Meanwhile, here’s Buckley’s latest gem from the New Yorker. It’s Jeeves with W. Money quote:

"Now, see here, Jeeves, I can handle this Iraq business myself."
"Yes, sir. But, if I may, there does seem to be something of a clamor for an exit strategy."
"Dash it, Jeeves, the only exit strategy is victory."
"Yes, sir. So Dr. Kissinger keeps insisting. And yet, as the Bard would suggest, ripeness is all."
"What are you talking about?"
"’King Lear,’ sir. A play by the late Mr. Shakespeare."
"Just spit it out."
"As you may recall, sir, I had suggested replacing Mr. Rumsfeld before the election, rather than after."
"Deuced good idea, Jeeves. See to it immediately. Walk him up the scaffold, and no blindfold. That’ll get us a few votes."
We W.s are slow to anger, but, when the feeling comes, the ground around us trembles.
"If I may, sir?"
"What is it, Jeeves?"
"The election is over."
"Oh. Dash it all, Jeeves, you might have told me."

And the beat goes on.