"American conservatives who find themselves identifying with Putin’s regime refuse to see the country for what it actually is."

Here's the pitch.

The belief that Russia is on our side in the war against secularism and sexual decadence is shared by a host of American Christian leaders, as well as their colleagues on the European far right.

Then this.

I his book, (Paul) Hollander described the prestige that Albanian communism once enjoyed in Sweden and Norway. Few Scandinavians had ever been there, but that didn’t matter: “Albania is picked up simply because it seems to be a club with a particularly sharp nail at the end of it with which to beat one’s own society, one’s own traditions, one’s own parents.” Now (Tucker) Carlson is using Russia as a club with which to beat his own society and his own traditions.

Whenever I hear the likes of Franklin Graham referred to as an "intellectual," I reach for my flask and eat lots of garlic. Thanks to the Bookseller for pointing the way to this fine read.

The False Romance of Russia, by Anne Applebaum (The Atlantic)

American conservatives who find themselves identifying with Putin’s regime refuse to see the country for what it actually is.

... Fortunately for all such critics, they don’t have to spend much time in the country they are “rooting” for, because there is no greater fantasy than the idea that Russia is a country of Christian values. In reality, Russia has one of the highest abortion rates in the world, nearly double that of the United States. It has an extremely low record of church attendance, though the numbers are difficult to measure, not least because any form of Christianity outside of the state-controlled Orthodox Church is liable to be considered a cult. A 2012 survey showed that religion plays an important role in the lives of only 15 percent of Russians. Only 5 percent have read the Bible.

If American Christians would find little to cheer for in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, American white nationalists would be disappointed too. Carlson has wondered aloud about America’s racial mix, asking, “How precisely is diversity our strength?” He would have a real dilemma in Russia. Nearly 20 percent of Russian citizens do not even identify as Russian, telling pollsters that they belong to different nationalities, ranging from Tartar and Azeri to Ukrainian and Moldovan; more than 6 percent of Russians are Muslims, as opposed to 1.1 percent of the U.S. population. And that might be a gross underestimate of the actual number of Russian Muslims, since in some parts of the country, Muslims are off-limits to census takers. Remember all those phony stories about Swedish and British neighborhoods that are supposedly no-go zones ruled by Sharia law? Russia has an actual province, Chechnya, that is officially ruled by Sharia law. The local regime tolerates polygamy, requires women to be veiled in public places, and tortures gay men. It is a no-go zone, right inside Russia.

As for Putin himself, there is no evidence that this former KGB officer has actually converted, but plenty of evidence that Putin’s recent public displays of Christianity are just as cynical as Stalin’s vaunted love for the working classes. Among other things, they are useful precisely because they can hoodwink naive foreigners. But you don’t need to listen to me say so. Listen, instead, to the words of a young Russian, Yegor Zhukov, who was put on trial for publishing videos critical of the regime. In an extraordinary courtroom speech, he addressed the loud support for “the institutions of the family” that Putin often offers in Russia, and contrasted it with reality ...

Jeff Gahan, too: "Conservatives blame the poor because the alternative is to blame capitalism."

Forget capitalism and religion. Kool-Aid-ism is the dominant ideology of our age, and it can be consumed by almost anyone -- and is, in startling volumes, regularly.

Where do you begin? With your premises, of course.

Why Conservatives Blame Poverty on the Poor, by Sarah Jones (New Republic)

A new essay by National Review's Kevin Williamson exposes the ideological blind spots of responsibility politics.

Scapegoat, prophet, moron, rogue—the poor white is a shapeshifter. He changes forms as the needs of his beholders change. When liberals need to blame a class for Donald Trump’s presidency, the poor white will do; never mind that two-thirds of all Trump supporters made $50,000 or more a year. When conservatives need to cast liberals as aloof elitists they appoint themselves the poor white’s defenders—until their ideology is threatened, and then it is time to take out the trash.

Because:

Black welfare recipients aren’t the problem; Mexicans aren’t the problem; immigration isn’t the problem. But low wages, a shrinking safety net, subprime mortgages, unattainable health care, impoverished local schools, among all the other locks that trap the poor in place, can and should be pinned to the very system conservatives want to defend. Williamson fixates on the willful stupidity of the poor because he must. If he didn’t, he’d have to indict his own ideology.

Obama in Flint: "The speech in Boston was a pillow. This was a brick through a window."

Leave it to Charlie Pierce to reach the heart of the matter.

Don't Let Trump's Taco Bowl Distract You From Obama's Speech on Flint, by Charles P. Pierce (Esquire)

The president went to Flint on Wednesday. He should have gone there long before this, and there was something unsettling about his conspicuously taking a drink of water, although I don't think it was as bad as Michael Moore does. But what may have gone unnoticed—especially by Ron Fournier, who went to Flint and filtered what he learned through his special Both Sides Do It filtering mechanism—is that the president took a big old sledgehammer to the philosophical foundation of 40 years of conservative political vandalism.

Just this pull.

But volunteers don't build county water systems and keep lead from leaching into our drinking glasses. We can't rely on faith groups to reinforce bridges and repave runways at the airport. We can't ask second-graders, even ones as patriotic as Isiah Britt who raised all that money, to raise enough money to keep our kids healthy. You hear a lot about government overreach, how Obama—he's for big government. Listen, it's not government overreach to say that our government is responsible for making sure you can wash your hands in your own sink, or shower in your own home, or cook for your family. These are the most basic services. There is no more basic element sustaining human life than water. It's not too much to expect for all Americans that their water is going to be safe.

Conservatives to Padgett: "The heaviest road users are the ones who get the biggest subsidies."

Narcissus, still gazing at that pesky erection.

Wanna know what's really funny?

The Padgett-led heavy trucking coalition seeks to sue the city of New Albany for failing to maintain city streets suitable for their interstate-grade vehicles.

And yet, when it comes to overall maintenance of roads in this nation, note the disparity.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that trucks already cost the public as much as $129 billion annually more than they pay in road user fees.

Whoa! That's a lot of TIF bonds.

But wait, because here's the punch line: In the article below, which explicates "asphalt socialism" in our autocentric nation, the air is being let out of the truckers' tires not by liberal leftist pinko fags, but by the Padgett Political Action Committee to Elect Republicans' very own beloved conservative element.

That's rich, indeed. The hypocrisy flies over their heads as quickly as the dump trucks speed down Spring.

I'm reprinting the entire article here, because it's just too good to excerpt.

House Republicans’ Asphalt Socialism, by Joe Cortright (The American Conservative)

The House of Representatives has hit on a clever new strategy for funding the bankrupt Highway Trust Fund: raid the Federal Reserve. Their plan calls for transferring nearly $60 billion from the profits earned on the Federal Reserve’s operations—basically fees paid by member banks—to bail out the Highway Trust Fund.

For years, many macro economists have been urging the Federal Reserve to stimulate the economy by using its power to effectively print money in the form of a “helicopter drop”—simply crediting every American with a certain amount of extra dollars in their bank accounts. The idea has been suggested as a way to jump start consumer spending in a moribund or deflationary economy by economists of some stature, including Ben Bernanke and Milton Friedman. The idea was advanced as a way of accelerating the sluggish growth we’re currently experiencing in an article in Foreign Affairs. But while it might make theoretical sense to economist, it was simply politically impossible, because as The Economist intoned, the idea of a helicopter drop would be anathema to Republicans.

But when it comes to a helicopter drop for highways, there’s no such problem. Remarkably, the proposal to tap the Federal Reserve’s funds comes not from radical Keynesians, but from the Republicans in the very conservative House of Representatives. And apparently, the same people who preach personal responsibility in almost every other field of endeavor want to insulate automobile drivers from paying the costs of the roads they drive on. While they may espouse the virtues for the free market in almost everything else, this position makes them “asphalt socialists” when it comes to transportation.

The best estimates are that drivers now pay only a tiny fraction of the direct costs of building and operating roads, not to mention causing huge externalities in the form of crash-related injuries and deaths and pollution. As we’ve noted before, the heaviest road users are the ones who get the biggest subsidies: The Congressional Budget Office estimates that trucks already cost the public as much as $129 billion annually more than they pay in road user fees. And a report from TransitCenter and the Frontier Group recently detailed the $7.3 billion in parking tax subsidies drivers get every year as well.

(Even with these subsidies, however, increasing fuel efficiency and the decline in per capita driving have pushed down revenues for the Highway Trust Fund, and contributed to the current crisis.)

While this latest chapter of dysfunctional public finance and ideological hypocrisy is playing out at the federal level, it’s equally prevalent in the way states and localities treat driving, too. Local governments have parking requirements that drive up the cost and drive down the supply of housing to subsidize car ownership. In Seattle, parking requirements add something on the order of $250 a month to the price of a typical apartment.

The new transportation bill will favor cars in other ways, too. Local highway projects will get an 80 percent federal match, but transit projects will get only 50 percent. Meanwhile, important sources of funds for transit, pedestrian, and bicycle programs, including TIGER grants and the Transportation Alternatives Program, were cut or imperiled.

While advocates of the road system regularly cloak their arguments in the rhetoric of choice and the free market, our transportation system is actually characterized by heavy government intervention on behalf of private vehicles. Massive, taxpayer-supported subsidies effectively bribe people to drive, and insulate them from the financial consequences their choices impose on others.

Drivers want more roads—as long as they don’t actually have to pay for them. The fact that there’s no stomach for increasing the gas tax—even though gasoline prices have fallen by more than a dollar a gallon in the past year—shows that when put to the test of the marketplace, there’s actually little demand for more transportation.

The irony, of course, is that transportation is clearly one policy area where traditional free market principles would put a serious dent in the problems of traffic congestion, air pollution, and safety. If car users faced anything close to the actual costs of building and operating roads (and mitigating or preventing the injuries and pollution effects), we’d see much less driving, and much less demand for additional capacity.

"If you (literally) disintegrate a society’s physical setting, as sprawl has done, you tend to disintegrate its culture as well."

Who are the local conservatives and Republicans who'd like to join the dialogue about these purple topics?

I can think of plenty of them in leadership positions who can't and won't, and yet many of us on the shop floor agree as to broad concepts during social media chats.

Where are you? Let's have a beer. Forget the parties, because there are coalitions waiting to be built.

Painting the Town Purple, by Jeff Turrentine (On Earth)

... Which is why it’s always satisfying when left and right amicably agree to come together over a sustainability issue that was previously thought of as the province of “the environmental movement” (whatever that term has come to mean). Not long ago, I came across a remarkable quote: a one-sentence condemnation of urban sprawl that astutely links its ethos of physical decentralization to the breakdown of certain civic ideals, like community and neighborliness, that we hold dear.

If you (literally) disintegrate a society’s physical setting, as sprawl has done, you tend to disintegrate its culture as well.

True enough, I thought—and well put, at that. The sentence appeared in a white paper on sprawl’s social costs. That one of its three authors was Andrés Duany, the architect who coined the term “New Urbanism” to describe a set of urban-planning principles emphasizing density, centrality, walkability, and shared civic amenities, came as little surprise. But upon reading the names of Duany’s collaborators, I’ll confess that my first thought was that a politically minded copyeditor was playing a practical joke. Could it really be the case that helping Duany make his anti-sprawl, pro–smart growth argument were Paul M. Weyrich, cofounder of both the far-right Heritage Foundation and the Moral Majority, and William S. Lind, the conservative critic who has spent the last quarter-century since the collapse of the Soviet Union railing against an insidious “Marxist culture” that’s still hard at work corrupting America from within?

"American conservatives aren’t necessarily racists, but they are invariably anti-anti-racist."

Ironically, only moments before viewing this article, I was making a point to a friend as to why the city of New Albany typically refuses to do very much about the physical infrastructure of "domestic" disturbances, particularly as they occur (a) in rental properties, and (b) outside the geographical and socio-economic vicinity where such matters typically (and cynically) are "expected" to occur, and are planned for accordingly.

Now, there exist various mechanisms which might be deployed by functionaries to turn up the heat on the property owner, but in my experience, these are only sporadically referenced. Political will is virtually non-existent, as you already know. Your issues cannot possibly exist in this shining city on the hill (or, in the flood plain).

In short, any elected official capable of convincing himself that an incessantly chanted mantra of "fundamentally better" describes a city where one's own two eyes persist in returning a different verdict probably is inclined to exist in a perpetual state of denial.

If this place is wonderful, then by definition, there can be no unresolved problems. It follows that those who continue to point to the unresolved problems must be doing so from malice and spite. In short, in the current climate of make-believe, my friend's complaints are likely to be construed as direct attacks on the mayor of the city, whose campaign platform is restricted entirely to this:

"These nice things I bought for you using your credit card are proof that we are fundamentally better and simply must go swimming while consuming more ice cream and cookies."

Meanwhile, there is the tendency of conservatives to be "anti-anti-racist." The preceding example has almost nothing to do with racism, as does the article referenced here. However, I'd argue that there is a linkage in the sense of cognitive dissonance, and methods of rationalizing it. Feel free to disagree, as we're still supposedly allowed to do so, at least until the guns come out.

National Review Magazine's Racism Denial, Then and Now, by Jeet Heer (New Republic)

... This unwillingness to admit a racist motive for the Charleston killings has a deeply political motive, for doing so would mean admitting that racism is a real, ongoing problem in American society—one that requires policies to counteract it.

American conservatives aren’t necessarily racists, but they are invariably anti-anti-racist. The creed of anti-anti-racism goes something like this: racism was a problem in the past, but no longer is a serious issue; the chief barrier for non-whites to advance in American society is their own behavior; attempts to remedy racism, such as affirmative action, are themselves a form of racism. For the anti-anti-racist, the very word “racism” has a strange, talismanic power. To utter the word “racism” is to create racism, which otherwise does not exist in the wonderful meritocracy that is America.

Lakoff: " Poor conservatives vote their identity as conservatives, not their lack of material wealth."

Long but recommended reading for Chairman Adam ... to be fair, for all of us on the "left" side of the aisle.

 ... George Lakoff, professor of cognitive science at the University of California, Berkeley, has been working on moral frames for 50 years. In Communicating Our American Values and Vision, he gives this precis: "Framing is not primarily about politics or political messaging or communication. It is far more fundamental than that: frames are the mental structures that allow human beings to understand reality – and sometimes to create what we take to be reality. But frames do have an enormous bearing on politics … they structure our ideas and concepts, they shape the way we reason … For the most part, our use of frames is unconscious and automatic."

Leading to this expression of what it means to be a Hoosier in Pence-istan, circa 2015:

 ... In fact, there is no centre: the more progressives capitulate, the more boldly the conservatives express their vision, and the further to the right the mainstream moves.

I was directed back to Lakoff after too long an interregnum when I stumbled on this article, and the "strict father family" framing explaining why the chickens vote for Colonel Sanders.

The following is a Truthout interview with Professor George Lakoff about his latest effort, THE ALL NEW Don’t Think of an Elephant!, to convince progressives to “frame” their political language and appeals based on deep-seated and active values. These are positions and actions that most of the public supports, but absent appropriate “framing” often vote their fears instead of progressive beliefs. It is necessary to ground a nurturing politics for the common good and core values in language and a moral foundation that appeals – rhetorically and emotionally – to the better selves of voters.

You write, “remember that voters vote their identity and their values, which need not coincide with their self-interest.” I remember writing a commentary on a poor congressional district, let’s say about 98 percent white, in Kentucky. Most of the residents were on food stamps, Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid – or all of them. However, they have voted in recent elections by landslide majorities to re-elect a congressman who opposes food stamps and supports cuts in Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Can you elaborate on how this can occur?

A single moral worldview dominates conservative policies in every domain of life – family, personal identity, sex, religion, sports, education, the market, foreign policy and politics – what I’ve called strict father morality. Your moral worldview is central to how you understand your life.

In a strict father family, the father is in charge and is assumed to know right from wrong, to have moral as well as physical authority. He is supposed to protect the family, support the family, set the rules, enforce the rules, maintain respect, govern sexuality and reproduction, and teach his kids right from wrong, that is, to grow up with the same moral system. His word defines what is right and is law; no backtalk. Disobedience is punished, painfully, so that children learn not to disobey. Via physical discipline, they learn internal discipline, which is how they become moral beings. With discipline they can become prosperous.

If you are not prosperous, you are not disciplined enough, not taking enough personal responsibility and deserve your poverty. At the center is the principle of personal responsibility and moral hierarchy: those who are more moral (in this sense of morality) should rule: God over man, man over nature, parents over children, the rich over the poor, Western culture over non-Western culture, America over other countries, men over women, straights over gays, Christians over non-Christians, etc.

On conservative religion, God is a strict father; in sports, coaches are strict with their athletes; in classrooms, teachers should be strict with students; in business, employers rule over employees; in the market, the market should decide – the market itself is the strict father, deciding that those who have financial discipline deserve their wealth, and others deserve their poverty; and in politics, this moral system itself should rule.

Conservatives can be poor, but they can still be kings in their own castles – strict fathers at home, in their personal identity: in their religion, in their sex lives, in the sports they love. Poor conservatives vote their identity as conservatives, not their lack of material wealth.

Back to Zoe Williams at The Guardian for a brief sketch of the nurturant-family model.

... The nurturant-family model is the progressive view: in it, the ideals are empathy, interdependence, co-operation, communication, authority that is legitimate and proves its legitimacy with its openness to interrogation. "The world that the nurturant parent seeks to create has exactly the opposite properties," Lakoff writes in Moral Politics. As progressives identify failures of logic in the conservative position, so it works the other way round (one of Lakoff's examples: "How can liberals support federal funding for Aids research and treatment, while promoting the spread of Aids by sanctioning sexual behaviour that leads to Aids?").

"The Conservative Case Against the Suburbs".

But is Dave Matthews reading?

The Conservative Case Against the Suburbs, by Charles Marohn (The American Conservative)

In his recent column, “Why Suburbia Irks Some Conservatives,” the prominent urban geographer Joel Kotkin creates and then slays a number of straw men in defense of suburban development patterns and all that is right and good in this country. This, unfortunately, is a lament that too often goes unchallenged, ceding a large swath of the American experience in the process. It is time for conservatives to confront the true nature of the suburbs.

America’s suburban experiment is a radical, government-led re-engineering of society, one that artificially inverted millennia of accumulated wisdom and practice in building human habitats. We can excuse modern Americans for not immediately grasping the revolutionary ways in which we restructured this continent over the past three generations–at this point, the auto-dominated pattern of development is all most Americans have ever experienced–but today we live in a country where our neighborhoods are shaped, and distorted, by centralized government policy.

Not you, too: "Why Conservatives Should Love the City."

That's okay, my conservative brethren. Don't pay any attention to this.

Please continue living just the way you are, where you are.

Pretty please.

Why Conservatives Should Love the City, by Michael Hendrix (The American Conservative)

... While the country is growing urban, conservatives are going rural. They desire to live in places that are losing population relative to the rest of America. For a while, conservatives may benefit from a preference for being spread out. But in the long run, it will be difficult to buck this trend and keep a solid electoral and cultural foothold. The growing share of urban Americans will be a ringing death knell for a strong conservative showing in national elections.

Conservatives eat their own.

And there's nothing wrong with that.

Right-Wing Author Abandons Cultural Populism, Decries ‘White Trash’, by Michelle Goldberg (The Nation)

Charlotte Hays, the conservative writer and director of cultural programs at the anti-feminist Independent Women’s Forum, has a new book out, titled When Did White Trash Become the New Normal? A Southern Lady Asks the Impertinent Question. A broadside against the moral and aesthetic failures of the lower orders, it’s a fascinating work, not for what it says but for what it represents. It’s a sign that at least some on the right are abandoning the NASCAR-fetishizing Palinesque faux-populism of recent decades for a more overt style of class warfare ...

... Hays’s work is saturated with that particular kind of right-wing smugness born of the conviction that one’s willingness to express common prejudices is a sign of free-thinking audacity. What’s interesting is where it’s directed—not at liberals or their sacred cows, but at fat, broke, ordinary Americans. “We look like hell as a nation, and fat people bear a large brunt of responsibility for this,” she writes. “I can remember when going to New York meant seeing beautiful, pencil-thin people in stylish clothes on Fifth Avenue. Where are they now? The other day I saw a fat guy in polyester in my favorite New York restaurant.” Heaven forfend! She’s so delighted with her description of diabetes as “the talismanic White Trash disease” that she uses it twice ...

... It’s becoming increasingly hard to ignore inequality’s ravages or to blame them on gay marriage or snotty university professors. Conservatives find themselves faced with a choice: either acknowledge that our economic system is failing the American people, or deride the American people for failing our economic system.

Hays opts for the latter.

Hobknobb Roasting Company location on State Street is closed.

I'm not sure when the Hobknobb on State Street closed; I happened to notice the sign on the door while cruising past on Wednesday afternoon. The web site still lists it. The original Knobs location remains in business, and you still can read the owner's conservative "meme-a-day" postings on Facebook.

They're an interesting sociological phenomenon, and I really enjoy perusing them while seated at Quills, downtown, safely out of range of the exurb.

Let's all take a Crappo -- please, take him.

Four more years, because Bain-think is Budweiser-think with fewer letters.

In many varied ways, 2008 was the worst year of my life in purely personal terms, and just prior to the presidential election that autumn, pretty much the whole country decided to join me in a state of dazed, depressed confusion. But then something unexpected happened, and Barack Obama got himself elected. Even my reliably fascistic state of Indiana landed in the blue column, a moment for cherishing during Nurnberg rallies to come.

Of course, four years of crazed opposition to modernity have followed, with America's right-wing nutjob cadres constructing a network of trenches to rival those zig-zagging across the Western Front in 1915, and now the element most directly responsible for impeding the cause of American progress demands that we reward its conniving intransigence by handing it the keys, ensuring that the title to the nation remains in the hands of the 1%.

No thanks. I'd just as soon drink Bud Light.

I'm constantly reminded by conservatives that a Randian, self-referential greed is the only barometer of such matters, and so, am I better off now than in 2008?

You bet your ass I am, and on all fronts, except the predictably shallow standards of my own aging, confused generation. I might be whining, moaning and mocking, because in dollar terms, my pay packet actually has diminished somewhat since 2008, and my personal wealth as measured by unnecessary objects also has declined, but these are conditions I can tolerate precisely because I've been busy investing everything I have, and several things I don't, into my brewing dream. In short, I've been following the conventional small business wisdom as touted by those most critical of my politics, and remaining leftist all the while.

And it drives them bat shit crazy.

We continue working hard to bring our business dreams to fruition, which parasitical socialist leftists like me supposedly are incapable of doing. Yes, it's slower than we thought it would be, but NABC moves forward. The growth has been incremental. We make first downs, and the work is both sustainable and honest. We never laid off an employee during the recession. We made numerous mistakes, try to learn from them, and keep fighting.

At no single point during any of it have I even once been tempted to say that Barack Obama's big government has kept me down. To the contrary, and yet again on the Democratic Convention's final night, the president has inspired me to believe in the future, to trust my instincts, to remain a part of the collective community -- in it together, as implied in any pursuit of a more perfect union. NABC was built not just by its owners, but also by the employees, the customers, the vendors ... the list goes on, and on, and it never implies a sense of unbridled, individualistic egoism. I may be an egotistical bastard, and yet I never doubt that the larger stage upon which one performs is collectively built.

Furthermore, neither hidebound conservatism nor antebellum throwbacks are options in the craft beer world. Rebelling against them is why the craft beer world exists. Times and economies have changed, and while no economic segment is perfect, I'm prepared to argue that craft beer's ongoing prosperity illustrates that we've adapted better than most.

Of course, for me it goes even deeper than lessons of my chosen field.

When right-wingers froth at the mouth in their insistence that big government -- that Obama's big government -- is so very bad that I must fall to my knees and beg for the intervention of big corporations, big religion and big lies as chosen curatives, or risk straight white males like me being doomed ... well, I won't get fooled again. I smile and grin, because they're just plain wrong.

Their medicine is far, far worse than the disease, because in every breath, one can hear the the unmistakable sound of padlocks connecting chains binding conscience. I can't imagine a time when for me, like for most of them, it'll be strictly about the profits, and the use of that money as a means of hierarchical, societal control. I'll struggle with them to the last gasp when it comes to their visions of capitulation through theocracy, and if I can figure out a way to use good beer towards this end, you can bet I will.

It's neither 2008, nor 1859. It's 2012, and I've into a sixth decade on the planet. I'm looking forward to the final third of my life, to whatever time remains allotted, as I continue to think and act in a manner to disprove the tired, sad bromide about people necessarily becoming ever more conservative with advancing age. What's the use is knowledge and experience if all you wish to do is turn back clocks?

Can't we just make better clocks?

This post's got no title, just words and a tune ... (November 1, 2008)

... Axiomatically, the people screaming anti-Obama epithets at Republican rallies identify themselves as religious people. They go to church. What’s more, it isn’t that they’re somehow guilty of incomprehension, or of misunderstanding the sermons they hear while awaiting the collection plate. In general terms, they’re grasping the point perfectly well: It’s us, and them. “They” must convert. “We” must proselytize. The message is clear. If you’re not one of them, you’re not really American.

And that’s bullshit. Always has been, and always will be.

Mittled's core platform, at a glance.

To paraphrase Mencken, conservatism is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

"It’s no wonder that Mr. Romney does not want to take full responsibility for his running mate’s ideas."

A white conservative (Romney) picks another white conservative (Ryan), and the nation yawns. Conservatism ... it's just SO damned white, or as Frank Rich wrote, "Strange as it seems this ticket really is the current GOP's idea of diversity."

The Romney-Ryan Plan for America, a New York Times editorial

Less than 24 hours after Mitt Romney chose Paul Ryan as his running mate on Saturday, his campaign was already trying to distance itself from Mr. Ryan’s politically toxic budget plan.

"Many conservative Americans have seen their livelihoods threatened by the very neoliberal economics their party seeks to extend."

See: Chickens, Colonel Sanders, et al.

The world as seen by Republicans, in a land of myth and amnesia; US conservatives are increasingly keen to interpret their country's woes primarily in terms of threats from abroad, by Gary Younge (Guardian)

... But while liberals are more likely to see the roots of this crisis as domestic – growing economic inequalities, religious zealotry, corporatisation of media and politics – conservatives are increasingly keen to perceive the primary threat as external: immigrants, Islam, foreigners and foreign trade.

Taibbi: "This is where the Republican Party is now."

I'd dearly love to hear Ed Clere and Ron Grooms explain how this analysis is (a) incorrect, and/or (b) does not apply to them, or to their idol, St. Daniels. Perhaps the Urban Enterprise Association might be compelled to fund a forum so that we can listen intently to the inevitable obfuscations.

Arizona Debate: Conservative Chickens Come Home to Roost, by Matt Taibbi (Rolling Stone)

... Most importantly, though, the conservative passion for divisive, partisan, bomb-tossing politics is threatening to permanently cripple the Republican party. They long ago became more about pointing fingers than about ideology, and it's finally ruining them.

Oh, sure, your average conservative will insist his belief system is based upon a passion for the free market and limited government, but that's mostly a cover story. Instead, the vast team-building exercise that has driven the broadcasts of people like Rush and Hannity and the talking heads on Fox for decades now has really been a kind of ongoing Quest for Orthodoxy, in which the team members congregate in front of the TV and the radio and share in the warm feeling of pointing the finger at people who aren't as American as they are, who lack their family values, who don’t share their All-American work ethic.

The finger-pointing game is a fun one to play, but it’s a little like drugs – you have to keep taking bigger and bigger doses in order to get the same high.

"Prejudice tends not to arise directly from low intelligence but from the conservative ideologies to which people of low intelligence are drawn."

Been to a city council meeting lately, George?

The right's stupidity spreads, enabled by a too-polite left; Conservativism may be the refuge of the dim. But the room for rightwing ideas is made by those too timid to properly object, by George Monbiot (guardian.co.uk)

Yes, conservatism thrives on low intelligence and poor information. But the liberals in politics on both sides of the Atlantic continue to back off, yielding to the supremacy of the stupid. It's turkeys all the way down.

Kathleen Parker on Chris Buckley, National Review: "(Republicans) do not ... deserve to win this time, and someone had to remind them why."

NAC has been following this story since Christopher Buckley's on-line Obama endorsement first broke.

William F. Buckley was articulate and intelligent, whereas contemporary conservatism boasts a crass anti-intellectualism that lately has become viral.

Surveying the scurrilous faith-based wreckage of the conservative movement, which today embraces the "we the people don't need no education" line of non-thought and would correspondingly not hesitate to ostracize Buckley elder in the same way that it has impugned the younger, as well as previously savaging Kathleen Parker for her apostasy in denouncing Sarah Palin, LEO’s Stephen George said it best earlier this week:

Let’s call this line of thinking the terrorism of the idiocracy. It did not start with John McCain or Sarah Palin — although they have found wild profit in it — and it surely will not end there. In actuality, it begins in the vacuum created by a general ignorance of the world around you, the pride you take in that ignorance, and the vulnerability that leaves you with. When some addled shit-peddler like McCain or Palin fills the vacuum with radical lies, these barely literate masses take a crazed posture, and the worst of their own fear and loathing manifests itself in heinous, hilarious ways.

Like the woman who still insists, despite McCain himself telling her otherwise, that Obama is an “Arab” and, by implication, “Arab” is bad. Naturally, McCain scored media points by calling off that particular dog, but he never said anything like, “Hey nut-job, Arab is not a bad word.” In fact, by avoiding saying that but nonetheless acknowledging she’d erred, he subtly reinforced her “epithet.”

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WFB Would Be Proud, by Kathleen Parker (Friday, October 17, 2008)

Christopher Buckley's endorsement of Barack Obama -- followed by his abrupt departure from the back page of the magazine his father founded, National Review -- has caused a ripple of contempt from the conservative right.

Nay, make that a tsunami of hostility. An avalanche of venom. A cataclysm of ... well, you get the idea. People are mad. Good riddance, they say, and don't let the door hit you on the way out.
Let us proceed, gingerly.

I am not a passive bystander to these events. Buckley is a friend, as are other members of his family, especially Uncle Reid, with whom I have worked for several years. National Review is home to many friends, and its online editor, Kathryn Jean Lopez, kindly subscribes to my column. Like Buckley, I have enjoyed a decent fragging for suggesting that Sarah Palin excuse herself from the Republican ticket.

What gives here?

What does it mean that the right cannot politely entertain dissenting opinions within its ranks? What, if anything, does it portend that Buckley The Younger has bolted from the right, even resigning (with enthusiastic editorial approval) from the family flagship?

Some have opined, ridiculously, that Buckley -- son of the famous William F. Buckley (WFB) -- was merely seeking attention. Christo, as family and friends call him, has written more than a dozen acclaimed books, one of which, "Thank You for Smoking," became a movie. In 2004, he won the Thurber Prize for American Humor for "No Way to Treat a First Lady." For 18 years he edited a magazine, Forbes Life, and otherwise seems to be doing all right.

Other critics have surmised that Buckley's "betrayal" was a publicity stunt for his newest novel, "Supreme Courtship" (which I reviewed for National Review). When you're as funny and write as well as Buckley, you don't have to resort to stunts. You are the stunt.

So why did he do it?

Because he had to. It's in his genes.

True believers of whatever stripe too often forget that the men and women who create movements are first and foremost radicals. Great movements are not the result of relaxing afternoons musing along the Seine but emerge from flames of passion ignited by injustice.

When WFB created the modern conservative movement, he didn't call a neighborhood meeting and whisper, "Come along now." He stood athwart history and yelled, "Stop!"

His son, though he customarily takes the more circuitous route to the revolution via satire, is now merely answering WFB's original call to political activism. Paraphrasing Ronald Reagan, the younger Buckley said: "I haven't left the Republican Party. It left me."

In 1955, when WFB announced his new magazine and explained the reasons for it, he described conservatives as "non-licensed nonconformists":

"Radical conservatives in this country have an interesting time of it, for when they are not being suppressed or mutilated by Liberals, they are being ignored or humiliated by a great many of those of the well-fed Right, whose ignorance and amorality have never been exaggerated for the same reason that one cannot exaggerate infinity."

Fast-forward half a century, and the old is the new.

Radical conservatives are still having an interesting time of it, though these days they are being mutilated by fellow "conservatives." The well-fed Right now cultivates ignorance as a political strategy and humiliates itself when its brightest sons seek sanctuary in the solitude of personal honor.

The truth few wish to utter is that the GOP has abandoned many conservatives, who mostly nurse their angst in private. Those chickens we keep hearing about have indeed come home to roost. Years of pandering to the extreme wing -- the "kooks" the senior Buckley tried to separate from the right -- have created a party no longer attentive to its principles.

Instead, as Christopher Buckley pointed out in a blog post on thedailybeast.com explaining his departure from National Review, eight years of "conservatism" have brought us "a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance."
Republicans are not short on brainpower -- or pride -- but they have strayed off course. They do not, in fact, deserve to win this time, and someone had to remind them why.

Christopher Buckley, ever the swashbuckling heir to his father's defiant spirit, walked the plank so that the sinking mother ship might right itself.

No doubt his seafaring father is cheering from heaven: "Ahoy there, Christo! Well done, my son."

Republican conservatives? "The avatar, the exemplar, the paradigm" of intellectual dishonesty.

Syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts Jr.'s ostensible target is Mitt Romney, but his description of "intellectual dishonesty" as practiced by Republican conservatives is priceless.

Republican conservatives make intellectual dishonesty an art form

If you're a regular here, you've heard me rant from time to time about intellectual dishonesty. By this, I mean more than just your garden-variety lie. No, to be intellectually dishonest means to argue that which you know to be untrue and to substitute ideology for intellect to the degree that you'll do violence to language and logic rather than cross the party line.

Yes, we're all intellectually dishonest on occasion. But no one does it like Republican conservatives. They are to intellectual dishonesty what Michael Jordan was to basketball or The Temptations to harmony: the avatar, the exemplar, the paradigm. They have elevated it beyond hypocrisy and political expedience. They have made it ... art.