Posted 11:10 AM by Gene

The CORNER kiddies are throwing sand around their box because Andy told on them:

Conservative institutions, conceived for combat, have in power become self-perpetuating, churning their direct-mail lists in pursuit of cash from the orthodontist in Wichita and the Little Old Lady in Dubuque, so the activists can continue to fund the all-important work of . . . churning their direct-mail lists. The current story of Jack Abramoff's lucrative self-dealing, involving as it does such movement stalwarts as Ralph Reed and Grover Norquist, may seem lunatic in its excesses, but the excesses aren't the point. The point is the ease with which the stalwarts commandeered the greasy machinery of Washington power. Conservative activists came to Washington to do good and stayed to do well. The grease rubbed off, too....

Conservatism nowadays is increasingly a creature of its technology. It is shaped--if I were a Marxist I might even say determined--by cable television and talk radio, with their absurd promotion of caricature and conflict, and by blogs, where the content ranges from Jesuitical disputes among hollow-cheeked obsessives to feats of self-advertisement and professional narcissism (Everyone's been asking what I think about . . . You won't want to miss my appearance tonight on . . . Be sure to click here for my latest . . . ) that would have been unthinkable in polite company as recently as a decade ago. Most conservative books are pseudo-books: ghostwritten pastiches whose primary purpose seems to be the photo of the "author" on the cover. What a tumble! From The Conservative Mind to Savage Nation; from Clifton White to Dick Morris; from Willmoore Kendall and Harry Jaffa to Sean Hannity and Mark Fuhrman--all in little more than a generation's time. Whatever this is, it isn't progress.

All true, but hardly new; Bill Buckley, J. S. BACH's closest friend and the father of a HILARIOUS comic novelist, eructed in Playboy and Penthouse. Still this cheap, almost faux conservatism has reached epidemic levels. We see it in The Weekly Standard, owned by A MAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! who ISN'T a CONSERVATIVE. We see it in the raves for EVERY CONSERVATIVE PC MOVIE in THE CORNER, and the ENDS-JUSTIFY-THE-MEANS TREATISES that say con-SER-va-tives can play liberal tricks to advance their causes. No, there are crooks all around politics, and some call themselves con-SER-va-tives.