Excellent post by Glenn Greenwald on how conservatism and the GOP under Bush devolved into a cult of personality and how liberalism can avoid the same - and to a large extent already has, in that liberals are far more liable to criticize Obama than conservatives were to criticize Bush.
It’s interesting that one of the right’s […]

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Spent the weekend camping up at Knoebel’s with seven other families, all with elementary-age (and younger) kids, a nice break from the intensive politics/online realm that consumes so much time and thought.
Still, politics intruded. One of the dads was a real conservative, and around the campfire the final night we got into it - mildly […]

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Atrios:
Oh, and conservatives? Thanks for giving Obama the power to tap your phones! bwahahaha
Which actually segues into a more serious thought here (hat tip: JN):

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One of the things that’s been sort of perplexing in the post-election environment is the question: What now?

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Pastor Dan:
For decades, we have been taught to cower before the shadow of every tin-pot dictator and every sliver of cultural difference. All up and down the social, economic, and political order we have been told: Be Afraid.
I think it’s time for that to come to an end, don’t you?
Yep.

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I’ve been thinking this for a while.

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Regarding this nugget from Joe H., Pat Buchanan has been a very vocal critic of the Bush administration for some time. Few years back he wrote “Where The Right Went Wrong,” which I read on vacation in ‘06; the critiques of how the administration approached the war in Iraq might have been made on Daily […]

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This one’s been floating around for a few days in the wake of the McClellan business. I’ll leave it for you to decide whom it sounds like…
In order to make groupthink testable, Irving Janis devised eight symptoms that are indicative of groupthink (1977).
1. Illusions of invulnerability creating excessive optimism and encouraging risk taking.
2. Rationalising warnings […]

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Kevin Drum, in a smart post on how conservatism now bears a resemblance to liberalism of the late ’70s:
The great liberal wave that lasted from the 30s through the 70s was fundamentally based on three things: middle class wage growth, the construction of a social safety net, and the individual rights revolution. Its other pathologies […]

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Gary Hart goes Godwin right out of the box:
Historians of early 21st century American politics will remark the degree to which radical forces, usually called neoconservatives, perverted language as recommended by the National Socialist Party in 1930s Germany. Continue to demonize liberals, blame them for all social and economic problems, and soon enough no one […]

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And I’m tempted to say ignorance is bliss. But I won’t. Or maybe I just did.
In any event:

Individuals with conservative ideologies are happier than liberal-leaners, and new research pinpoints the reason: Conservatives rationalize social and economic inequalities.
Regardless of marital status, income or church attendance, right-wing individuals reported greater life satisfaction and well-being than left-wingers, the […]

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I’m going to link this with the caveat that you might not be able to get through, for whatever reason the site seems to be periodically down. Nevertheless:
I’m sure it will come as no surprise that an evil lib’rul like me occasionally peruses the Village Voice. Though in this case, I merely happened across a […]

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So that’s what happened to Justin Quinn.
Strange, I never would have pegged him for a conservative, but then I never asked. Whatever floats your boat, I suppose. But I did catch this, as did justplainjoe in the Opinion thread:
If nothing else, a disdain for liberalism is the common thread that unites us.
Right about now, that’s […]

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Spent much of last night watching the Paul McCartney in Red Square concert film/documentary, which I picked up via a Christmas gift card to record store FYE. Good stuff - the performances of his lesser-known tunes are better, mostly because you don’t expect them to sound a certain way, and aren’t disappointed when they don’t […]

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Now there’s a kick in the head for you.

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So in addition to fending off right-wingers here on this site, I also do quite a bit of fending off via regular old e-mail. One group in particular for some reason decided to include me in all of their local right-wing clubhouse e-mails; I’ve come to know the guys, they’re musicians, I’ve downed a few […]

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And while we’re on the subject of kids - and I suppose I haven’t been contentious enough yet today - I was struck by a line in this item from Ross Douthat, who is probabably one of my favorite conservative writers (in that he’s not of the conservative movement, and is thus apt to wander “off the […]

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I was on jury duty in Philadelphia and had gone out to get a bite to eat when, upon returning to the courthouse, I ran into a ragtag group of protesters shouting about the war in Iraq.
I’d guess there were about a dozen of them, bundled against the raw cold of early March, frizzy hair flying […]

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“I think I’ve got you figured out,” the reader wrote a year or so back. “You’re not really liberal at all. At heart, you’re a conservative.”
I smiled a little, I think. The reader might have been onto something.
But it’s more complicated than that, isn’t it? I’ve written of how I once called myself a conservative, […]

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