Bill, I’ve never gone to the site you mention, but the problem is even worse than you suggest. Once-venerable conservative organizations are now sinecures for third-rate hacks with no principles. What principles could these people possibly have if they think George W. Bush is a great president?
I don’t want to mention any names, but I got a fundraising letter not long ago from a well-known, decades-old conservative organization. It ended by noting that political correctness and ignorance of Western civilization are greater threats to freedom even than Saddam Hussein! Wow! Even greater than Saddam, the man with the “unmanned drone” program that turned out to be a single prototype of plywood and string? Surely not that great!
We have sunk to quite a low when conservative organizations are sending out letters whose propaganda quotient is pretty much that of the old Pravda and the Kremlin. There are still people out there who call the nobody weakling Saddam a “threat to freedom”?
As I read major conservative sites, I wonder what in the world these people have in common with me. They hate limited government, they can see no real problems with perpetual war, and the Constitution is for them a vaguely subversive document. Their principle is this: the United States is Good, so whatever the U.S. government (which to them is the same thing, of course) does is also Good, no matter how transparently dishonest its stated rationale. Things these people would laugh at if the old Soviet Union had said or done them are hailed as supreme acts of genius and goodness because the U.S. government has done them.
And to think these are people who complain about moral relativism. Physician, heal thyself!
9:58 am on February 28, 2004
