Those Poor, Persecuted Conservatives

URGENT: If your senator is on the HELP Committee, call or write them to support a strong public option as part of any health care reform legislation. Details here...

Pity the oppressed conservatives, writes Leonard Pitts. After all, a bad joke about Sarah Palin's daughter is easily the moral equivalent of the shooting at the Holocaust Museum. On the mark as usual, Pitts writes that

...modern conservatism is defined by an Alice-through-the-looking-glass incoherence: small government except when it is growing larger than ever, fiscal restraint except when we are spending like Michael Jackson in a Disney gift shop, foreign policy pragmatism except when we are trying to transform the Middle East.

Indeed, sometimes it feels as if it is no longer defined by principles at all, nor by energy and ideas, but rather, by a limitless ability to feel put upon and slighted. To be a conservative these days is, or so they would have you believe, like being black in Birmingham in 1952. It is to be the victim of media, culture and law that hate you just for being.

If there's anything consistent about modern conservatism, it's hypocrisy. These practitioners of victimology are the first to blame the victims (see: Dr. George Tiller, the people of New Orleans) when it suits them.

Then there's the sheer number of sex scandals, the proportion of which has reached the bizarre. To be sure, it's none of my business whether John Ensign (R-NV) has an affair with a campaign volunteer. But it is the people's business when the practitioners of an ideology that both asserts its moral superiority in everything from so-called "family values" to foreign policy and decries its opposition as treasonous moral lepers put themselves above their own standards. That's rank, sordid hypocrisy and we must continue to call them on it.

Something for which I say "thank God for the blogosphere." If newspapers had been doing their jobs, they wouldn't be whining about about what we "lose" as they shrink and close down. If the blogosphere had been as widespread and effective in 2004 as it is now, John Kerry might well be entering his second term: Liberal bloggers would have made the Swift Boat smear about Republicans instead of the bogus "story" about how Kerry responded to something so unthinkably low....


NOLA Happenings: Start your weekend tomorrow night at Concerts in the Courtyard with Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys...Saturday, check out the Bywater Art Market ("affordable art by New Orleans artists") before heading out to Abita Springs for the Louisiana Bicycle Festival...