I don't know whether it's because I haven't finished my coffee, but this article seems to make literally no sense at all. The sentences appear randomly generated by a right wing computer. I know there are really smart right wingers --Judge Posner, for example. And really shrewd ones -- Karl Rove. But this particular display seems to be an attempt to prove that the right is indeed The Stupid Party, as Mill called the Tories. Or am I being uncharitable? jks
--- oudeis <oudeis at gmail.com> wrote:
> Understanding the conservative mind:
>
> 1. I'm not religious, either, but theocracy is a
> great idea.
> 2. If you want to win, be like us.
>
> http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg.asp
>
> The Sore-Loser Party
> Understanding Smiley, Dowd, Raines, Krugman, Maher,
> Sarandon, et al.
>
> Enough.
>
> [...]
> But that brings us back to this whole "ignorance"
> thing. What Smiley, Dowd,
> & Co. object to is not ignorance qua ignorance, but
> what the Marxists called
> false consciousness (indeed, Smiley even talks like
> a character out of a Tom
> Wolfe novel with her glib references to "big
> capitalists" and right-wing
> "greed"). Gary Wills's question sums up the attitude
> nicely: "Can a people
> that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth
> than in evolution still be
> called an Enlightened nation?"
>
>
> Hating the "Haters"
> For example, Saturday night, my wife forced me to
> watch Bill Maher's HBO
> show because we'd heard that Andrew Sullivan tore
> Noam Chomsky apart. That's
> not actually what happened. Maher actually did a
> one-on-one interview with
> Chomsky. It was more like Maher was granted an
> audience with Chomsky.
> Maher's style was only slightly less deferential
> than our own Kathryn
> Lopez's would be with the pope. Which only makes
> sense, since Chomsky is
> something akin to the Black Pope of America-Hatred.
> Sullivan did a fine job
> ridiculing Maher about all that, but ultimately the
> show wasn't worth its
> price in agita. I had to listen to Susan Sarandon
> — Hollywood's Patron Saint
> of Sore Losers — explain that maybe Kerry really
> did win and that some
> grassy-knoll Republicans absconded with the
> election.
>
> But even worse was Maher's mindless righteousness
> about his own atheism. For
> years Maher has been auditioning for his Profile in
> Courage award by saying
> "brave" things about the unreality of Jesus and the
> silliness of religion.
> Every mention of religion causes a dirty smile and
> joyful sneer to spawn
> across his face. The other night he was pounding the
> table with great
> satisfaction for having the courage to be a
> "rational" person and hence an
> unbeliever — and of course the audience was
> applauding like so many toy
> monkeys.
>
> There's no time here to dismantle fully the edifice
> of condescension and
> ignorance constructed by Maher and Smiley (I put
> Dowd in a different
> category). But what offends them so much about
> religion is that it is a
> source of authority outside — and prior to —
> politics. What has offended the
> Left since Marx, and American liberalism since
> Dewey, is the notion that
> moral authority should be derived from anyplace
> other than the state or "the
> people" (conveniently defined as citizens who vote
> liberal). Voting on
> values not sanctified by secular priests is how they
> define "ignorance."
> This was the real goal of Hillary Clinton's
> "politics of meaning" — to
> replace traditional religion with a secular one that
> derived its authority
> not from ancient texts and "superstitions" but from
> the good intentions of
> an activist state and its anointed priests. Shortly
> before the election,
> Howell Raines fretted that the worst outcome of a
> Bush victory would be the
> resurgence of "theologically based cultural norms"
> — without even
> acknowledging the fact that "theologically based
> cultural norms" gave us
> everything from the printing press and the newspaper
> to the First Amendment
> he claims to be such a defender of.
>
> What Maher, Raines, and Smiley fail to grasp is that
> all morality is based
> upon transcendence — or it is merely based on
> utilitarianism of one kind or
> another, and therefore it is not morality so much
> as, at best, an
> enlightened expediency or will-to-power. It is no
> more rational to vote
> based on a desire to do "good" than it is to vote
> based on a desire to do
> God's will. Indeed, for millions of people this is a
> distinction without a
> difference — as it was for so many of the
> abolitionists progressives and
> civil-rights leaders today's liberals love to invoke
> but never actually
> learn about.
>
> Love, in fact, is just as silly and superstitious a
> concept as God (and for
> those who believe God is Love, this too is a
> distinction without a
> difference). Chesterton's observation that the
> purely rational man will not
> marry is just as correct today, because science has
> done far more damage to
> the ideal of love than it has done to the notion of
> an awesome God beyond
> our ken. Genes, hormones, instincts, evolution:
> These are the cause for the
> effect of love in the purely rational man's
> textbook. But Maher would get
> few applause lines from his audience of
> sophisticated yokels if he mocked
> love as a silly superstition. This is, in part,
> because the crowd he plays
> to likes the idea of love while it dislikes the idea
> of God; and in part
> because these people feel love, so they think it
> exists. But such is the
> extent of their solipsism and narcissism that they
> not only reject the
> existence of God but go so far as to mock those who
> do not, simply because
> they don't feel Him themselves. And, alas, in elite
> America, feelings are
> the only recognized foundation of metaphysics.
>
> I didn't intend to get off on the tangent of
> religion. I'm not particularly
> religious myself, after all. Nevertheless, I think
> the great irony of this
> election is that for all the talk of how the bigoted
> Right won, the Left's
> loss has sparked far more bigotry. Their clever
> trick is to defend their
> hatred of the religious by calling it a hatred of
> bigotry itself — a
> rationalization no liberal would tolerate from any
> other kind of bigot.
>
> Anyway, I should wrap this up. Look, I understand
> that the entire Popular
> Front of the Left lost — and big — last week. I
> understand they thought they
> were going to win. I understand that many of them
> believed all of the
> nonsense about Bush's being a fascist crusader and I
> understand that some
> actually believed P. Diddy's axiom that you should
> vote (Democratic) or die.
> (Although it should be self-evident that a man who
> chooses the name P. Diddy
> is not a man to take very seriously. Last time I
> checked, Henry Kissinger
> never contemplated calling himself "Special K.")
>
> But for those of you who think your grief and
> disappointment justify your
> pious nastiness and blame-shifting for your own
> failures: Do keep in mind
> that it is precisely such self-indulgence and
> arrogance that costs you
> elections.
>
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