Agreed that the POTUS is not a Reagan conservative [who was not a Bob Taft conservative who was not a Calvin Coolidge conservative. . .] It’s not the taxcuts that result in the redistribution of income but the spending of borrowed money on programs like No Child Left Behind and the Medicare drug benefit.

I will, however, vote for whichever GOP candidate emerges from the primaries and convention on the basis that ANY candidate acceptable to the bulk of folks who identify themselves as Republican is more to be desired than ANY candidate who is acceptable to the bulk of folks who describe themselves as Democrat.

*** Even the paranoid have real enemies. But they’re still paranoid.

Anyone who believes that a Democrat in charge of public policy is no different than a Republican in charge of public policy is clearly wrong. Republicans may be far from meeting the ideal standards of conservatism, but the Dems have gone entirely off the deep end. Beware of getting too caught up in hyperbole.

“Liberal” and “progressive” have joined “gay”, “single mom” and “fiancee” — among others — as words which no longer have a meaning as currently employed.

Better to call our domestic leftists “social democrats” since they seek “. . .to reduce the [perceived] inequities of unrestrained capitalism by government regulation, redistribution of income, and varying degrees of planning and public ownership. . .” I inserted “perceived” in a definition taken from Wikipedia.

Oops! That covers our President and most of his/our party, doesn’t it!?

The underlying thread in the above exchange seems to be that looney liberals are so convinced of their own superiority that they have no reason to defend their ideas or discuss them, unless of course you already agree with them.

If you are not part of their mutual back-patting society, if you’re not part of the “consensus” (which of course begs the question of how can there be a consensus when there are people who are not a part!), if you’re have not bought the whole thing hook-line-and-sinker, then you are not simply expressing another point of view. No, there is no such thing as diversity when it comes to diversity of ideology. Phil, you are not simply wrong, you are evil, you are sold out to big oil/drug/business/insert your epithet. You are dense, unenlightened, perhaps even sub-human.

May I point out that this is classic cult behavior? The incongruity of expression, the inability to think logically or respond to a direct question, the anger that manifests when challenged, these all are consistent with the behavior of cultists.

Think about it. Government is god, taxation is the offering, abortion and free-for-all sex are the sacraments, and evironmentalism, homosexuality, anti-war-ism (unless it’s Clinton doing the bombing), and speech codes are the doctrines of the faith.

That’s why any deviation from orthodoxy is greeted with such violence and derision. You are not a presenter of another opinion, you are a heretic, a fallen one, an anti-christ leading others astray with your aberrant ideas.

And because you are dense, unenlightened, and stupid, you are twice the evil one. You can’t be reasoned with, you must be destroyed, marginalized, dis-empowered, and cut off.

John is simply doing what any of the faithful must do: keep the purity of the faith.

How can one be a conservative intellectual and not know that “right-wing” means monarchist and is a false label for the variants of totalitarian socialism based on nationalism (Richard Pipes’ “Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime”) commonly called “fascism”? Just because there are crackpots who spin out elaborate conspiracy theories doesn’t mean that everything their ideas are based on is wrong. “Selling out to blacks” obviously means going past the desire for a colorblind society and entering the realm of white guilt, itself derived from Lenin’s theory of imperialism. If Mr. Clark believes that America has no “moral authority,” to use Shelby Steele’s term, to tell blacks what to do because it defended Indochina from Communist aggression he should tell us readers.