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- Surveying the evidence that conservative ideological self-identification correlates with wealth, I'm tempted to revisit a pet theory: Some of the very wealthy are looking for an explanation for their good fortune, and the one with the most compelling explanatory power is the conservative brand of bootstrap meritocracy. Now this is ideological self-identification, so what respondents mean by "conservative" could vary. But among the rich, I would not be surprised if their definition hovered around the Randian connection between wealth and moral superiority.
- The ongoing effort by Republican-affiliated groups and enterprising individuals to retell the saga of W in a positive light tells us more about movement conservatism than it does about the short memory of the American public. No doubt, given time, some pollster is going to ask the favorability question about the Bush administration and get results much higher than his approval rating when he left office. And in that span of time, given their current trajectory, movement conservatives will still be touting the value of preemptive war, promoting tax cuts as the solution to all economic problems, and railing against government spending while doing nothing to reduce it. They refuse to accept that conservative government was a failure in practice, will offer the same proposals, and rely on "independent" Tea Partiers to turn out for the GOP on Election Day
- Jonah Goldberg is indignant that Marc Ambinder finds better criticism of the Obama administration coming from the left than the right, wondering why Ambinder doesn't feel the need to read sources like National Review, The Weekly Standard, Commentary, etc. Maybe it's because much of the criticism of Obama from the right has accepted that the president is a socialist who is destroying America, for example this long post at Commentary which asks -- in all seriousness -- "What Kind of Socialist Is Barack Obama?" The post's author, Jonah Goldberg, natch, has decided that for conservatives the question is no longer whether Obama is a socialist but what kind. Now, they're free to pursue the more high-minded work of locating his socialism in some sort of typological framework.
- Remainders: Chuck Schumer's Israel blind spot; the upcoming Senate climate bill has some terrible provisions; Matt Yglesias chimes in on pursuing "freedom" as a policy goal; David Boaz collects some takes on the lost libertarian golden age; the problems at National Review go well beyond "epistemic closure"; Ohio GOP reaches out to
homemakerswomen voters by appealing to the fair sex's natural desire to serve man; and yes, using non-nuclear ICBMs to take out terrorists is horrible idea.
--Mori Dinauer
