Ominous values

It's a dark morning here in the Northeast, with gusting winds driving drenching rain showers horizontally. The weather suits the mood of the editorials.

Apparently relieved that the Thanksgiving holiday is over, and quoting from a letter her brother sent to his circle of the like-minded, MoDo sheds light into why she she's such a snark-filled opinionatrix: It's her overbearing family's fault.

I've been surprised, out on the road, how often I get asked about my family. They're beyond red - more like crimson. My sister flew to West Virginia in October to work a phone bank for W.

People often wonder what our Thanksgiving is like.

It's lovely - if you enjoy hearing about how brilliant Ann Coulter is, how misguided The New York Times's editorial page is, and how valiant the president is as he tries to stop America's slide into paganism.

And over at the Post, Michael Kinsley declares that he's grown weary of the "Values Debate." Kinsley explains pretty succinctly why the overriding liberal instinct -- that in a wealthy society, we have a responsibility to ensure some measure of fairness, respect and support for the less well-off among us -- is ineffective as a political philosophy in our current environment of bitter cultural schism. It's because an instinct, or a philosophy, is not seen as a value, but rather as a mere "opinion," whereas Republicans have been effective at positioning their ideology as a "value."

Those labels don't confer any logical advantage. But they confer two big advantages in the propaganda war. First, a value just seems inherently more compelling than a mere opinion. That's a big head start. Second, the holder of a value is held to be more sensitive to slights than the holder of an opinion. An opinion can't just slug away at a value. It must be solicitous and understanding. A value may tackle an opinion, meanwhile, with no such constraint.

No doubt there are strategists all over Washington busily reconfiguring their issues to look like values. Highway construction funds? Needed to help people get to Grandma's house for Christmas. You got something against family values, buddy? Or Christmas? Especially humiliating are efforts by liberals to reposition the issues they care about as conservative and therefore, we hope, transform them into values. Welfare? It (like nearly everything else) is about families, of course. And affirmative action is about work and opportunity. Liberals' motivation -- a simple instinct that a prosperous society ought to mitigate the unfairness of life to some reasonable extent -- isn't considered a value. So let's keep that one among ourselves.

And what we have now, notes Kinsley, is a government in which a growing number of officials have been elected not for their competence, but for their supposed values. And politicians who believe their constituents have given them a mandate based on allegedly shared values are an ominous thing for the Republic.

A country whose political dialogue is all about values is either a country with no serious problems or a country hiding from its serious problems. When I want values, I go to Wal-Mart.

Personally, I stay away from Wal-Mart because unlike political candidates, I do believe in patronizing, whenever feasible, retail establishments who share my values, such as paying a decent wage and offering decent benefits to their employees. Well, that and because wandering the vast lanes of those mega-stores and wading through a sea of cheap goods I don't want but unable to find what I do, is an enervating way to spend an afternoon.

But that's just me; I wouldn't want to impose my "opinions" on you.