Conservatism is hard

So we look for the owner's manual.

From Dougj:

Oh, for the simple times of hating France and Dan Rather! Now, both major American donut makers are off-limits, granite countertops are strictly verboten, you can’t buy American cars, and field mice, bear DNA, and volcano-monitoring have replaced Islamofascism as the greatest threats we face. Anyone who doesn’t know what “where’s the birth certificate” means is suspect.

Billboards that make no sense, protests that take their cue from contemporary sexual slang, self-contradictory messages about consumerism…At some level, isn’t this all beginning to resemble some kind of huge, conceptual art piece (the kind that real conservatives don’t want the NEA to fund)? Is it fair to say that modern conservatism has now jumped the embalmed shark?

And from TNC:

A critique of liberal identity politics is not wrong on its face, but it almost always is unconcerned with the identity politics of power. Thus Sotomayor's focus on her identity as a "wise Latina" pose is seen as the disturbing result of multiculturalism run amok, not having been raised in a country where the tangible mechanisms of white supremacy were in full effect.

It isn't, for instance, the fact that Sotomayor was raised in an era where government-backed redlining was still legal, it's the fact that some students at Yale demanded a Chicano history course that's the issue. Likewise, it isn't the oppressive identity politics practiced by conservatives for the past 30 years that's disturbing, but Sotomayor's response to it. To be a true conservative is to be more disturbed by victimology, than actual victimizing. It is to claim to abhor evil--but to abhor the response to evil even more. It's like in the NFL--it's the second who throws the punch who draws the flag.