URLs du Jour

2007-08-16

  • Rich Lowry makes a good point, chastising what he calls the "flip-flop police":
    Here we are as conservatives expending an enormous amount of energy to effectively punish candidates for agreeing with us. Since when did it become a bad thing for a candidate to realize the influence of conservatives (and hopefully the correctness of their views) in the nominating process and react accordingly?
    Yes, other things being equal, I'd prefer to support a candidate who agreed with me on everything since we were both in diapers. But that's not going to happen.

  • Fellow Granite Stater Patrick Hynes has an interesting and important essay on Identity Group Conservatism, and I'm probably the last person in the whole wide world to link to it. But his overall theme is similar to Lowry's—why are conservatives suddenly so politically incompetent?—and he adds in an overall pessimism about the future. You might also want to check his followup posts here and here, with plenty of links to other reactions.

    I'm more optimistic, because I think the marketplace of ideas is powerful and on our side. But that's more of a long term view.