VDH is a lot like Mondale speechwriter Charles Krauthammer. Although I don’t know that Hanson ever tried to defeat Ronald Reagan the way that Krauthammer did.
Anyway both of them came from the liberal wing that flies under the name neoconservative, and many freepers find that soothing. Bushism. They at least aren’t leftists, but they will take pot shots at conservatives who want nothing to do with the liberal pieties that neocons love to embrace. Other than his recognizing the disaster that illegal immigration wrought on California I don’t find VDH interesting.
Dennis Prager is another of this same camp. I knew Dennis when he still corrected callers who kept insisting that he was a conservative. He’d tell them no, he’s a Gene McCarthy RFK Scoop Jackson liberal. Which he really still is. They just started calling themselves neoconservatives during Reagan. Rush and Hannity helped popularize the confusion, not knowing there was any difference.
The great Clyde Wilson nicely summed up what happened to the conservative camp during the ‘80s, which is how we arrived where we are today:
“The offensives of radicalism have driven vast herds of liberals across the border into our territories. These refugees now speak in our name, but the language they speak is the same one they always spoke. We have grown familiar with it, have learned to tolerate it, but it is tolerable only by contrast to the harsh syllables of the barbarians over the border. It contains no words for the things that we value. Our estate has been taken over by an impostor, just as we were about to inherit.”
If you scratch VDH and Prager, who else? Please surprise me with a conservative who isn’t already dead or smoking a pipe in a tweed suit.
bump