Times starts Web site for conservatives

The Washington Times has launched TheConservatives.com, a Web site with technology that allows activists to talk up to ideological and party leaders and interact in innovative ways.

TheConservatives.com - run by The Washington Times with contributions from the Heritage Foundation and other organizations - is a tool to "reinvent the right" and help move the public discourse.

"TheConservatives.com creates a cutting-edge new marriage between the social publishing world of bloggers and the social networking world of Twitter, YouTube and the like," said John Solomon, executive editor and vice president for content of The Times. "Most opinion sites today enable thought-leaders to talk down to the masses, but TheConservatives.com empowers users to change the direction of that dialogue, allowing the Joe the Plumbers of the world to speak up to major thinkers, like Newt Gingrich."

It seems to be nothing more than a collection of allegedly conservative websites.

A poor search engine, nothing more.

It doesn’t compete with FreeRepublic, and I don’t see links from there to here...they are apparently using it as a money-making gimmick.

FreeRepublic, if it wanted to be associated with it, would apparently have to “pay to advertise” on “TheConservative.com”.

In other words: WTF?

"...I don’t see links from there to here..."

That's because they're "reinventing the right." They don't want the political embarrassment of being associated with us, even though Free Republic is the preeminent gathering place for Conservatives. They won't get my support until they get they're heads out of their ass. You've got to give the Democrats one thing...they're loyal to each other. If this were a Liberal endeavor, they would openly court such places a Daily Kos, Democratic Underground, and Huffing Post.

Just like townhall.com, it takes ten minutes to get through the pop ups. Right now I’m listening to Bill Bennett, who I always streamed on TH, but now I listen on XM. It got to the point that by the time the audio came on the show was over and how many the world is ending buy gold commercials could you look at?

"Most opinion sites today enable thought-leaders to talk down to the masses, but TheConservatives.com empowers users to change the direction of that dialogue, allowing the Joe the Plumbers of the world to speak up to major thinkers, like Newt Gingrich."

Yes, thanks to this new website, you (the common rabble) may now approach the thrones. Now, for the first time ever, the great unwashed get to speak. You--yes you!--will be allowed to "talk up" to major thinkers.

The tone reeks of the very elitism they pretend to combat. The premise here is that these "great minds" and "great thinkers" would be eagerly listening, if only they knew where, oh, where to find the common man. If these "great minds" had the slightest interest in the opinions of real Americans, they'd already be reading the thousands of readily available options. There is no dearth of conservative opinion and debate in the blogosphere, and they're not hard to find.

Oh, and they're "re-inventing the right"--which is simply more of the top-down model their site is supposed to be countering. Meh.

I welcome any and all addition to conservative thought exchange, and would have applauded the Times' efforts if they'd simply launched the site without the patronizing head-patting. This is about the most condescending (and revealing) way they could have positioned themselves.

They have it ass backwards.

They should be begging *me* for input, because *I* am the great conservative thinker.

Those guys are liberal-light, super-deficit spending, yesterday’s democratic movement.

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