The left earns our pity if little else. For they cannot even conceive of our sense of good and evil. To them, we must have a collection of ideas which we categorize in a list ok for conservatives, and perhaps that list can be modified to fit the times. That is how they would do. What they are organically incapable of understanding is that we have solid and simple grasps of good versus evil, and some things fit as good and others do not.
We accomplish little when trying to convert them to our understanding. Sometimes they will buy what is on our "conservative" list, not because of comparable motivation but because it is something that fits their own collection at the time. But they will not grasp our motivation any more than our dogs would grasp our discussions of space travel. It is out of their realm. They DON'T get it because they CAN'T get it. With that, we have an example.
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According to my correspondents, those conservatives in charge weren't really conservative at all. As Roy from Sanger put it in an e-mail: "If you believe what we have had in D.C. so far this century is a conservative Washington, your perceptions are colored by a memory loss of what real conservatism looks like."
The funny thing is, I agree. Stack the traditional definition of "conservative" alongside the events of the past few years, and it's hard not to. It is, for example, difficult to find evidence of government getting out of people's way in the Terri Schiavo affair. Or evidence of lean, mean government efficiency in the Hurricane Katrina debacle. Or evidence of fiscal restraint in a projected $500 billion budget deficit. Or evidence of accountability in the eagerness to duck blame for all the above.
Conservatism, an ideology once driven by principle, has shrunk until its purview can be, and often is, delineated in three syllables: God, guns, gays. Worse, it has embraced a win-at-all-costs ethos and intellectual dishonesty that are, even by the seamy standards of modern politics, astonishing....................................
LEONARD PITTS JR.: Conservatism shrinks to God, guns, gays
8mm
