Free Republic

BEGIN TRANSCRIPT "Does Organic Food Turn People into Jerks?" What do you think, folks? When I think of organic food, I think of vegetarians. I think of militant vegetarians. Now, a liberal vegetarian is not content to just eat his vegetables. You have to, too. A conservative vegetarian will eat his vegetables and leave you alone. A liberal vegetarian will eat his and then demand that you only eat vegetables, too. And this is one of the big differences between liberals and conservatives across the board -- whatever it is, whatever the left-right issue is. If a liberal doesn't want...

Found out this morning that a National Guard officer who is personally very close to me is being deployed to Baghdad for a year, leaving behind his wife and little kids. Tens of thousands of men and women have had to do the same, but this is as close as the war has gotten to me, and I'm having a tough time dealing with it. N. will be sent there into the middle of a civil war, to implement a policy few in Washington believe will work, and in which two-thirds of the American people disbelieve. Meanwhile, here is the...

The idea that there is something fundamentally unconservative about protecting the environment is, of course, a canard. At the very core of British conservatism since the time of Benjamin Disraeli has been a romantic reverence for the land and a desire to mitigate the damage done by industrialization. It was Marx and Engels who sneered at "the idiocy of rural life." It was Lenin and Stalin whose mania for smoke-belching steelworks turned huge tracts of Russia into toxic wastelands. Conservatives do not expect problems to be solved by some kind of world government; on the contrary, they prefer local solutions...

A great deal of attention has been given to Ron Dreher’s announcement he is considering a move to Eastern Orthodoxy. Dreher, a convert from Protestantism to Catholicism, gives as reasons for his possible change of ecclesial allegiances the fallout from the sex scandal, the lack of any real sense of Catholic belief and practice at the parish level and concern for his children’s spiritual wellbeing. Al Kimmel gives a fairly strong critique of Dreher’s possible move at Pontiications and it is fine as it goes but I believe there are a few things that may be a factor in Dreher’s...

Two succulent, naturally raised chickens with good farm references are in the oven, snuggled up in a roasting pan like doomed lovers. Fat, perfect carrots are peeled, chopped, seasoned and ready to simmer. "Notice that I am literally barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen," observes Mrs. Crunchy Con, and perhaps, she quips, she should have done her hair for the occasion like Phyllis Schlafly's. The li'l Crunchy Cons, boys ages 2 and 6, are out back in the warm Wednesday afternoon sun, making sculptures out of a bowl of ice cubes -- something constructive and home-schoolish, something very We're Not...

Americans ought to regard the word "growth" with trepidation. When invoked by presidents and economists, it is meant to imply ideas like "more" or "better." It's a habit of thinking left over from the exuberant phase of the industrial age, when there was always more of everything to get. Nowadays, though, as we enter terminal years of cheap energy, the word "growth" invokes a new set ideas. For instance, "impossible." With the price of oil edging toward $70-a-barrel now, and likely to flirt with $100 by the end of the year, the effect will be higher costs for virtually all...

Over this past weekend, I had the opportunity to read Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons. This is a book that has been stirring up conservative circles since its release this past winter. Dreher is a popular Generation-X conservative writer and a convert to Eastern Catholicism. He has worked for a number of publications, including the National Review, the New York Post, and the Washington Times. He is now a full-time writer and editor with the Dallas Morning News. A Manifesto for the Family In Crunchy Cons, Dreher sets out to chronicle how “Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip...

Book review: CRUNCHY CONS How Birkenstocked Burkeans, Gun-Loving Organic Gardeners, Evangelical Free-Range Farmers, Hip Homeschooling Mamas, Right-Wing Nature Lovers, and Their Diverse Tribe of Countercultural Conservatives Plan to Save America (or at Least the Republican Party). By Rod Dreher. 259 pp. Crown Forum. $24. THE upscale natural foods grocery chain Whole Foods now stocks a brand of cereal called Ezekiel 4:9. It could pass for any other gravelly, whole-grain, flour-free concoction on the shelves, but Ezekiel's box credits its inspiration to "the Holy Scriptures." If this sounds like your kind of breakfast, you may be a crunchy con —...

The New CountercultureMeet Rod Dreher, a conservative who is critical of capitalismBY GEORGE H. NASHRod Dreher, a columnist and editor at the Dallas Morning News, is a self-confessed member of the vast right-wing conspiracy. As a lapsed Protestant who converted to Roman Catholicism several years ago, he is an unabashed religious and social conservative. He has little use for the morally relativist and libertine tendencies of modern liberalism. Too often, he says, "the Democrats act like the Party of Lust." But Mr. Dreher is also a passionate environmentalist, a devotee of organic farming and a proponent of the New Urbanism,...

DALLAS, Texas- Some people love organic food, are environmentalists, and do not think much of unbridled capitalism, yet they still insist they are hard-core conservatives. Can this be true? Now there is a new subset of conservatives known as “crunchy cons.” Crunchy cons is a term coined by journalist Rod Dreher, who realized after he and his wife got hooked on the superior taste of organic foods, that he himself might be a crunchy con -- or crunchy conservative. Dreher said, "My wife had cooked these amazing vegetables. They were delicious. I said, 'Where did you get these?' She goes,...