Two Great Reasons To Stand With Meghan McCain

My girlfriend has said that she often feels like she's dating David Frum, which perturbs me because I'm almost certain that he's not hung as beautifully as I am and the fact that she apparently thinks that he is keeps me up at night.
Actually, what she objects to is my propensity toward "attacking other conservatives", which isn't what I do at all. If you've read me for any length of time, you might have noticed that I have serious problems with "group think", particularly when said group think happens to be factually wrong or demonstrably counterproductive. I'm hardly the guy you go to when you're organizing a rally for stupidity.

Besides, I don't attack conservatives at all. I attack the Republican Party, the Conservative Party of Canada and their amen choirs in the media and blogosphere, and those are increasingly two very different things. I'm very traditionally conservative on fiscal and foreign policy and libertarian on social issues that no one should care about, like gay marriage.

The "conservatives" that I regularly ridicule aren't conservatives at all, they're populists. And populism has a long and storied history of being dangerously dumb. Advocating giant tax cuts when you're fighting wars, calling for even more wars, and saddled with terrifying levels of debt isn't all that different than wanting to replace the gold standard with silver because gold is awfully expensive. Calling for more wars than a volunteer army is equipped to fight only serves to get your soldiers unnecessarily killed and it sets back your foreign policy objectives by decades. However, I will grant you that it looks good on Fox News or in the pages of the The Weekly Standard.

I also refuse to support any movement that mocks thinking. In the recent past, intellectualism was something that conservatives strived towards. It wasn't something that they went out of their way to "refudiate." Worshipping at the altar of ignorance to gain the favor of DJs, like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly is not something that Barry Goldwater or William F. Buckley ever would have done, particularly as both got older and challenged the populist orthodoxy of modern Republicanism more and more.

The Jim DeMint school of conservative populism elevates stupidity to the point where it believes that you can actually grow a political movement by shrinking its appeal. It seriously evangelizes that you can build a winning national coalition solely on the Deep South and shrinking pockets of the rural Midwest, while excluding Latinos, Muslims and homosexuals who might actually share our principles, which is outrageous nonsense that defies the laws of both common sense and the structure of the Electoral College.

You would think that the election of 2008 should have demonstrated the folly of that thinking, but in far too many cases, it didn't. Losing states like New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, North Carolina and Virginia should have been a huge warning sign, but it wasn't.

I'm sometimes asked why I don't assail liberals with the same fervor that I do my own side. The answer is simple: I don't expect liberals to be anything other than liberal. I already know what they think and I don't think that I'll ever change many of their minds. If nothing else, I respect the intellectual consistency of most liberals, although I more often than not disagree with it, and I honour the fact that they haven't elevated stupidity to the level of a religious virtue.

In a lot of cases, progressive bloggers like Dr. Dawg have taken more traditionally conservative positions on the fundamental rights of citizenship than even the most conservative bloggers have. Where that happens, I'm proud to stand with him and be disgusted by "my side." When the left is more right than the right, the intellectual side of the right should be worried.

Moreover, my side didn't start this debate. People like David Frum, Bruce Bartlett, myself, and even Meghan McCain were assaulted as RINOs and closet liberals long before we started fighting back. The "right" blogosphere has been winning mostly because there really hasn't been any opposition. Now there is. Some people don't like it. Fuck them.

Meghan McCain might have taken the worst of it because she's a pretty young girl with huge, gorgeous tits that she isn't afraid of showing off. Even though her positions on the issues aren't radically different from mine - although, I'll grant you that her father, my former political hero, is whorish enough to shift with the winds - she doesn't pretend to be an intellectual titan of the movement, or even a leader of it. Even though I generally agree with her, I don't think that she's a leader of any kind, nor does she aspire to be.

Sarah Palin, on the other hand, does. But I defy any of you to point out just five examples of Governor Palin's intellectual or policy wisdom. Five will do. And I'll bet that you can't do it.

For bonus points, show me the intellectual consistency from one of Palin's positions to another. For example, I'd like you to show me how Sarah is a free-market champion simply because she imposed a windfall profits tax on oil companies operating in Alaska, which she subsequently "distributed" to every man, woman and child in $1,300 increments. If that isn't "spreading the wealth around", I just don't know what is.

Meghan McCain has been repeatedly slammed by the "conservative" blogosphere and media for being hot and vapid, while the same people have elevated Sarah Palin for being exactly the same. I haven't read Dirty Sexy Politics but I doubt that it's the exercise in the elevation of ignorance and the denial of personal responsibility of everything that Going Rogue: An American Life is. Nothing is ever Palin's fault.

If nothing else, Miss McCain is more than willing to admit what she doesn't know. Sarah just makes shit up and blames the "lamestream media" that pays her a small fortune for her ignorance of almost everything. It's actually a fascinating thing to watch, and only makes me want to fuck her more.

So let's stop pretending that this is some kind of intellectual battle, because it isn't. This is Mean Girls writ large. It's a battle of who has the better titties and little else, although most idiot bloggers would like to pretend otherwise.

Let's recognize this for what it really is: a wet t-shirt contest. Who has the better titties?

Meghan McCain has bigger, better and much younger titties, and she's more willing than Sarah Palin is to show them off on Twitter, although I'd much rather fuck Palin, mostly because she's better looking and carries with her better bragging rights.

This, my friends, is what conservative discourse has degenerated into. I'm just just more willing to point that out than most. And that's also why I don't care about conservatism other than mine anymore.