There is a misconception that the mainstream media hates all conservatives.  That’s just not true.  The MSM loves some conservatives – the ones who combine a willingness to stick their conservative brothers and sisters in the back with a stereotypical, tweedy doofusism that ensures absolutely no one would ever want to be one of them.  Their poster children are David Brooks and David Frum.  Call them the Conservanerds.

Conservanerds aren’t hard to identify. You can tell one by listening to him for about 15 seconds, by which time you will be overcome by a desire to either slap him or take his lunch money.  You can find them dwelling at the fringes of liberal culture – they are allowed to attend the cocktail parties as the token conservative, tolerated by their masters in return for passive obedience and the occasional swipe at Sarah Palin and her intolerable uppityness.

If they were simply annoying, that would be one thing, but the problem is that the MSM loves to present them as the true face of conservatism, a face that is reasonable and harmless and that always – always – loses out to the liberals.  Conservanerds play up to the awful stereotype of the bookish, passive-aggressive “traditional” conservative with a disdain for popular culture and, critically, for the other 95% of modern conservatives out there today.

Tea Party folks?  Heaven forbid – those simply are not our kind of people.   Those vulgar Tea Partyiers enjoy NASCAR and beer and guns and some actually believe in God.  Many of them work with their hands, and most of them didn’t even go to Harvard!

Sure, there’s class at play – it goes without saying the Conservanerds feel more at home with an Ivy League Hillary Clinton than a Middle-American Sarah Palin – but it’s also MSM wish fulfillment.  Liberals love the idea of conservatives who pose no threat at all, who are happy to take the scraps from the MSM’s table just as long as they get invited to the dinner party.

This is not a new phenomenon.  Starting with Goldwater and up through the Reagan years, a bunch of new folks flooded into the Conservative movement, folks that were less William F. Buckley and more John Wayne – or even Johnny Rotten.  The old line conservatives, the tweed-wearing country club types, found it quite a culture shock.  During college in the 80’s, half the staff assembling the California Review, UCSD’s right-wing paper, would be trying to appreciate to some Respighi concerto while the rest of us would be cranking the Ramones and swilling Coors.

It turned out that the party Republicans won.

The real conservative today is aggressive, outspoken and (worst of all for the Conservanerds) cares nothing for the approval of the elite.  That makes us anathema.  No wonder they are so eager to pounce – we’ve committed the sin of not caring what they think.  Whether you’re a tee-totaling Georgia Evangelical, a concerned mama grizzly from Kansas or a beer-swilling LA cavalryman with a four letter vocabulary and the Sex Pistols on his CD player, we’re the new face of conservatism.  And it’s driving the Conservanerds bonkers.

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The other day I was reading the Daily Kos and my wife came up and read my laptop over my shoulder. She asked “why are you reading a site that is mostly progressive propaganda?”

“I am tired of reading the conservative sites,” I answered. “All they talk about is the economy stinks, the government is getting too big, and on and on.  It gets depressing.  But sites like the Daily Kos make me feel empowered.  They keep talking about how the Jews control the media, the Jews control the banks, the Jews control the government.”

The progressive world is usually very quick to place the “bigot” label on people. The people who opposed the ground zero mosque are Islamophobes, critics of the President are doing so because Obama is partially of African descent. It is interesting that some of the same progressive media that tries to brand the tea party movement as racist spews bigoted venom against Jews.

The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, published a report that examines anti-Semitic cartoon content used in some of the major progressive sites, such as Mondoweiss, The Daily Kos and Indymedia. Some of the content of these blogs pointed out in this report is short of startling. The sites use “political cartoons: to reinforce negative stereotypes against Jews. The cartoons cloak their anti-Semitism in a veil “anti-Israelism.” (more…)

The liberal media’s newest meme is to claim that the tea party movement is made up exclusively of John Birchers, militia types, racists, and “birthers.” Politico, for instance, had an extensive story about how legitimate conservatives are coming to realize that they’ll have to conduct a Buckley-style purge of the extremists if they expect the tea party groups to be taken seriously. Of course, the left has had its extremists for decades, unlike the right has never conducted any such purges, and has also benefited from a news media that has never highlighted the left’s worst nuts.

The whole idea that conservatives have to purge their wackier, more fringe members is something that at one level is obvious but at another is proof that the left and the Old Media are nothing but hypocrites. At still a third level there is part of the attitude exhibited by some of these far right elements that is a root motivation of the tea party movement, fringe or no.

As clownish left-wing commentators such as Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, John Stewart or Stephen Colbert point fingers and guffaw at the fringes of the right and as the New York Times and Politico stroke their chins and look down their noses at the unruly tea party movement, it must be noted that none of these folks ever uttered a cross word against the Code Pink wackos, the communist infiltrators, anti-war hippies, Stalinist apologists, pro-abortion extremists, Euro-trash half-wits, eco-terrorists, and outright anarchists that have filled the left’s ranks since the birth of the new left after WWII. (more…)

Two years ago today, William F. Buckley moved on to the great Firing Line in the Sky where he is, no doubt, still debating the wisdom of turning over the Panama Canal with the Gipper. Buckley’s legacy lives on, not only in the remarkable generation of writers that he spawned after he first dared to stand athwart history and yell stop but, in an odd sort of way, in the manner in which some of the liberals he defied over the course of five decades seem to pine for the great man’s genteel ways.

On a personal note, Buckley was one of the two great influences in the creative life of this particular – not particularly humble – correspondent. The other was that irascible Chicago newspaperman/Everyman: Mike Royko. It’s difficult to imagine an odder couple, but Buckley and Royko shared at least a couple of common characteristics. One took them on at one’s peril (and very few ever successfully did so) and neither could be neatly constrained within an ideological box. Royko was classically liberal, but he openly scorned the liberal elite. Buckley became the symbol of the conservative movement, but he refused to let the movement define him, cutting his own path through the ideological jungle when necessary, most famously when he argued for the legalization of many illegal drugs. Agree or disagree, both Royko and Buckley were thinkers, and honest thinkers to boot, who had a knack for expressing their thoughts with the kind of panache that left their readers breathless in awe. (more…)