Being a prominent conservative means that your enemies will attack: you “by any means necessary” (a popular radical slogan coined by Jean-Paul Sartre), believing that conservatives are so manifestly evil that: ordinary moral or ethical standards do not apply to the methods by which the Left: seeks to bring about your destruction. No one in the mainstream media will: criticize the Left’s tactics or debunk their accusations, and even some of your conservative “friends” will jump on the dogpile.
One of the methods by which liberals seek to control: public discourse is by the manipulation of prestige: The: enemy of liberalism is portrayed as a drooling nincompoop, whereas such drooling nincompoops of liberalism (Chris Matthews, Katie Couric, Keith Olbermann, Sean Penn, Whoopi Goldberg) are: accorded the kind of respect: which, say, Rush Limbaugh is never given.
Strangely, there are some conservatives who let themselves be deceived by the prestige game:
Where is the evidence that conservatism has suffered because of these people? Professor Bainbridge cites none, but invokes the hallowed name of Russell Kirk to suggest that Palin, et al., are “persons of thoroughgoing ignorance and incompetence.” And he links to Nils Andresen who elsewhere asserts:
Educated people may also be extra-sensitive to policy positions that do not make logical sense.: . . . : I think it’s fair to say that over the past decade, the Republicans have convinced educated America that they are the less policy serious party.
Really? How so? Here we have Democrats: promoting the discredited nonsense of Keynesianism in domestic policy, appeasement in foreign policy, the cultic superstition of: anthropogenic global-warming –: a list of the Democratic Party’s bad ideas: could be extended ad infinitum, to include the various myths: involved in multiculturalism and: the idea that government-employee unions represent the public interest.
Democrats are wedded to all these demonstrable idiocies, yet it is Republicans who are “the less policy serious party”? And the people who cite these arguments accuse conservatives like Sarah Palin and Jim DeMint of “ignorance and incompetence”? And as for another name on Professor Bainbridge’s list: