Imagine The Possibilities
What possible reason would a conservative have to attack Cheney instead of Obama? ~Warner Todd Huston (via John Schwenkler)
Because only one of the two supported the commission of war crimes? That is one reason that comes to mind. Because only one actively pushed for an unnecessary and unjust war, and the other opposed it? There’s another. There are two possible reasons, and I’m not even trying that hard. Reihan might have very different reasons. He might recognize that Cheney is a widely loathed and basically unlikeable public figure. Even if Reihan were concerned more with marketing and image than with policy substance, which is not the case, he could see that there is a disadvantage in having an irritable man doing a fair imitation of the Penguin as one of the major spokesmen for one’s party and political cause.
That said, we should not simply dismiss Huston out of hand. He and those like him are the political equivalent of Darwin’s discoveries on the Galapagos: strange, unusual creatures cut off from the rest of the world that deserve to be studied and understood as the weird evolutionary offshoots that they are. It is rare to find people who seem genuinely unaware that Cheney is deeply unpopular and also implicated in atrocious crimes, and rarer still to find people who know this and still think it wise to have him making the rounds on television serving as a leading Republican spokesman. Some might say that Huston is simply a pitiable product of the conservative cocoon, but I say that he can offer us evidence for the strange mutant varieties of conservatism that have developed in isolation from reality.
You’re in rare form today.
Huston’s a veritable nutcase, and his comments have been the bread and butter of left-wing political comedy blogs for years.
You are on a roll. Can’t believe I never saw the Penguin thing before. The Galapagos bit also deserves a place in your greatest hits.
[...] This is the big problem for Republicans. The entire party apparatus at the state level has been taken over by a bunch of lunatics. The reason Specter switched yesterday was because the dwindling band of sociopaths who still call themselves Republican in Pennsylvania are so detached from reality, so far removed from the mainstream, and so convinced of the utter infallibility of their own bizarre brand of “conservatism,” that someone like Jon Huntsman or Arlen Specter, who deviated slightly on a few issues here and there, just isn’t pure enough for them. This is the essence of wingnut, the kind of guy Larison was talking about yesterday: [...]
You are of course right, but you’re overthinking Huston’s motivations. He’s merely arguing for party loyalty and fealty to the “principles” the GOP has tied around its neck over the past decade or two, and he isn’t sophisticated enough to see the ways, a few of which you point out, in which that very fealty – and in particular this embrace of Darth Cheney – will result in the death of his beloved party. If things keep going this way, then right before it dies, it will be bereft of anything that can coherently be called a principle or idea at all.
I am very familiar with RTH who is right on much but very wrong on the War and foreign policy. He is a good example of a mainstream GOP centric conservative who doesn’t understand criticism from the right. Or if he does, he just rejects it.
I mean WTH