Politics and Culture

The most conservative moment in American remakes of French films occurs in The Birdcage. When the Williams character is shocked that his son's potential father-in-law is a conservative, the son responds with, "Dad, half the country is conservative." I remember thinking at the time that it was a bold realization that the targets of liberal scorn actually outnumber themselves.

The Birdcage

A fact apparently lost on Arianna Huffington. The left wants to unite Americans, right? One big, fat purple country, si? Such a bold union would include the conservative half, no? Not if Arianna Huffington gets her way. Witness this Arianna Huffington post. She seems genuinely puzzled why conservative "Neanderthals" get to pollute our airwaves with their extreme views. Extreme views? Like who: David Duke? Pat Robertson? No:

Like clockwork, as soon as I published that post, yet more evidence arrived in my in box -- word that Tony Snow, late of Fox News, and more recently of the White House, where he earned high marks as a gifted purveyor of Bush/Cheney propaganda, would be joining CNN (the self-anointed "Most Trusted Name in News") as a commentator. I guess Karl Rove was too busy with his Newsweek gig, and Bill Kristol with his New York Times gig, hence the opening for Snow. What next, Scooter Libby and David Addington signing up at NPR?

But it isn't just the media that have been infected by the toxic thinking of the Right. It has also been absorbed into the bloodstream of the body politic. The political class has allowed the Neanderthal wing of the GOP to drag the political debate so far to the right, that even Democrats find themselves getting cozy with ideas that not so long ago would have been the exclusive domain of arch-conservatives.

Yes, Tony Snow and Karl Rove, associated with a president who won two elections, is out of the mainstream while Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, and, indeed, the most liberal senator alive today, Barack Obama, are the kind of people you'd meet at a Youngstown PTA meeting.

Huffington goes on to say that Republicans duped Bob Kerry into thinking that it's OK for reporters to ask Obama questions about his recent controversies. She has the credibility to make such a charge, too: Huffington would never mention any Republican gaffe or unsavory association- that would be to wallow in irrelevant mud.