CPAC. Live feed + live blog.

At WaPo.

"But yeah, smart administrators understand that intellectual diversity on the faculty is a good thing, for purely self-interested reasons alone."

"Back in the 1990s when I was writing a lot of second amendment stuff, somebody tried to get my dean to fire me, saying that I was fomenting domestic terrorism. But my dean told me that he was glad to have me writing that stuff, because when alumni or legislators talked about ivory-tower liberal faculties, he could just send 'em a copy of my 'Critical Guide To The Second Amendment.'"

Heh. Yeah. Think about it. Let's say you have a state law school the legislators and alums imagine must be about 95% left-wing. Get one conservative lawprof out there in the public eye — maybe with a blog that's supposedly right-wing — and that vague mental percentage might readjust to 80% or so. That's value! Treasure your house conservative, oh lefty law school!

Things said about Dick Cheney lead me to reaffirm my decision to vote for Obama.

Instapundit picked up on the Cheney-hate wisecrack I blogged yesterday:

CIVILITY CAMPAIGN NOT CATCHING ON: “Cheney’s heart transplant. Wouldn’t that be the worst day ever? Not only are you dead but they’ve given your heart to THAT prick!”

Plus, from the comments: “Obama ends up adopting half these policies in his continuance of his war on terror. And yet, whereas these policies made Cheney Darth Vader and the Emperor rolled into one, under Obama these policies are not even worth mentioning.” That Obama adopted them too only makes Cheney more evil — for undermining the fierce moral urgency of change. And then mocking The One for going along.

That last link goes to Tom Maguire, who notes Glenn Greenwald's moaning over Cheney's solemn observation that Obama, as President, has recognized the importance of the Bush administration's policies and made them his own:

“I think he’s been through the fires of becoming president and having to make decisions and live with the consequences,” Cheney said. “I think he’s learned that what we did was far more appropriate than he ever gave us credit for while he was a candidate ... I think he’s learned from experience.”

And I just want to say that this is part of why I voted for Obama. I explained my vote on November 9, 2008, just after the election and made a prediction that I think you should now see was right. Here's the key part, where I quote what I blogged on October 30:

October 30: I come to terms with the problem of 1-party government:

Usually, I prefer divided government, but that doesn't mean I need to support McCain. I've seen McCain put way too much effort into pleasing Democrats and flouting his own party, and I can picture Obama standing up to the Democratic Congress and being his own man. What, really, will he owe them? McCain, by contrast, will need them. And we've seen that he wants to be loved by them.

Sometimes, I think that letting the Democrats control everything for 2 years would work out just fine. Let one party take responsibility for everything. When they can't whine and finger-point, what will they actually step up and do? It will be interesting to know. And it will do the Republicans good to retool and define themselves, with an eye toward the 2010 election. I'd like to see this clarification after so many years of obfuscation.

This goes along with my problem that McCain had abandoned the effort to define himself as conservative. I could see myself voting for a conservative. I would like some good conservatism. But I did not see it in McCain. Certainly, just bringing in Palin was no substitute for having his own clear principles.

Also in that November 9th post I quote something I wrote on November 3:

One thing I don't like about John McCain is that he never showed respect for Bush. He was all about distancing himself from Bush, but if it's distance you want from Bush, there's Obama. And Obama had no reason to defend the other party's President, but for all his criticism of Bush's policies, I don't remember Obama taking ugly potshots at Bush. McCain treated Bush like an outcast. Was there even a word of defense for the man who protected us from terrorist attacks for 7 years?

Before you bitch about Obama, do a clear, honest visualization of where we'd be right now if McCain were President. Take account of the benefit we have received as the Obama administration has had to embrace many of Bush's policies, and these things have become the norm. And look at what the Republicans have done with their period of exile. Now, seriously picture what the political discourse would be if the Republicans had held onto power.

I know some of you are ready to list the terrible things the Democrats did in their 2 years of dominance. I'm not saying there wasn't a down side. The Democrats did a lot more damage than I thought possible. But McCain would have gone along with a lot of things, and there would be continuing partisan criticism about the wars. Everything having to do with national security would be pinned on McCain and presented in the worst possible light, for the aggrandizement of the Democratic Party.

If McCain had won, we would not have experienced the revitalization of the conservative movement that had such a tremendous effect on the 2010 elections and is shaping the next presidential election. Finally, think about all the angst there would be right now over the lost opportunity to experience the brilliant hope that was Barack Obama. Instead of the wistful imaginings of the glories of Obama administration that could have been, we have the reality. We get to see it, criticize it, and sharpen our conservative politics on it.

Another reimagining of the Gadsden flag snake.

Another entry in the "For civility's sake, let's change 'Don't Tread on Me'" challenge. This one, from Mateo, reworks the snake into the 2 snakes of the caduceus and changes the phrase into the physician's precept.

Here's a discussion point for the comments: Is "First, do no harm" a good conservative principle, making this flag something other than mockery of the liberal's call to civility? Or does the presentation of government as medicine work as a critique of liberalism?

"Take care of the ____ run and the ____ run will take care of itself."

Full in the blanks with the words “long” and “short.” A test originally proposed to distinguish conservative and liberal economists. I wonder if it more generally distinguishes conservatives and liberals.

"Does that not just sound like an NPR report, to do an in-depth report on the word of the year, 'no.'"

Says Rush Limbaugh, about this NPR segment, which I tried to listen to. Man, NPR is slow. Unless you're driving in traffic trying to create the illusion that you are going quickly, I don't see how you can listen to that. But there's a transcript at the link, and you can read it so much faster than the 5 minutes it takes for Geoffrey Nunberg to perform the text on the audio. When he finally gets to the point that the word of the year is "no," he says:

That word usually gets a bad rap in public life; it's never a compliment to call somebody a naysayer. So Democrats obviously meant to put Republicans on the defensive when they began to call them "the party of no" for opposing the stimulus bill in early 2009. As The New York Times' Ben Zimmer pointed out, that phrase has often been used by the party in power to label the opposition as obstructionist. Ronald Reagan branded Democrats as the "party of no" in 1988, Bill Clinton did the same thing to Republicans in 1994, and Tom Delay turned the phrase back on Democrats in 2005.

Here's the part Rush played:

What was different this time is that after some early defensiveness, a lot of Republicans embraced the label and even ratcheted it up a notch. "We're not just the party of no," Rush Limbaugh said, "We're the party of hell, no!" — and Republican leaders quickly adopted the line. That extra word shifted the meaning of the phrase — it no longer suggested just opposition to particular bills and programs but unapologetic and resolute defiance.

That stance clearly resonated with a lot of voters.

Rush stopped his playing of the clip there, but it continued like this:

"No" has a great power to bring people together, precisely because it doesn't have to be pinned down. A child has a much harder time mastering "yes," which is always the response to a specific prospect — "Do you need to go potty?" Whereas the child's first "no" comes earlier, as a pure eruption of willful refusal. And the word retains that capacity, even as we learn to intone it to convey despair, anger, defiance, fear, astonishment, disappointment or resignation.

And that's how NPR sees you voters: You're children. You're resisting potty training. Your Tea Potty Party is mindless emotionalism. You're — as Andrew Sullivan would put it — intellectually inert brats.

That's what makes these choruses of negativity so hard to read, whether they're coming from unhappy voters or tired preschoolers in full shutdown. Everybody is sounding the same plaintive note, but it isn't as if there's any single juice flavor that will make them all happy again.

Hard to read?! Is conservatism a foreign language to Nunberg and the NPR slow-listeners stuck in traffic? Juice flavor? It would be a punch line for me to call that a punch line — juice ≈ punch — but why is that a punch line? Maybe Nunberg plied his intellectually inert brats with juice — I'll get grape, because grape is a little more favorite — but what does that mean about what he (and NPR) think government is supposed to do? It's supposed to give us yummy things to make us feel good (and compliant). No wonder he can't read these choruses of negativity.

"Palin is still talking about how much she loves C. S. Lewis."

"What is up with this? Chunky Bobo is always talking about C. S. Lewis too. Is he the new Edmund Burke? I read a bunch of C. S. Lewis books when I was a kid and I don’t see what makes them so conservative, aside from all the Jeebus stuff."

Sayeth DougJ. For a couple of seconds, I was all "who's Chunky Bobo?" but I figured it out.

***

Here's there underlying story about Palin. (She's on Barbara Walters' "10 Most Fascinating People of 2010." Ah, but how influential is she in Madison ?)

Here's a really nice — giftable — book collecting the works of C.S. Lewis. And here's a "daily readings" collection. And here's "The Portable Edmund Burke."

Righty bloggers pick their Conservative Of The Year: Chris Christie.

Second Place: Sarah Palin. Third: Mark Rubio.

Is it surprising that 31% of self-identified gay/bisexual voters voted Republican?

This doesn't surprise me. I think the split between the parties should be about the same as it is in the heterosexual population. I'd expect it to be somewhat skewed because the Democrats give the impression that they will do some things to advance gay rights.

But that shouldn't have too great an effect because: 1. Gay people are interested in all the issues, not just who purports to care about specific gay-related issues, 2. There isn't much reason to trust the Democrats to do more than pretend to care, and 3. If the GOP seems libertarian, it may appeal to those who mainly want the government to leave them alone to live their lives according to their own values.

The 31% figure is probably also skewed by who is willing to tell pollsters that they are gay. It may be that more conservative respondents are less likely to convey the information and, especially in the case of religious conservatives, less likely to admit to themselves that they have a homosexual orientation.

"A Vote Against Dems, Not for the GOP."

Says Rasmussen.

The theory is, the Republicans will win big because people want to say "no" to the Democrats. If so, the Democrats should be kicking themselves — stomping themselves — for going all-out defining the GOP as "the party of 'no.'" These days, no is what people are for.

Rasmussen makes the argument that we will see a lot, that the GOP victory shouldn't be understood as a preference for conservatism:

[I]t would be wise for all Republicans to remember that their team didn't win, the other team lost. Heading into 2012, voters will remain ready to vote against the party in power unless they are given a reason not to do so.
Elected politicians also should leave their ideological baggage behind because voters don't want to be governed from the left, the right, or even the center. They want someone in Washington who understands that the American people want to govern themselves.

Supposed "Big Althouse Projects" that purportedly prove that I'm "deeply conservative."

Hmm. I'm surprised I even ran across this. It's buried in a comments thread over in a Bloggingheads diavlog — and I'm not one of the "heads" — which I happened to start reading. Somehow my name comes up in a conversation about people who are hard to pin down politically. This commenter, one "Twinswords," insists that my "conservatism is irrefutable":

My take on her has always been this: Due to her sharp analytical mind and her legal training, she knows how to put forward the best possible argument. During the period when she rose to blogging prominence, conservatism as an ideology was deeply discredited and unpopular -- especially in an academic setting, and doubly so in Madison, Wisconsin. She recognized that branding her arguments as "conservative" would only serve to weaken them. Not for legitimate reasons having to do with the merits of what she was saying, but merely because in the 2005-2008 timeframe, conservatism was very unpopular. I suspect this is one factor in her constant lying about being a conservative.

But I'm as much of an Althousaholic as anyone: I read her blog daily for years. I've watched every diavlog she's done on BhTV. I have listened to at least a dozen of her debates on Wisconsin Public Radio. And I have listened to many of her old Audible Althouses.

If I were to judge her exclusively by her early BhTV appearances, it would be easier to be confused about her conservative bias; she worked hard to hide it. But if you look at her whole body of work, you can't escape the conclusion that she's deeply conservative.

Big Althouse Projects:

-- Before Obama was nominated: Destroy Hillary Clinton, defend Bush and Cheney. Defend GWoT, Iraq war.

-- After Palin was nominated: Defend and promote Palin. She was BhTV's go-to-'head for Palin defense for about a year straight.

-- From about mid-2009 - present: Defend and promote the tea party

-- Since Jan. 20, 2009: Damage Obama and the Democrats by promoting every meme, true or false, that can be used against them.

I "toast or roast" Andrew Sullivan.

At Andrew Sullivan's blog, The Daily Dish.

I'm one of a bunch of bloggers invited to "toast or roast" Sullivan's blog. As he explained yesterday, today is his blog's 10th anniversary. He reflects on the occasion:

I'm a Catholic, so let me start with the things I am sorry for and even, in some cases, ashamed of. When you blog in real time, day by day, hour by hour, emotions can get the better of you. The blogosphere is awash in examples of invective, abuse, cruelty, accusations of bad faith, or just bluster - in part because blogging is so much more like speaking than writing and also because it addresses people in the abstract, not face to face. I am not innocent in this, and wish I could take back a few barbs, especially in the early days, when we were all discovering what this medium could do....

His greatest failure, he says "was giving in to my legitimate but far-too-powerful emotions after 9/11 and cheer-leading for a war in Iraq that remains one of the most disgraceful, disastrous and murderous episodes in the history of American foreign policy." He reaffirms that he is a conservative:

I remain deeply skeptical of government's ability to solve most human problems, but have never denied its necessity or importance in tackling the profound questions of the common good no other institution can replace. I'm a Whiggish Tory, not a pure libertarian....

I remain very proud of a few things: of my early recognition of the anti-conservative nature of the Bush administration in almost every respect - fiscal, constitutional, social...

And he reaffirms the value of unseriousness:

From '80s music video contests to our now constant Mental Health Breaks; from mischief and blasphemy and black humor, from Road Runner videos to ghetto mashups, the Dish has always had an anarchic streak, what Bodenner calls "Dishness". The sardonic awards; the reader threads that became riveting - the "cannabis closet" which will soon be a book; the wonder of that simple idea - The View From Your Window - that then became a weekly puzzle; the dialogue with Sam Harris on faith and reason; the countless faces of the day that can convey things no words ever can; the Poseur Alerts; the randomness of bear culture, beard disasters, straight anal sex, South Park out-takes, Hathos Red Alerts, baby panda sneezes ... we've created an institution here that remains alive because we really don't know what the fuck we are going to do next. And yes, I used the word "fuck". Because I fucking well can, if I want to.

Ah, yes. There are so many blogs that are no fun at all. 

Suddenly, Wisconsinites are so conservative!

How did that happen?!!

Peter Berkowitz collects quotes from 2008 saying conservatism in America is over forever.

And:

The credit for galvanizing ordinary people and placing individual freedom and limited government back on the national agenda principally belongs to President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Their heedless pursuit of progressive transformation reinvigorated a moribund conservative spirit, just as in 1993 and 1994 the Clintons' overreaching on health care sparked a popular uprising resulting in a Republican takeover of Congress.

So it wasn't that conservative principles caught hold of America. It was that the progressives scared the hell out of us.

"Paul Ryan will need all the friends he can make."

Writes G. Tracy Mehan, III in The American Spectator:

The stakes are too high for the Republicans to simply stand by, quietly, hoping the Democrats will self-immolate. The GOP needs to embrace a big, visionary idea, something like Ryan's "Roadmap," which addresses the most important political challenge of the age: the runaway costs of entitlements which were irresponsibly put on autopilot under both Democratic and Republican governments.

"Why I Denied David Frum’s Website A Spot In The Blogads Conservative Hive."

John Hawkins explains:

Now, as a general rule, I try to be very open minded about who gets into the Blogads Conservative Hive. If they're generally friendly to conservatives and seem to have a mostly conservative audience, I don't mind having them on board. So, aside from conservative blogs, there are Libertarian blogs in the Hive and there are blogs I'd call center-right. It goes without saying that there are plenty of issues where members of the Hive, myself included, don't see eye-to-eye.

I'm in the Blogads Conservative Hive, so I can vouch for that!

Guys like Frum want to have it both ways. Being a "Republican" / "conservative" who tells liberals what they want to hear about the Right is a career niche —and it can pay big dividends....

[W]hy is David Frum getting a column at CNN? How is it that Time has a guy like this writing for them? What's the purpose of putting a guy like Frum on TV as opposed to all the genuine conservatives who dwarf his traffic and can obviously draw a bigger crowd?...

[T]he mainstream media loves "conservatives" and "Republicans" who will trash whomever the Left hates most. So, if you're willing to talk about how Sarah Palin is a hick, Glenn Beck is a crank, Rush Limbaugh is bad for the country, and the Tea Party is bad for democracy, the mainstream media will reward you and because conservatives pride themselves on being open minded, they'll all too often give you a pass for your atrocious behavior — especially since the MSM doesn't insist you play their game all the time. As long as you're willing to say what they want about the people they hate the most, they'll reward you with a cover story at Newsweek and then in your off time, you can churn out a few articles to point gullible conservatives towards while you're trying to guilt them into taking you seriously by crying "epistemic closure!"

I Googled "epistemic closure" and got, first, "'Epistemic Closure'? Those Are Fighting Words," a NYT article featuring a photo of Frum. So what's that fight all about?

The phrase is being used as shorthand by some prominent conservatives for a kind of closed-mindedness in the movement, a development they see as debasing modern conservatism’s proud intellectual history....

([Julian Sanchez of the libertarian Cato Institute] said he probably fished “epistemic closure” out of his subconscious from an undergraduate course in philosophy, where it has a technical meaning in the realm of logic.)

Blech. What an ugly phrase and what a pointless and irritating explanation for it. It's pretentious, but the usage is actually inaccurate. How off-putting and unhelpful!

Back to Hawkins:

Long story short, everybody has to make a living. But, I'm not interested in helping people like Frum play this little game where they try to cripple conservatives publicly while coming around on the back end to milk us for money. If Frum wants to be a dancing monkey for the Left, let them come up with the money to pay for the tune.

ADDED: "NOTE TO DAVID FRUM: Google doesn’t own BlogAds." Ha. Frum had written: "Hawkins is the person entrusted by Google to determine who may join the conservative blogads cloud." You'd think Frum would figure out the basics of blog advertising before attacking Hawkins. BlogAds is its own company, and Hawkins took the initiative to set up a "hive" that he called "Conservative" to attract buyers.

1. "I take them seriously; they’re building something brand new, something that defies conventional wisdom. If readers get a deeper understanding of these people, their strategy, and their ideas, then I’m doing my job."

2. "Honestly, it’s been tough to find fresh angles sometimes–how many times can I report that these [tea party] activists are joyfully signing up with the agenda of discredited right-winger X and discredited right-wing group Y?"

The public (1) and the private (2) David Weigel (if by "private," one means in the company of 400 of your bestest friends, at least one of whom is ready to tea-bag you before you teabag him).

ADDED: Glenn Reynolds, noting the photograph, says "Check out the photo if you want to see the face of modern journalism. In your nightmares . . . ." This is the photograph:

"But she found the Party of the Right students compassionate, intellectual and not terribly exercised about her homosexuality."

"She was drawn to the Catholics among them, who corrected her misimpression that the existence of sin 'means you are bad.' It means 'precisely the opposite,' they taught her. 'It means you have a chance to come back and repent and be saved,' she says."

The NYT has an article about Eve Tushnet, the daughter of lefty lawprof Mark Tushnet. As a Yale student, she first attended a meeting of the conservative group "specifically to laugh at them, to see the zoo animals." Now, she advises individuals with a homosexual orientation to abstain from sex.

As the hundred or so daily readers of eve-tushnet.blogspot.com, and a larger audience for her magazine writing, know by now, Ms. Tushnet can seem a paradox: fervently Catholic, proudly gay, happily celibate. She does not see herself as disordered; she does not struggle to be straight, but she insists that her religion forbids her a sex life.

That blog has been on my blogroll for a long time. Her father, now a Harvard lawprof, is one of the many former Wisconsin lawprofs who are out there at other law schools carrying on what people here like to think of as the Wisconsin tradition.

Her father, a nonobservant Jew, and her mother, a Unitarian, both belonged to progressive traditions, tolerant of her sexuality.

Eve became a Catholic in her sophomore year at Yale.

[S]ince 2002 she has made a meager living through writing, computer programming and freelance research. She lives in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of downtown Washington and volunteers two hours a week at a Christian pregnancy-counseling center.

ADDED: Queerty says:

Tushnet's website receives "hundreds" of visits per day — hardly enough to call her an influential blogger. But that reach comes through her scribblings for magazines like the National Review, titles that are apt to give space to people "on the inside" of gays advocating against them. Her writings are interesting, we'll give her that; ex-gays! sublimation vs. repression! And so is her story.... But she is a person with a platform who is out harming human beings with her instruction, and that's simply unacceptable.

"We are not living off the grid as much as we are creating a new grid, a more wholesome grid."

Conservative Christians drop out.

"We are following a different path that we think is healthier, promotes better families, and better communities."...

"Christians should be looking for a way to take care of one another without forcing their neighbor to contribute to their welfare. In essence that's coveting your neighbor's goods through the agency of the governments you create."...

"Making the government an idol is the problem. That's what stands in the way of Christian sanctification... It's hands off mainly things like our family, our children, our bodies, our health, and even our money, the fruits of our labor. These don't belong to government."...

"We originally anticipated thousands and thousands of people overwhelming these smaller counties.... We had people moving, that were moving, but they were kind of putting the cart before the horse, because they weren't living independently. They were just showing up and saying 'Okay, where's my house and where's my job?' We're like, 'Uh, no, it doesn't work like that. '"....

"Personal secession are things like homeschooling, house churches, home gardening, home-based economics, just regaining privacy and a sense of community rather than worrying about what's going on in Washington, D.C... What's the latest thing from the Supreme Court?"

"Now, Limbaugh has a mantra: 'Real conservatism wins every time it's tried.' "

"By 'real conservative,' he means Reaganite conservatism. Whether that's true or not remains to be seen. But it looks to me like it's going to be tested in 2010. And if the Republican Party, having moved to the Limbaugh-Reagan right, scores a big victory, I think that's going to be interpreted in the Republican party as vindication of Limbaugh's belief."

So says Zev Chafets, who has a big new book about the big man. Nice excerpt from the book at the link. And here's an Althouse-blog-supporting link for buying the book.