The so-called purity test is a 10-point checklist — a suicide pact, really — of alleged Republican positions. Anyone hoping to play on Team GOP would have to sign off on eight of the 10 — through their voting records, public statements or a questionnaire. (…)
It’s too bad that “elite” and “nuance” have become bad words in the Republican lexicon. Elites are viewed in Republican circles as “those people” who are out of touch with “real Americans.” And “nuance,” the definition of which suggests a sophisticated approach to understanding (as opposed to “Because I said so, case closed”) has come to be viewed as a Frenchified word Republicans successfully [ed’s note: that’s right, Kathleen: “successfully”. Get it? No..?] hung on presidential candidate John Kerry in 2004 (…)The old elite corps of the conservative movement, men such as William F. Buckley and Russell Kirk, undoubtedly would find this attitude both dangerous and bizarre. When did thinking go out of style?
In fact, the 10-point checklist proffered by Bopp and others is the antithesis of conservatism. As Kirk wrote in his own “Ten Conservative Principles,” [ed’s note: !!!!] conservatism “possesses no Holy Writ and no Das Kapital to provide dogmata . . . conservatism is the negation of ideology: it is a state of mind, a type of character, a way of looking at the civil social order.”
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Say, Kathleen, you mean the William F. Buckley who “read out” thousands of people from the “conservative movement” because THEY failed HIS… “purity test”?
And Russell Kirk was a boring old fart. There, I said it.
Those two guys and Goldwater and (occasionally Reagan) (all safely dead and unable to protest) are now being used as baseball bats by liberals to beat conservatives with.
If “conservatism possess no Holy Writ” then you can use anything written by Kirk et al to make your case, dummy. Jeezuz.
Reminder: This woman has a newspaper column and I don’t.
