More on the emerging consensus in the Old Confederacy & Buffalo Commnos Party: shutup and chew your gum

Wow. And wow all over again. Earl Capps reports Wesley Donehue has also gotten delisted from SC Hotline. And the reason isn't the one originally bruited- that they weren't posting enough. It turns out they weren't conservative enough.

Which is pretty mind-boggling. Capps summarizes his creds:

We here in the Blogland support school choice, challenge Barack Obama, praise judges who are tough on crime, question ineptitude in state government, criticize tax-and-spend educrats, loudlyendorsed legislative roll call voting, called for reigning in the state's tax-and-spend mindset and support hunting down jihadists around the world.

- and rightly concludes:

... but somehow, we're still not conservative?

Apparently, there's just not enough Kool-aid, vodka, or LSD to make some people happy.

What links the three exiles- in our estimation- is their independence of thought. Sure, they're all conservatives, but they don't check their brains at the door. We've enjoyed batting the issues around with two of the three, blog to blog, and would with Anaconda if he would just give up that lame-ass Ozymandias pose.

All of which suggests there's a big chunk of the conservative GOP blogdom inhabiting what National Review columnist John Derbyshire calls "ideological comfort food." we call it an ideological echo chamber. You go there and all you hear is what you want to hear. Metaphor choices aside, it's the same thing. SC Hotline seems to want to go the road of Mike's America, Sunlit Uplands and the other blogs you only have to read for a few weeks to realize you're gong to read the same thing every week.

Derbyshire, writing in American Conservative, argues that

At the very least, by yoking themselves to the clueless George W. Bush and his free-spending administration, they [Limbaugh, Hannity, et al] helped create the great debt bubble that has now burst so spectacularly. The big names, too, were all uncritical of the decade-long (at least) efforts to “build democracy” in no-account nations with politically primitive populations. Sean Hannity called the Iraq War a “massive success,” and in January 2008 deemed the U.S. economy “phenomenal.”

Much as their blind loyalty discredited the Right, perhaps the worst effect of Limbaugh et al. has been their draining away of political energy from what might have been a much more worthwhile project: the fostering of a middlebrow conservatism. There is nothing wrong with lowbrow conservatism. It’s energizing and fun. What’s wrong is the impression fixed in the minds of too many Americans that conservatism is always lowbrow, an impression our enemies gleefully reinforce when the opportunity arises. Thus a liberal like E.J. Dionne can write, “The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity. … Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans.” Talk radio has contributed mightily to this development.

It does so by routinely descending into the ad hominem—Feminazis instead of feminism—and catering to reflex rather than thought. Where once conservatism had been about individualism, talk radio now rallies the mob. “Revolt against the masses?” asked Jeffrey Hart. “Limbaugh is the masses.”

In place of the permanent things, we get Happy Meal conservatism: cheap, childish, familiar. Gone are the internal tensions, the thought-provoking paradoxes, the ideological uneasiness that marked the early Right. But however much this dumbing down has damaged the conservative brand, it appeals to millions of Americans. McDonald’s profits rose 80 percent last year.

All Waldo can say, is "welcome to Purgatory, boys."

UPDATE: At The Next Right, Patrick Ruffini worries the GOP is becoming the Joe the Plumber Party. Maybe SC Hotline'll sign up Joe to fill out the gap in the Real Conservative roster.