Sigh. I suspected this would happen

Mildly criticize Rod Dreher on one rather small point and the all the kids over at IsurehateRodDrehersgutsdon'tyouPauli
WellsaidKathleenYesIcantstandhim
didyouevernoticehowdetestableheisBubba
Youguysarebrilliantandcleverforagreeingwithme
Yeswemustmodestlyagreeweare
butbacktothepointIsurehateRodDrehersguts.com are instantly speculating about "what I say off the record" about Rod. Not that they are consumed with a love of whatever salacious nastiness they might dig up on a brother Christian or anything. No. They are motivated entirely by a concern for Rod's good.

Sheesh! Get a freakin' life, people.

Naturally, my failure to hate Rod as they do has a pre-emptive explanation: I hate Bush. So my failure to criticize Rod about everything down to his cell structure is due to that, doncha know.

The ideological tendency of conservatives like these guys to explain all Bush criticism by attributing it to the stupidity and malice of voters mirrors nothing so much as... the Dems in 2004. I repeat my sage counsel like a message in a bottle, in the flickering hope that somebody on the right will hear it and learn: If you think somebody like me, who is basically a garden variety conservative, is motiviated by "hatred" of Bush, conservatism, or America then you are too dumb to be involved in politics and too out of touch with voters to ever be able to function literately in public life. If you seriously can't tell the difference between my garden variety conservative critiques of Bush's betrayal of many key conservative ideas and the *real* Bush haters--the people who really can't distinguish him from Hitler and who seriously expect a police state to be erected at any minute, complete with martial law, enabling acts, and permanent states of emergency--then you are simply unable to cope with the forces that humiliated the GOP this year.

My advice: abandon ideology for prudence. Right now, you're simply living lab examples of precisely what Bramwell describes:

Conservatism is concerned less with truth than with distinguishing insiders from outsiders. Conservatives identify themselves in part by repeating slogans (“we are at war!”) that, like “ignorance is strength,” are less important for what (if anything) they say than for what saying them says about the speaker. At the same time, to rise in the movement, one must develop a habitual obliviousness to truth, or what Orwell labeled “doublethinking.” Anyone who expresses too vociferously too many of the following opinions, for example, cannot expect to make a career in the movement: that the Soviet Union was not the threat that anti-communists made it out to be, that the current tax system discriminates in favor of the very wealthy, that the Bush administration was wrong about the Iraq invasion in nearly every respect, that the constitutional design itself prevents judges from deciding cases according to the original meaning of the Constitution, that global warming poses small but unacceptable risks, that everyone in the abortion debate—even the most ardent pro-lifers—inevitably engages in arbitrary line-drawing. Whether these opinions and others are correct or not matters little to the movement conservative, even if he knows next to nothing about the topic at hand. If you do not reject these opinions or at least keep quiet, you are not a movement conservative and will be treated accordingly.

There are any number of intelligent critiques to made of, for instance, Crunchy Cons or, for that matter, Bush critics. The kids at DreherHatred.com make none. What they do is the intellectual equivalent of that screech made by the Pod People in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It isn't something Rod says that is wrong. It's *everything* Rod says. And it's not just wrong. It's evil. It's stupid. It's ridiculous and ignorable. And yet somehow they can't ignore it. Indeed, they've devoted an entire blog to saying, for months on end, that Rod is not worth paying attention to--because he is no longer Of the Body. He is an Outsider.

I've made clear my disagreements with Rod on the issue where we diverge most sharply. It's not a big secret. But on the whole, I'd prefer Rod's company over the company of the folk at ConCrunchy any day. I can see writing a blog entry or two to quarrel with him. But a whole blog devoted to the hatred of one man--and a rather decent man, on the whole--bespeaks the shrivelled ideological smallness only of the bloggers, not of the man.

Update: After a few hours of cooling off, I retract my insult to Ms. Reilly. Mea culpa.