The Morning Rant

First, let's talk about the snobbery of Con, Inc.

Ace touched on this yesterday:

I'm very, very tired of the Snob Jocks.

This is a claim these Twitter Intellectuals make -- they read and you don't. They write and you don't.

And yet, they seem to spend all of their time "reading" and "writing" on... Twitter.

Which is not generally considered a medium of belles-lettres.

... the greatest fear of these pencil-necked weaklings is to be mistaken for one second, even if it's just online, for a member of the (shudder) working class.

Yes, but I don't think this is something new. This goes back to rich kid William F. Buckley, son of an oil magnate, went to school in London, Paris, etc. Very high-class, very hoity-toity. And this is reflected in National Review during his time as editor/publisher.

Rush once told the story of him being invited to visit Buckley at his home in Connecticut. This was just after his show went national and he was a conservative phenom. So he arrives at Buckley's upscale estate and he feels kind of awkward and doesn't quite know how to act around these East Coast toffs in their fine house, but everyone is friendly towards him and he is ushered into an opulent sitting room of some sort with a bar on one side. He's asked if he would like a drink, and what would he like? So Rush tells them he'd like a Diet Coke and immediately there's some consternation as, he supposed, they were expecting a request for an adult beverage and so they dispatch someone who leaves in a bit of panic and then awhile later, he is handed some sort of dark beverage in a glass that tasted indescribably bad. And Rush's punchline to the story was, "I don't know what it was, but it definitely wasn't Diet Coke."

So what we have here was the new kid on the block meeting the Conservative Establishment, or, if you will, what would eventually become Con, Inc. Bush was basically a working stiff who had suddenly become successful and Buckley was Old Money. They were from two different worlds and they didn't known quite what to do with each other, even though both knew they were on the same team.

But Buckley was good at holding disparate conservative elements together, using the National Review, the standard-bearer for American conservative thought:

The most influential synthesis of the subject remains George H. Nash's The Conservative Intellectual Tradition since 1945 .... He argued that postwar conservatism brought together three powerful and partially contradictory intellectual currents that previously had largely been independent of each other: libertarianism, traditionalism, and anticommunism. Each particular strain of thought had predecessors earlier in the twentieth (and even nineteenth) centuries, but they were joined in their distinctive postwar formulation through the leadership of William F. Buckley Jr. and National Review. The fusion of these different, competing, and not easily reconciled schools of thought led to the creation, Nash argued, of a coherent modern Right.

I suppose that it was inevitable that once he passed in 2007, National Review would eventually drift off course. Their "Against Trump" issue was a low point, and now one of the senior writers' "hot takes" the day Rush's death is announced is to trash him. And then when the inevitable blowback occurred, he said that it did not surprise him that (get this) "non readers who like shock-jock radio dislike writers", and that is some weapons-grade elitism right there.

I think it was there in Buckley's day, but he knew how to keep a lid on it, and Dougherty's piece would not have seen the light of day.

Because Rush is kind of like Trump. That is, he doesn't play by their rules. The Con, Inc. of the 80s and 90s wanted to carry on a conversation about ideas on an intellectual level, but even back then we were way past the point where that was possible. Con, Inc. didn't recognize this, but Rush sure did, which is why he mocked and ridiculed the left at every opportunity. And thus he's the godfather of ace, us, the Babylon Bee, and pretty much every conservative sh1t-poster on the internet.

Because "illustrating the absurd by being absurd" is a necessary component of the long war.

Who Dis:

For the 'Ettes:

Wednesday Who Dis: We recently discovered a limited-run miniseries that I missed the first time around (2019), Beecham House, which I think may have been shown on PBS. I thought that the male lead, Tom Bateman, looked to be a fine, strapping young fellow suitable for a 'who dis'. And as this series was set in India, there of course had to be some young Indian lasses who are absolute smokeshows, so I chose Pallavi Sharda, who has actually born in Australia and does a lot of her work there.

Today's Edition Of The Morning Rant Is Brought To You By Triple Chocolate Scones:

(click for bigger scones)

Scone recipe available here

posted by OregonMuse at 11:08 AM

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