In a world where Charles Krauthammer's not conservative enough...

Yeah, you should probably read that subject line in the voice of Don LaFontaine.

While the original post that this one's spinning off of was originally intended only to contrast a true conservative writer with a pretentious scrunchy con clown, it turns out, news to me, that Bubba and Kathleen and so probably others - Bubba linked Andrew McCarthy - don't think Charles Krauhammer is conservative enough, or is the wrong kind of conservative, or in some major wholesale way doesn't serve the conservative cause well or even at all.

Let me right now distinguish the wholesale standard or non-standard I just described from just disagreeing with Krauthammer periodically on different points or statements he may make. For example, I strongly disagree with his sympathies toward amnesty, but I think he probably settles there in what is probably just academic naivete simply because he doesn't know enough working class black and white and legal Hispanic people displaced from potential jobs in construction or hospitality by the illegal aliens which took those jobs and depressed the wages they used to pay. If that's the only sort of dispute any of the people named above have with him - just occasional disagreements on points - say so now and consider that my retraction of what I claimed above.

However, anyone, McCarthy included, who is taking a disagreement on particular isolated points or statements and extrapolating them to generally define Krauthammer's conservatism as a whole, if that's what it turns out they're doing, is leaving rationality behind in pursuit of a more subjective, purely personal disregard for him.

Speaking of which, it could also be that someone just straightforwardly dislikes Krauthammer personally - that haughty little nose, for example - for reasons ultimately having nothing to do with his writings. I'm the same way, just not with Krauthammer. In that case, they might agree perfectly well with many of the things Krauthammer actually writes but find he somehow puts a stink on them they just can't abide.

There is also the possibility that Krauthammer is being measured in some quasi-religious way against some sort of idealized potential conservative savior who will not only perfectly embody all conservative principles but will also unilaterally bestow some sort of conservative salvation on everyone else as a matter of grace without them having to do very much themselves. If that sort of perception is out there, I'm sorry, but, unlike Christianity, I just don't think politics, any politics, has ever worked that way or ever will. If someone is waiting for someone to act conservatively on their behalf, the person they're really waiting for is probably themselves. Unlike in Christianity, in politics there are no saviors, and there is nothing and no one involved in politics which is not to some degree incomplete, broken, impure, or dirty.

Which brings me back to my original point. In a world where Charles Krauthammer with his canon of writing as a conservative is not considered conservative enough - what sort of world, exactly, do those who feel that way imagine they're really living in? What are their realistic expectations for the present and the future, of conservatism, and particularly for conservatism to actually shape the world they and their children inhabit in ways it's not doing now?

Let me point out that, if they're in fact not doing anything less than repudiating Krauthammer in that wholesale way I first described above, then what they're effectively doing is repudiating everything that's only Krauthammer-type-and-degree conservative and below and accepting only that more complete, more fully realized, more pure, more intense, or more whatever conservatism cream that is somehow better or richer or more intensely pure than the mere Krauthammer-type-and-degree conservatism they reject.

If so, given what I and a number of others find as Krauthammer's sufficient conservatism, I can see only two alternatives.

First, if their view is conservatively incorrect, their view of the world may be, to use a term from Krauthammer's psychiatry, "cognitively dissonant": their view of how they want the world to be is so realistically out of joint with the way the world will necessarily be that it will never serve them well.

Second, if their view is in fact the only true conservatively correct one, they may find that they're in fact able to practice it themselves in some ways in the world, but just not in any way that has any noticeable effects on the world beyond them and those particular co-conservatives who share that same rarefied vision with them. In other words, they might be confining themselves to permanemtly limited and circumscribed, impotent academic cult status. Conservative, perhaps, but permanemtly limited and circumscribed, impotent academic conservative cult status nevertheless.

Finally, here's Krauthammer's most recent column, Obamacare Laid Bare and his take on the

three pillars of Obamacare: (a) mendacity, (b) paternalism and (c) subterfuge.

Read it - or not - and decide for yourself.

Charles Krauthammer seems conservative enough for me.