Brought to you by the publisher of "The" "American" "Conservative"

We have some fun here, from time to time, chatting about the dyed-in-the-wool conservative chops of Wick Allison, publisher of The American Conservative.  Which, in the same manner that a roundtable is neither round nor a table, is neither "American" nor "Conservative".  (For a refresher, here's Allison's Cub Reporter discussing the boss's renewed support for Obama in 2012, and chiming in his view that Obama was better choice than Romney on foreign policy and economic issues -- quite the oracle, given recent events.)

Anyhoo, Wick Allison's other vehicle is D Magazine, which is one of those print and online rags about what is trendy and cool in a particular city.  D is of course about Dallas.  In the recent issue, D published an online ranking (don't know if it's in the print version) of the various suburbs in the Dallas area.  The city of Rockwall, TX was ranked #16 out of 63 (yes, we have a lot of suburbs here).  But it is the six-paragraph story accompanying the ranking that raised a bit of a foo-fraw on local AM talk radio today.  The story noted that Rockwall is the hometown of US Congressman Ralph Hall, who is 91 years young and who was recently beaten in the GOP primary by a Tea Partier, and then quoted a local barber thusly:

 “I’ve been cutting Ralph Hall’s hair for 20 years, his kinfolk’s even longer,” he says, pointing to a framed picture of the congressman. “He’s a gentleman. That guy who beat him? He’s an asshole. All these assholes have moved in here. I had a better clientele 20 years ago, no assholes.” 

So there you go.  According to D Magazine, a city loaded with Tea Party "assholes" makes it into the top quartile of suburbs.

And yes, they're hiding behind the "we're not saying that, it's just what we heard" defense.  But it seems an odd paragraph for the publisher of The American Conservative to have in a six-paragraph blurb.

More material documenting combox Nazism at The "American" "Conservative"

Speaking of comments not being approved over at The "American" "Conservative", a blogger named Thomas O. Meehan has posted numerous examples over at his site Odysseus on the Rocks of his comments not being approved by Rod Dreher and others. Mr. Meehan is an interesting example to me because I think he's much closer to Amconmag's way of thinking on certain foreign policy issues than I am. But, like us, he is utterly perplexed at how they can continue to advertise themselves as being conservative after displaying so much Obama-love and espousing so many liberal views. He writes this:

I was going to post something later on the President's faux impromptu speech to the White House press corps. And then I noticed an almost giddy puff piece in TAC by some kid they recently hired named Jonathan Coppage. Let me say that this is just the latest signal from TAC that they no longer wish to be considered Conservative in any way beyond their masthead. Along with Coppage's love letter to our mulatto messiah, there was a piece by Goldman attacking the 2nd amendment, a piece by Jacobs in the same vane and a really shameful piece by Millman whining about Human Bio-Diversity. So It's official, TAC is now a sham. It has devolved into a spineless exercise, a hermaphrodite among the journals. It is neither really conservative or left. It is a talking shop for those worshiping at the plastic shrine of the goddess NICE.

[Nota bene, I try not to use the term mulatto even as an adjective, but Kurt used it as a noun, so it probably can't be racist.]

Meehan's entire post is worth reading. I don't know if they published this comment, he doesn't say. Someone else can do that research if they wish. While you're at it, find out if Amconmag has any openly gay traditional religious conservative bloggers yet. They're due for a token of that important conservative voting bloc.

The way I discovered Thomas Meehan was through a snarky comment of his that was published on Jeremy Beer's review of The Little Way of Ruthie Leming. It's a short comment which I would be proud of writing, subtle but deadly:

This is a very timely and necessary review given Dreher’s extreme reluctance to publicize or advance himself in any way.

Isn't that good? See, that's the trick you need to use if you want a chance at getting a comment approved. He begins with perceived flattery: "This is a very timely and necessary review", but then he packs the business end of his argument in the subordinate clause. It's the Trojan Horse model, and it worked in this case.

Here's another interesting post from about a year ago about comment approval over at Amconmag.

A comment of mine was "excised" by Wick Allison over at the American Conservative last week. Excised is his term for his culling of comments that violate his criteria for respectability. An informed source tells me that Allison is the censor for all comments, without reference to the wishes of the writers. Curious that, considering they pay people to write but don't trust them to manage their own comments. Well, at least they're honest about it.

This is another step in the devolution of TAC from it's nationalist/traditionalist beginnings to something lesser and disappointing. TAC has come to suffer from a form of multiple personality disorder. It still publishes Pat Buchanan's and Jim Pinkerton's articles but it also publishes the work of Kelly Vlahos, resident harridan at the left wing Antiwar.com. Rod Dreher is on board writing from deepest, darkest Louisiana representing the childish crunchy-cons while Daniel Larison does a grand job deconstructing Republican talking points in the manner of a dissertation defense. He also does a very creditable job as agent of the vast pan-slavic mind view. That is, the Russian government ought to pay him. I'm not suggesting that they do, but that's how good he is at advancing the let's not be beastly toward the bear meme. Lately, to further extend the big tent into a three ring circus, TAC brought on people like Noah Millman who at least make no pretense at being a conservative.

He claims he has a source for Wick Allison being the main comment censor, and I don't doubt this claim. It rings true because this level of micromanagement is so odd that I can imagine any eye-witness to it would be willing to relate his strange experience. I have the experience of Wick Allison personally returning emails which was a little bit surprising to me.

The thing that is hard to remember in the aftermath of having a comment deleted is that you most likely scored a point. This is because you're irritated that it wasn't published. That means that you have to go and start your own blog—or go to someone else's who shares your opinion—and relate it there where it won't be excised. But here's the thing: this is the mainstream conservative experience in modern America. The mainstream media—which is dyed-in-the-skin liberal to leftist—used to practically control all the information that got out there, and they still control it to a great degree. Then we had the talk radio revolution—spearheaded by Rush Limbaugh, Fox news and the conservative pundits and blogger on the internet. Sites like Washington Examiner provide the counter-balance to WaPo even though they scrapped their print edition. Think of how the liberal mainstream media have tried desperately to censor so many huge stories. Any good news from Iraq back in the Bush years, anything bad about Islam, the Kermit Gosnell case, the dirt on Trayvon and his whacked gang connections, the Benghazi cover-up, etc., etc. But they can't always readily do this, thanks to alternative conservative media.

So the really pathetic thing about Amconmag is that they're doing what the drive-by media does on a tiny little scale. They really aren't much bigger in popularity than someone like R. S. McCain, and they are dwarfed by NRO and Hotair.com (source = alexa.com). By using a fine-tooth comb on comments with which they don't agree, they are just forcing people like Thomas O. Meehan to drop his subscription and to join the chorus of other conservatives in the rest of the world who doubt there's anything very conservative or even American about the "American" "Conservative". And they'll never engage us naysayers directly since they wouldn't want to give us hits, or maybe because their noses are at such a steep angle that they can barely even see us.

---

(Update: I added Meehan's middle initial after finding out he shares a name with a famous comedy screenwriter.)

Quick Refresher Course on Crunchy Conservatism

I'm planning to post something soon about the libel flair-up which we've been discussing over here, but I've been too busy to do so, so I'm throwing this out there for now. Not apologizing—see number three here.

I came across this review in New Criterion while googling the phrase "platonic ideal of chickenness". It's seven years old, but I don't remember reading this review when the book Crunchy Conservatives first came out. I might have read it, but either way, I think it's good to read it again and note that Dreher's ideas, his tone and his manner haven't changed very much even though, from what I know, he doesn't use the adjective crunchy that much anymore unless he is referring to his earlier book. WSJ's Joseph Rago, the author, read the book and came to the same conclusions that we did. Here are some excerpts, but the entire thing doesn't take long to read.

The major thinkers, to be sure, may be reinterpreted to meet the conditions of contemporary life. New discoveries must be made. But Dreher’s findings are slight. The novel thing about a “Birkenstocked Burkean,” it seems to me, is not the Burke but the Birkenstocks. Dreher is preoccupied by lifestyle signifiers—the way people dress, the homes they live in, and, particularly, the food they eat. For reasons I can’t comprehend, he has a voracious obsession with the “right” kind of organic food. At one point, he tells a story about a really delicious free-range chicken he ate with his family: “It was … almost the Platonic ideal of chickenness.” Eating is for Dreher a fundamentally political act. “There are many mansions in the American conservative house,” he writes, “and some of them are old and funky and smell like a pot of organic mustard greens cooking down on the stove.” This gives you a taste of his ersatz cracker-barrel folksiness.

Style over substance—check. The phrase which jumped out at me was "Dreher’s findings are slight." This was something we were always noting back in the Contra-Crunchy days. Whenever Dreher said something we agreed with it seemed like others had said it already and usually better and less obnoxiously.

One thing he marginally adds in this is the notion that under our current political alignment, not all conservative ideas belong usufruct to the Republican Party, and indeed the GOP often does things that are not conservative. He further reminds us that not all ideas emanating from the left are bad ones, particularly in regards to the stewardship of the environment. True enough. The traits crunchy cons mainly borrow from the left, however, are sanctimony, condescension, and impermeable self-regard.

Sanctimony, condescension, and impermeable self-regard—check, check, check. Nothing to add to this observation. Crunchy snobbery deserves no more than this bulls-eye waiting room diagnosis.

This is most evident, and most insulting, when Dreher draws distinctions between crunchy cons and regular cons. If you’re not wearing the Birkenstocks, so to speak, you’re not getting Burke. Only those who have been inducted into the mystery cult of crunchy conservatism are leading rich, fulfilling lives. Dreher’s mainstream conservatives are “really” spiritually arid and “really” desire only filthy lucre. “[M]ost people who call themselves conservative today,” he summarizes with by-God certainty, “aren’t really conservative in a deep sense.”

These are severe charges. Regrettably, Dreher is not analytic but impressionistic in his writing. He relies heavily on interviews, which lend to his arraignment an air of sociology, but little evidence or argument. You could say that the crunchy cons believe they’ve cornered the market on virtue—but then, they don’t believe in markets.

Here the money clause is "little evidence or argument". Dreher was incensed at the time because Jonah Goldberg basically denied the existence of crunchy conservatism as a political reality, and challenged him to give evidence of its existence. But proving a theory is beneath the Believer who has unshakeable faith in the object of his Belief. Or maybe what seems like faith is merely disguised delusion based on "impermeable self-regard".