Ultimate Wingnut Challenge: The Respected Conservative Thinkers
Today the Respected Conservative Thinkers get their chance to show what they are made of. Their challenge is to write a column using a respected conservative truth as its thesis, and to write at least one passage demonstrating how pretentious they can be.
1. Our first contestant will be the guy you people voted on to the island: the 1977 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, "one of the most widely recognized, and widely read, writers in the world," and the man about whom Rachel Marsen said, "Will is a conservative, but the esoteric pontificator is drier than a mouthful of volcanic ash."
Yes, we're just talkin' 'bout George F. Will. Let's take a look at his most recent column, "Wilkinson Would Make a Fine Supreme Court Justice."
Respected Conservative Thesis: President Bush should nominate J. Harvie Wilkinson III to fill Sandra Day O'Connor's spot on the Supreme Court. (George took this week off, so his most recent column is from last week, and it's already outdated. Hey, you snooze, you lose, when it comes to having a winning thesis in the high-stakes world of the competitive wingnuttery.)
Pretentious Piffle:
Dismay about abuses of judicial discretion drives some conservatives into a misguided quest for a jurisprudential holy grail - a theory of constitutional reasoning that will virtually expunge discretion from judging. This goal is chimeric.
[...]
Any senator's claim that Wilkinson is an "extremist' would be risible, and itself evidence of extremism.
Hey, any guy who can use "chimeric" and "risable" in the same column can't be dry as dust, Rachel!
2. Next up is the former psychiatrist who won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary. His bio at the Harry Walker Agency adds that, "He is widely known as a conservative, but he is also unorthodox to the core," meaning, I suppose, that he's secretly a Bohemian, or a Bolshevik or something.
Charles Krauthammer, come on down -- you're the next contestant on The Ultimate Wingnut Challenge! Charles's entry is called "Judge's Record Offers Little to Go On."
Respected Conservative Thesis: Supreme Court nominee John Roberts may or may not vote to overturn Roe v.Wade -- but his record does show that he's anti-toad.
Pretentious Piffle:
But if he is no Scalia, is he a Sandra Day O'Connor - who moved so steadily leftward through her Washington career that she has become a retroactive icon, a paragon of principled conservatism, to liberal advocacy groups today?
Well, is he? That's for Krauthammer to know (via his secret shrink powers), and you to find out.
3. Per his bio at the Leigh Bureau ("Exclusively representing the world's preeminent thought leaders since 1929"), our next contestant's goal as a commentator "is to make conservatism attractive to both the East and West Coasts." The fact that he's failing miserably hasn't stopped him from commentating, alas.
He hasn't won any Pulitzers, but he did write BoBos In Paradise, "an often hilarious description of today’s upper class—the bourgeois bohemians: BoBos—whose hybrid lifestyle combines the hippie values of bohemian counterculture with a solid commitment to bourgeois capitalist enterprise."
Yes, it's the head BoBo himself, David Brooks! His latest column is called, "Pain, Agony, Despair: Flying With Children."
Respected Conservative Thesis: Flying with kids is hard! (Okay, David just got back from vacation, and still doesn't feel like tackling a real topic this week.)
Pretentious Piffle:
Any airplane trip with children begins before boarding in the airport gate area, where the parents, dreading the next four hours of high-altitude agony, will be laying down a bed of psychic tension that will be the karmic foundation for everything that is to come.
[...]
The final hour of the flight is aptly captured by Picasso's painting "Guernica." Parents are strewn about in heaps, hardened air marshals are weeping under the strain, the kids look like flesh-eating Beanie Babies, and the pilots emerge to complain that because of the kids' crying they can't hear the air traffic controllers (this actually happened to my family).
Next week David will endeavor to make conservatism attractive to both coasts by asking the important question, "Is it hot enough for you?" and then explaining that it's a dry heat.
4. Our fourth contestant is the guy who was chosen by the NY Times to replace noted conservative writer William Safire. But lacking Safire's Word-A-Day calendar, he's off to a rather rough start. That's why it's nice that he has John Stossel to serve as his mentor. (They both hate the environment, they both hate the government, they can both be awfully annoying, but only Stossel has a porn mustache.)
Of course, we're referring to John Tierney. His colunn for this week is entitled "Handcuffs and Stethoscopes."
Respected Conservative Thesis: The government picks on doctors who give out prescriptions for opiods to addicts and street dealers because it's easier and more profitable than tracking down real drug dealers. However, the DEA should leave "Doctor Feelgoods" alone and start doing its real job: forcing the FDA to approve that really good sunscreen. (Okay, the sunscreen part is just implied.)
Pretentious Piffle:
As quarry for D.E.A. agents, doctors offered several advantages over crack dealers. They were not armed. They were listed in the phone book. They kept office hours and records of their transactions. And unlike the typical crack dealer living with his mother, they had valuable assets that could be seized and shared by the federal, state and local agencies fighting the drug war.
5. Outside Challenger: She may look many other mean old ladies, but she's the wife of Norman Podhoretz, and the mother of JPod, so when she says that she wants to compete with respected thinkers for a shot at the Wingnut title, we have to give her a chance. So, Midge Decter, come take your place on Contestant's Row.
Not having a regular gig, Midge offers this NRO column from November of last year as her audition piece -- it's called, "An Amazing Pass."
Respected Conservative Thesis: The AIDS crisis proves that gays are icky, and that they therefore shouldn't be allowed to marry -- and it's only the fear of being considered mean-spirited that prevents everyone from acknowleding this. Oh, and gays, like women, are just trying to get special rights by claiming to be victims, when the truth is that gays, like women, brought all their problems upon themselves (gays by having icky sex with members of their own sex, women by being born inferior to men).
Pretentious Piffle:
When the claim that everyone was at risk turned out to be untrue — virtually the only heterosexuals in danger of contracting AIDS were careless intravenous drug-users (at least in the West) — a public show of deep compassion for — indeed the beatification of — those who were afflicted became the new propriety, if not, indeed, the new piety. AIDS was now to be seen as a cruel fate, like a lightning bolt, rather than the result of who knows how many nights and how many blind encounters in those so-exclusive bars and bathhouses. [...]
[T]he shame of those years, indeed those centuries, of living comfortably with the crimes committed against the country's blacks has left [Americans] quite disarmed in the face of any and all charges of injustice or bigotry, whatever the merits. So it was, for instance, that the country was all too easily mobilized by a largely meretricious campaign to undo the alleged historic wrongs against women. (Insofar as women could rightly claim to be suffering from special disadvantages, nature itself had decreed them, after all, and it was only an unprecedented degree of national wealth combined with the wonders of medical technology that would make it possible to overcome them.)
I think you can see from the above that, try as he might, John will never be the wingnut that his mother is.
Anyway, now it's time to vote. Which TWO wingnuts do you thing had the weakest Respected Conservative Thesis, the least orchidaceous Pretentious Piffle, and, in short, failed to live up to the high standards of idiocy and wrongheadeness that we would expect from a Respected Conservative Wingnut thinker. (And don't forget that all-important evening gown competition!) So, which two do you want to leave Wingnut Island: George F. Will, Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks, John Tierney, or Midge Decter? Remember, if you don't vote, you can't ever complain about these people -- that's the law.
12:10:54 AM 
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