WITH REPUBLICAN FRIENDS LIKE THESE …
THE MEDIA LOVES CONSERVATIVES, BUT ONLY IF THEY HATE REPUBLICANS
By KYLE SMITH
March 15, 2009
Dear Mainstream Media:
I’m a conservative who believes that other conservatives are fat, drug-stuffed, money-grubbing warthogs like Rush Limbaugh, or scary inbred backwoods retards like Sarah Palin.
So can I please be your go-to guy whenever you need a conservative viewpoint?
When you assemble an op-ed page or a panel discussion that has three or four liberal commentators—plus a liberal moderator (if this is TV) or a liberal news section (if this is print)—I volunteer to be the one voice you allow to speak for the loyal opposition.
I am available to write cover stories for Newsweek, hold down the other side of the New York Times op-ed seesaw against Paul Krugman and Co., or fill in whenever David Gergen is unavailable to supply analysis of President Obama’s next magnifiquent speech for CNN.
I promise that the only conservatives I will ever praise will be safely dead (Churchill, Reagan, or, if this is PBS, Edmund Burke).
Sample phrases with which I plan to begin my columns:
“As a conservative, I am deeply troubled by the comments of (name of conservative), who just this week said (conservative things).”
Or try this one: “I’m a conservative, but nationalization is starting to look like the only viable option. I don’t mean just banks. It’s time for FedEx to be taken over by the postal service.”
Or: “It breaks my heart to see what my party has become—jingoistic, hysterical, intolerant. Also, Ann Coulter should be gagged with my sweaty undershorts.”
David Brooks and David Frum get it. The Republican Party is a fossil in pleated khakis and penny loafers. As Meghan McCain said: It’s unhip. It is to Washington what Donny Osmond is to the Billboard charts. It has won but seven of the last 11 presidential elections and only six of the last eight Congressional elections.
All that remains of the Griping Old Party is a tattered remnant, an embittered rump faction of 46%. I have devised a simple one-step solution to reversing our losing position in the last election: Move to the side that won.
It’s time for bipartisanship. A third way. A new majority in which new conservatives consider new ideas, such as the New Deal, which is still spry and vigorous at 76 and is a model worth remembering because it led directly to the end of the Depression only seven years later.
I love trillion-dollar spending sprees that triple the deficit overnight. All I ask is that they be for a good cause, like massive increases in welfare. We need to get past old conservative policies, such as those signed into law by President Clinton, that assumed welfare is counterproductive. We should expand welfare in a conservative way. Instead of calling welfare checks initiative-crushing poverty-reinforcing handouts, we should call them “Freedom Opportunity Vouchers.”
We need new ways of thinking about foreign policy, too. I’m not saying we need to send red roses to the Taliban, but maybe we just need to meet them halfway. Maybe they’d be a little friendlier if our women agreed to wear scarves over their heads from noon till three? I can’t support stoning adulteresses in the village square, but—what if we just gathered ‘round and threw hacky sacks? The point would be made symbolically. It might even build a sense of community.
Like all conservatives, I believe in sticking to the original intent of the framers of the Constitution, and that intent was to guarantee a nationwide right to gay marriage and unlimited abortion by using secretly embedded code words that no one would correctly interpret for 200 years. Think “The Da Vinci Code.”
I know what you’re thinking: How do we know this guy is what he says he is? How do we know he’s a conservative?
Simple. Because I regularly mention values, church and family. I’m a fan of charity and volunteerism and giving back to your country. I am a steadfast, dyed-in-the-wool, principled conservative. Who voted for Obama.
Kyle.Smith@nypost.com