The thing that is the most disturbing about conservatives is not their overarching ideals of smaller government and greater individual responsibility. It is their constantly shrinking circle of orthodoxy that ultimately excludes and anathamatizes their fellow true believers. It’s getting harder and harder to tell the faithful from the infidels. This on the recent dust up between Glenn Beck and Bill Kristol:
Fox News’s Glenn Beck lashed out at Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol on his radio show this morning, accusing Kristol of betraying conservatism and missing the significance of what Beck sees as an alliance between Islamism and socialism.
“I don’t even know if you understand what conservatives are anymore, Billy,” Beck said in his extended, sarcastic attack on Kristol. “People like Bill Kristol, I don’t think they stand for anything any more. All they stand for is power. They’ll do anything to keep their little fiefdom together, and they’ll do anything to keep the Republican power entrenched.”
Kristol this weekend took Beck to task for the latter’s skepticism of the Egyptian uprising:
When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He’s marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s.
Kristol’s words drew an approving nod from National Review’s Rich Lowry, a rare public repudiation of the influential Fox host from a conservative elite that quietly dislikes him.
my apologies 
One Comment
That’s pure poppycock. We have a two party system (mainly because of the electoral college) and the ethos of either party is in a constant shift. The Robert Taft Republicans of the 1940’s, the Rockefeller Republicans of the 1950’s, the Goldwater Republicans of the 1960’s, the Nixonians of the 1970’s, the Reaganites of the 1980’s and the Irving and Bill Kristols of the 2000’s are all changes in the party ethos. Do you think that the Party of Abraham Lincoln has the same political ideas of the Party of George Bush. Both Kristol and Beck are infidels if the ethos is the Taft Republican. The only thing going on here is an arm wrestle over the definition of “conservative”.