Conservative Family Squabbles?
Ace responds to Rod Dreher:
This is silly, bordering on the stupid-silly. Limbaugh's point was to contrast two vehicles for getting to the Good Society: 1) freedom of personal action, relying on people's conscience and self-interest to mostly get them through, and 2) government coercion and instruction. Limbaugh was not postulating that people live in a state of natural grace -- he was making the point that people, left to their own devices, are closer to such a natural state of grace than they are under a government that attempts to bully and bribe them into such a state. What would be the source of external moral instruction if not the State? Well, Limbaugh didn't address that, but for many Americans, it's religious faith. Had Limbaugh brought that up, I'm guessing Crunchy Non-Con would have had similar carpings. One point Limbaugh made that Dreher doesn't address -- he noted that many conservative pundits would fall upon themselves to cut down their fellow conservatives in order to ingratiate themselves with the Obama regime and its owned-and-operated media messaging brigade. There are honest disagreements, and then there is just posturing to demonstrate one is not one of those "bad conservatives" who do all sorts of evil and ugly things like force mortgages on the poor, deny health care to children, and believe in actual conservatism. The anklebiting, contradiction-for-contradiction's sake tenor of Dreher's critique seems to suggest that Rush's counter-critique might have hit too close to home.