The Crackup Continues

Kevin Drum writes that Bush's speech did nothing to ease his troubles with the base. So I mosied over to the Corner (ugh) to see how things were going. And I have to say, it's kind of funny:

Suddenly, immigration restriction has become one of those issues about which one is not permitted to disagree, because to disagree is to join with the forces of Evil. Those who favor a less restrictive policy are said to be bought and paid for by Big Business, to want to oppress poor American minorities who can't earn a decent wage, and to seek the cultural destruction of America. Chief among these villains, it appears, is the president of the United States, whose efforts on behalf of conservative causes — from faith-based policies to stem-cell research to a strict-constructionist judiciary to entitlement reform and massive tax cuts — have all fallen down the memory hole. He is not a conservative, my e-mailers tell me. He is Jorge Arbusto, an agent of the Mexican government. And neither, by the way, am I, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and someone who left mainstream journalism to toil in the fields of conservative media when conservative media weren't cool, to put it mildly.

This inability to stomach disagreement on a hot-button issue should be troubling to anyone and everyone who has found an intellectual home on the Right — in part to avoid the kind of crippling self-censorship that has afflicted the P.C. Left.

If I were a more compassionate person, I might feel bad for John Podhoretz. But here's the thing: The American right have spent all of the Bush years, and a large chunk of the Clinton years, declaring that not only were Democrats treasonous dogs, but they needed to be ignored, and if necessary silenced.

Now here's the thing: Once you've said it's okay to define political disagreement as treason, it's hard to stop that game.

John Podhoretz had no problem declaring that the Democrats were traitors. But now people who are even crazier than him are declaring that he's a traitor, and he's discovered that really, what America needs is a less impassioned, more reasoned debate. Sucker.

Oh, and let's be clear - there's no "self-censorship" on the left, at least not the way J-Pod means it. What frustrates conservatives like him is the left's insistence on being, you know, Left. This means we're stubbornly attached to racial equality, or a woman's right to choose. But in J-Pod's world, that's not a sign of principle or a moral conviction - because obviously moral people could never value individual rights! No, it can only be chalked up to "self-censorship", and probably "activist judges" for good measure.