Well, it’s been quite a week for conservative elites.
Sorry, the term “conservative elite” is unfamiliar? That’s understandable, given the incessant harping about how liberals are out-of-touch, sissified, morally bankrupt, coastal ne’er do wells. Perhaps a closer reading of some recent news clips will clarify matters.
Maryland Senate candidate Michael Steele gave an interview on background to nine national reporters in which he complained about and criticized President Bush. When his identity was revealed, Steele tried to blame the media for breaking the rules (they didn’t) and then wrapped himself in the self-fitting draperies of a courageous maverick.
Forget what Steele said. The telling details from his media luncheon at a Capitol steakhouse, as recounted by columnist Dana Milbank, are that Steele likes hanger steak, wears fancy French cuffed shirts, and delicately picks the gelatinous yolk from the eggs in his salad.
This is the stuff of a Tom Wolfe novel or, rather, Wolfe himself — a truly urban and urbane dandy. Does this self-proclaimed “Man of Steele” come from like, Manhattan, or some other place that produces pampered dilettantes?
Maybe if Steele spent more time dining at Applebee’s — you know, the kind of restaurant where, conservatives inform us, the real Americans in the flyover states eat — they might de-yolk his salad eggs.
Leaping across Flyover America ,our next stop is the Botox-addled, who’s-your-nanny enclave of Malibu: Mel Gibson, proprietor.
Apparently, the conservative movie star and hero filmmaker of “The Passion of the Christ” feels entitled to endanger fellow citizens by driving — and talking — while intoxicated. When pulled over, Gibson blamed all the world’s wars on the Jews, called a female officer “sugar t-s,” and threatened to leverage his powers as Lord Malibu to punish the police for arresting him.
If he wants to be really punitive, the judge in the case should sentence Gibson to love his neighbors as much as he loves himself.
Ah, love, which brings us to Michele Cottle’s article about congressional second wives in the latest New Republic. A riveting tale of permissive, Clintonian liberals chucking their wives for the fawning, belly button-exposing “skinterns” on Capitol Hill?
Afew Democrats made the roster, sure. But the list of spouse up-traders is chock full of Republicans, including Roy Blunt, Tom Davis, Tim Hutchinson, and Stephen LaTourette. Heading the group is 1994 GOP revolutionary Newt Gingrich, who dumped his second wife while she was in the hospital for wife No. 3.
It’s not just the husbands, either. Republican Mary Bono ditched her post-Sonny husband so she could start dating fellow Republican Connie Mack, who freed himself by leaving his wife. Talk about the need to put some “heart” back in heartland values: Republicans, it seems, believe their moral authority to lecture on the sanctity of marriage derives from the fact that they’ve been through so many of them.
On his self-titled MSNBC program, Tucker Carlson scoffed Monday at Michael Moore’s claim that Republicans increasingly approach the liberal documentarian to give him a hug. Moore has provided conservatives with so many juicy story lines, Carlson quipped, that he would actually consider hugging him, too.
“If Moore didn’t exist, we’d have to invent him,” said Carlson.
Thomas F. Schaller is an associate political science professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
