New Guy

I've always admired and somewhat envied the oft-quoted Digby, who holds down his own well-regarded blog at "Hullaballoo." Now there's a new guy posting there who's just as good as the proprietor. OK, maybe he's been there for a while and I just didn't notice.

This unfamiliar name, Tristero, responding to some piece of cast-off flotsam from National Review Online editor Ramesh Ponnuru uncorks the best defininition of "neocon" I've seen yet:

Colin Powell is a conservative, Mr. Ponnuru. Christie Whitman is a conservative. Joe Lieberman is a conservative. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Tom Delay, Bill Frist, Tom Coburn, and their ilk are NOT conservatives. They are rightwing extremists. In the sixties, I would have called them Birchers, not having the knowledge of the far right back then to distinguish amongst different flavors of rightwing lunacy.*

Conservatives don't look at videos of a brain-dead woman twitching and drooling, declare her conscious and then pass a law that eviscerates a 200 plus year old history of jurisprudence in order to deny her a dignified death.

Tristero goes on to tell Ponnuru that he's not particularly enamored of conservatives, then adds: "conservatives aren't terribly competent or effective politicians. But they aren't raving mad like you and your pals."

Indeed. The lunatics are running the asylum. For how long, d'ya think?