Conservatives of Blindness

By way of DougJ at Balloon Juice comes this bit from Andrew Sullivan, a "conservative of conscience," as the kids say:

What I think conservatism has to do is recover its core sense of itself as the movement that values work over wealth, individual effort over collective action, and a system that is transparent and fair enough for ordinary folk with lives to live and families to take care of to keep tabs on.

Right. There's no question that Sully, good ol' John Dean, and a heaping helping of regular-American Republican voters believe these are core conservative values, but it simply has never been true. (And Dean should've discovered that back during the Nixon Administration.) It just so happens that it's a good cover story for policies that transfer money and power to people who've already got plenty of both.

That way you can wail about the need to rein in welfare queens with welfare reform, and then later, you can bemoan the coming socialistpocalypse when the federal government pressures the CEO of bailed-out GM to resign.