Repugnicans’ Diversity

And people say there’s no diversity on the right! There might be more black people in NASCAR than in the Repugnicans’ quickly shrinking “big” tent, (notice FOX News’s complete disavowel of race’s role in Michael Steele’s “prominence”), but the GOP might have enough cross-cutting diversity in its employment of language to make up for its monochromaticity.

Setting the stage for the first major post-Obama institutional cave-in, problems are mounting at William F Buckley’s beloved National Review. After losing two generations of Buckleys to (different versions of) reality, this bastion of intelligent conservatism, the magazine’s most popular writer, David Frum, is leaving to start his own site. Potentially more damaging, however, is the institution’s declining brand. Thoughtlessly virulent comment boards, (largely) unflinching support for Sarah Palin (we’ll get to this in a second), and the omnipresent threat of the new mediascape have conspired to tarnish the reputation of the magazine as a reasonable conservative voice.

Despite some notable detractors, the National Review’s support for Palin is inexplicable unless read as a truly selfless effort to keep the team together. Buckley, who was known for a biting wit and an extensive vocabulary certainly wouldn’t have supported this beautiful Palinism:

“My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.”

It’s hard to believe that Sarah Barracuda might get a $7 million book deal.

After eight years of ridicule being hurled at Bush for his Engrish, one might think that the right would want someone who speaks WELL (instead of good).

So where does this leave conservative discourse?

Since I’m sure that Joe The Plumber will do a great job “Securing Our Freedom” as Joe-The-Blogger, there might not be much use for thoughtful conservatives over there on the right. Since I doubt they’ll be able to win much support from the Repugnican rank-and-file, might their allegiances be up for grabs. I hear there are some academics who are looking for help running the country.