Better Talking Heads

D.R. Tucker takes note of a disturbing trend: cable news organization hiring conservatives who are not eager to critique the GOP:

The latest example of the promotion of pro-GOP punditry over old-school conservatism is the announcement of S.E. Cupp's selection as the token non-liberal co-host on MSNBC's new show The Cycle. I've had the pleasure of interviewing Cupp, and I don't deny that she's a talented writer and speaker... but the second coming of Michael Oakeshott she is not. Certainly, a traditional conservative would have had a better response to Chris Mooney's arguments regarding climate change than one that involved pounding once again on the dead horse that is "Climategate."

Tucker argues that it wasn't always this way. As Tucker remembers it, the right used to be more willing to critique its own side when the evidence pointed that way:

I can still remember reading innovative conservative commentary on such sites as JewishWorldReview.com in the late-1990s and early-2000s, and reading columns by Thomas Sowell, Michelle Malkin, Laura Ingraham, Jonah Goldberg and Walter Williams attacking both Democratic and Republican malfeasance with profundity and passion. Somewhere along the line, these men and women only came to see fault and fraud on the left, an intellectual tragedy for those who came to admire them for condemning corruption wherever it was found in American politics.

With rare exceptions -- such as Daniel Larison of The American Conservative -- no one's serving up conservatism they way they used to make it. Instead, what we see today is the equivalent of gourmet chefs making fast food -- pundits who should know better than to give the GOP an automatic pass, but who have become so ideologically blinkered that they turn two blind eyes to Republican ridiculousness.

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Noah Kristula-Green

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