Every time conservatives point out the preponderance of liberals in higher education, the response is usually the same: What a bunch of crybabies. 

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Ever since Pat Robertson’s endorsement of Rudy Giuliani, media outlets have scrutinized the move as a signal that the conservative Christian vote is fractured and confused. Columnist Joe Loconte says such a critique is flawed and naïve:

Let’s start with Pat Robertson. Anyone who thinks that Mr. Robertson is a weather vane for religious voters simply hasn’t been paying attention. The most influential voices in conservative Christianity have excoriated him for his chronic absurdities.

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Last week, we blogged on the Times essay by David  Kirkpatrick titled “The Evangelical Crackup,” about the splintering of the Christian right.  One Evangelical says this isn’t the case, though. Evangelicals aren’t cracking up, because we never were a bloc in the first place.

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Last night, Ron Paul delivered an incredibly cogent and winsome interview on The Tonight Show. I like him more and more. My favorite line from the clip: Paul says, “There probably is a risk that I could win.” Republicans need more irony like that. Until I determine how to post video, you can watch the fabulous 8-minute interview here.

Why does Rudy Giuliani, who seems to do so many very unconservative things, like, say, living with an openly gay couple after getting kicked out of Gracie Mansion, still poll so well across the country? 

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I think conservatives like Stephen Colbert because, well, for the same reason conservatives like Ignatius Reilly of A Confederacy of Dunces.  While both Colbert and Reilly seem to be lampooning conservatism with their satire of it, they’re actually revealing what’s good about it, and what’s bad about the other.  When Colbert, on his show, offers a “tribute to the ladies” by inviting Jane Fonda and Gloria Steinem on the show to bake apple pies, he’s not just saying something about sexism.  He’s saying something about the paradox of feminism, too. 

But what’s Colbert really like? 

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…is the title of a great big piece in the Times magazine about the changing politics of the pulpit and the church.  The story begins with Terry Fox, a conservative Southern Baptist minister forced out of his church for getting too political: “The board of deacons had told him that his activism was getting in the way of the Gospel. ‘It just wasn’t pertinent,’ Associate Pastor Gayle Tenbrook [said].’”

Fox, who is 47, said he saw some impatient shuffling in the pews, but he was stunned that the church’s lay leaders had turned on him. “They said they were tired of hearing about abortion 52 weeks a year, hearing about all this political stuff!” he told me on a recent Sunday afternoon. “And these were deacons of the church!”

The gospel has to do with everything, but the pulpit is not a political stump, and pastors - both liberal and conservative - confuse the two at their peril.  Read the rest of this magnum opus here.

Okay, so people are saying a lot of Republican women are going to vote for Hillary Clinton next year.  This is scandalous, which is why it’s such a good story for the Clinton campaign to tell: it suggests rifts in the Republican party, it plays to conservative women who’ve ever felt a little slighted by their conservative male colleagues, it plays like the tempting of a woman to leave her husband and go man-bashing on a girl’s night out with mint-chocolate martinis and uncomfortable shoes.  And now, it even sounds like Peggy Noonan wants to have a girl’s night out with Hillary.  The long and short is, the presidency is about ideology and ideas, not about Girl Power.  If Republican women don’t know why they’re conservative and why Hillary is not that, then please, let them out themselves by voting her in.  At least we’ll know who they are.

Kyle Smith, a film critic for the New York Post, had an intriguing essay in Friday’s Opinion Journal that, for all its merit, left me wondering why so many of us reflexively assume that to oppose violence is to be anti-American. Smith wanders about, first reviewing what sounds like an absolutely dreadful new Jodie Foster film, and then taking a few jabs at liberals, before settling down to his thesis, which is that liberals like movies that question the use of violence. Such movies, Smith implies, are anti-American. To substantiate his point, Smith points to two recent films, “The Bourne Ultimatum,” and “A History of Violence,” which he says capture the liberal ethos regarding violence, to wit, that it is bad and somehow caused by nefarious forces — in the former movie, a shady government, and in the latter, a violent American culture.

It’s a bad habit for conservatives to adopt this reflex of defending whatever liberals critique. Eric Breindel, a New York Post journalist from a more thoughtful era, once wrote that “some things are true even though Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy said they were.” The same can be said of Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky. The fact that liberals approve of a storyline in which Jason Bourne, the haunted ex-assassin from the Bourne trilogy of movies, was trained by the U.S. government, shouldn’t lead conservatives to suggest that the only pro-American stance is to be in favor of CIA-trained assassins. If conservatism is about, in part, a rightful distrust of large, unaccountable government bureaucracies, then shouldn’t conservatives applaud films that pick on the CIA?

More disturbing, however, is the notion that to oppose violence is somehow anti-American. A conservative understands that in a fallen world, violence may sometimes be necessary. But a conservative, and especially a Christian, also mourns the destruction of life. Smith notes that left-wing Hollywood filmmakers must be disappointed “that audiences remain more interested in crisp revenge than messy guilt.” It seems to me that genuine conservatives, and Christians above all, ought to be disappointed as well. That doesn’t mean that every movie which attempts to portray the true ugliness of violence should be applauded (Smith mentions some real stinkers). But it does mean that we ought to admit that violence is an ugly, terrible thing, even if Oliver Stone says so.