Peter Krupa

I usually don’t watch the Oscars because the spectacle of people kissing each others asses disagrees with me. However, something (my wife) made me turn on the TV last night, and I had the shocking experience of watching an award show dominated by (gasp!) foreigners!

The L.A. Times gives it the full treatment here. Pretty much everyone was from the savage lands outside our borders! Javier Bardem gave a speech in Spanish! Best actress went to a FRENCH woman! One guy who won in some category I don’t remember started his acceptance speech, “I don’t really speak English”!

That, and we’re maybe about to elect a president whose father is from Kenya and whose middle name is Hussein. Who says Americans are xenophobes?

People used to say Hugo Chávez was the next Fidel Castro, but these days he’s looking more and more like Manuel Noriega:

Chavez, a former soldier, repeated a claim that Colombia was planning to invade neighboring Venezuela and said he would soon test the firepower of Russian-built fighter jets.

“We don’t want to hurt anybody, but don’t make mistakes with us,” he said during an address to the country to mark nine years since he took office. “They would regret it for 100 years.”

No one is going to invade Venezuela because Chavez calls George W. Bush names. But threatening a neighboring country, messing around with narco-trafficking guerrillas, and stockpiling weapons - that’s a whole different story.

I really can’t imagine the international community thinks he’s so entertaining anymore. The thing to keep in mind, however, is that he (like many military rulers before him) is creating an external conflict in order to divert attention from an internal one.

Even with oil at $90 a barrel, the state oil company appears to be having alarming cash-flow problems from years of mismanagement. At the same time, food shortages are such that people are getting in fights over milk (video).

This will end badly. The only question is, when.

I remember when I was a conservative attending Hillsdale College. Just budding, I was. We were conservatives, and we read Great Books and took rhetoric classes, and we told ourselves that we thought with our minds and would have none of the mushiness of the hated liberals, who were full of bad arguments and sundry sleaziness.

I’m no longer a conservative, in fact I’m not really anything. But sometimes I look back, look for that classic rhetoric that conservatives - in my day - prided themselves on, and I’m a little shocked. Was it always like this? Or did something change?

Take Jonah Goldberg. He’s come out with a book called - I’m serious here - Liberal Fascism. Just right there in the title, Goldberg has already made an association fallacy and more or less violated Godwin’s Law.

According to a Slate.com review, Goldberg declares Woodrow Wilson to have been the 20th century’s “first fascist dictator,” and then traces that fascist political DNA all the way up through - wait for it - Bill Clinton.

I have this idea that there was an earlier generation of conservatives that liked to wrestle with ideas and have a good, spirited debate that didn’t devolve into this kind of idiocy. A Golden Age, if you will, when we strove to be like William F. Buckley, not Bill O’Reilly.

Sure, looking back into my imagined Golden Age of conservatives, there were plenty of ideas that I now find distasteful. But at least there was a tradition of real thought behind them, perhaps best illustrated by the fact that I’ve managed to think my way out of being a conservative.

Now today’s conservatives – well, they’ve given Goldberg 3.5 stars on Amazon and pushed the book’s ranking up to number 25.

“This is a serious scholarly work, and it deserves to be read and judged as such,” said one reviewer. “Goldberg is attempting to right a historical injustice.”

The human brain is prone to nostalgic misrememberance, but I swear to God, “conservatism” has gone completely off the rails.