James Poulos has in the past been, in my mind, one of those all-too-uncommon righties who is actually worth hearing out. You know the kind, or at least rue the rarity -- don't always agree with him, says some truly whacked-out things, but still, not always just regurgitating Rush, Beck, and Newt. I used to check in on the original(?) Postmodern Conservative blog pretty regularly, and I'd also try to remember to look for his posts over at The American Scene.
And then he moved PoMoCo over to First Things, and howl how you will about GUILT BY ASSOCIATION!!!1!, I could not often bring myself to consider worthy any longer someone who would willingly associate himself with the likes of The Anchoress and Hateway Pundit. There is a shortage of time and energy in all of our minds, and we must therefore apply filters, crude though they may sometimes be.
So! Maybe those thought-waves I've been beaming at him ever since he descended into being a part of what someone, I can't remember who, called "that fascist Catholic outfit" have transmogrified him just a bit. Let us pray.
2 comments:
Did you see Edroso's recent post on post on Poulos?
I've never followed Poulos, so it was a surprise to me.
Oh yeah. And of course it had to come about three seconds after I had just finished praising Poulos, didn't it? ;)
In all seriousness, though, I am not dissuaded from labeling JP a reasonable conservative merely because he has some strange views. It's also fair to say (and not to my credit) that if I had only read his post, and not Roy's brilliant dissection of it, I probably wouldn't have thought it was as whacked as Roy showed it was. Instead, I probably would have MEGOed and written it off as "Meh, another Catholic boy has some warped views about teh sexytime," and would have either not read it closely, or would have abandoned it before the end. You know, kind of like I do with Ross Douthat when he goes off on the same subject.
I haven't followed Poulos enough to be familiar with the other examples Roy gives of his hangups, but I have read enough of his views on other things to see him as someone worth paying attention to -- I may not always agree with him, but it's not just the same old talking points, and he doesn't have the standard childish wingnut black/white, left-bad/right-good, with-us-or-against-us way of looking at the world. If nothing else, he'll from time to time cause me to stretch my brain a bit, and I can't ask for anything more than that.
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