Donald Trump may be the face of something, but it's not conservatism

There are two takes on Rush Limbaugh's discussion of Trump's infrastructure-spending intentions that I recommend: Allahpundit's at Hot Air and Patterico's at RedState.

Each of them includes the transcript and even the audio clip, so I needn't reproduce it here.

Patterico's angle is to refute Rush's position with the Frederic Bastiat - Henry Hazlitt unseen-consequences principle. Money taken by government as tax dollars is money not available for private citizens and organizations to freely choose to put it to what the market deems its most productive use.

Allahpundit is more interested in what Squirrel-Hair's lack of ideological mooring portends for right-of-center radio punditry over the next few years:

I think this is what we’re in for from various right-wing media over the next four years: Less advocacy for conservatism and more quasi-neutral “analysis” of Trump’s gambits in order to stay on the audience’s good side. Rush can’t come out strongly for a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill or it’ll shred his conservative cred but he can’t come out strongly against it or else chunks of his audience will run for the reassuring embrace of Sean Hannity. “Analysis” squares the circle.

And thus do commercial considerations insert themselves into what ought to be an arena for defense of immutable principles.

Rush has staked out kind of a weird middle ground between the Kool-Aid terrain occupied by Ingraham and Hannity on the one hand and Levin on the other. The question is going to be how long he can keep up the schtick of "You have to understand, this is bigger than ideology; it's a totally unprecedented phenomenon!" when everybody gets that because it's so obvious.

There's yet another bit of terrain that figures into the present moment, that occupied by the likes of Kurt Schlichter at Townhall. In his latest column, for instance, he says, "[C]onservatives should be smiling because everything is going our way," and cites the undeniably great cabinet and agency appointments to date to make his case. But then waxes Rush-esque just a few paragraphs later when he says of the Carrier deal, "Yeah, I get all the conservative critiques of it, and I agree. But it demonstrates that he intends to do what he promised, and he promised to do some seriously conservative stuff."

So you have this strange position of trying to burnish principled-rightie bona fides, while making room for glaring departures on the part of the GOP standard-bearer.

It all gets weirder still when you throw Sarah Palin's calling out of the Carrier deal as pretty clearly a case of cronyism, and she was one of the original Kool-Aid guzzlers.

One might think those of us who still can't stand Squirrel-Hair would be discouraged, perhaps even nearly as despondent as the unhinged lefties. He is, after all, the face of Republicanism now. Lefty venues such as The New Republic and the New York Times, as well as all the venom-pukers on your Facebook feed, are wasting no time at pointing out the stink of cronyism, targeted economic meddling and heavy-handedness of the Carrier deal, as well as S-H's commencing to conduct foreign policy even as the current administration's diplomatic infrastructure remains the official face of US interaction with the world.

Observers of various stripes are taking note of the degree to which Ivanka has her father's ear, even as her views on the global climate are at odds with his public pronouncements, as well as his reliance on Myron Ebell to handle the EPA's transition. As we know, her positions on "pay equity" and government-mandated family leave are decidedly left of center as well.

It's widely known that she and husband Jared Kushner travel in leftist-bubble circles. And now they are house-hunting in DC.

But, with regard to this site at least, and from what I can tell of the undiminished fighting spirit at other sites, programs and journals, there is a heightened sense that it is up to us to hold before the public something that Rush, and certainly not the Kool-Aid crowd, is not going to give it: basic three-pillared conservatism, the same set of principles that has driven our every keystroke all our opining lives.

There will come a point over the next four years when the mocking by Rush et al of "pointy-headed theorists" will look like the fast train to nowhere, because, as Rush used to know, conservatism is the only approach to culture, public policy and economics that works, whenever tried and to whatever degree.

He may have forgotten this, or chosen to abandon it, but it's still true. And that's all we ever claimed to be peddling here: timeless truth.