I Have Trouble Believing

Anyone's this stupid:

"I always listen to Mark Levin while making Friday night dinner ... Funnily enough, he has explained just what it is community organizers do. Advocating, for instance, for affordable housing for the poor - the poor who traditionally rent, because they are bad loan risks. The day that reasoning by banks was junked as "racist," was the day this crisis became a possibility.," - Lisa Schiffren, NRO.

The biases are hanging out all over the place -- notice how Schiffren conflates "poor" with "racist": can we tell where her head is at? And also, the poor being "bad loan risks" who "traditionally rent." Has anyone told Schiffren that "affordable housing" includes Section 8 and other rentals?

And she's obviously just not very smart.

All that evolution gone to waste.

At least Andrew Sullivan was perceptive enough to realize Lisa Schiffren isn't really on this planet. But then, he doesn't tend to spend a lot of time here, either. This is how Sullivan's version of "conservatism" plays out in the real world:

And the government never told them they couldn’t. Wall Street is to blame for giving these people these loans, but no one is ever forced to take out a bad load they cannot pay.

"The government never told them they couldn't." I guess along the DC/P-Town axis, it's the role of government to tell the little people what they can and cannot do. Funny -- in spite of Sullivan's many protestations that he's a "classical" conservative and is repelled by what "conservatism" has become, he starts to sound more and more like -- well, any other self-styled establishment aristocrat, I guess.

John Amato rips him a new one for his performance on Real Time:

Andrew Sullivan has been conned by a fictitious notion of what conservatism really is. He states his Utopian vision of conservatism, but leaves out the part where conservatives want to deregulate everything and get rid of oversight and government so they can reap a magical harvest of cash like they have been doing during the entire Bush administration. Now we are seeing the results of conservatism. It’s a failure. Does Sully really believe that conservatism exists without the fat cats expanding their pie of wealth in America to 1920’s or pre-New Deal proportions? They’ve been trying to undo the New Deal ever since it was instituted and by the way which brought the country back from the brink of destruction.

If you visit here regularly, it's no secret to you that I think Sullivan is a shallow thinker and inclined to favor theory over reality. I am, however, usually kinder about it than Amato is here.

Note: Sullivan also has a clip from the show, but it doesn't deal with that part at all. Read Amato's post -- it's great.