I’ve been wondering if I should delete from the subscription bar at my bloglines page the feed for the lewrockwellblogs, nothing wrong with the tedium from its anarcho-libertarian bent — even if I don’t think I’ve pulled anything from it in quite a while, its incessant fandom of Ron Paul has been irking me as a tedium overdone.

Maybe I will, but first I am sidelined by a phrase that one of those people used:

Antiwar Conservative Democrat (and former Republican) Sen. Jim Webb.

The story regards the big hoo-de-hah between Jim Webb and Lindsey Graham over Iraq which has received much attention.  Lindsey Graham should, by all rights, be one of those 40-60 percentilers that makes the difference between a filibusting Republican Party and some measure or other on Iraq (however pathetically weak a resolution it is that brings us to 60) — in the distant recesses of my mind, I remember the Washington Monthly magazine calling him the swing voter of that last Republican Congress — a conservative who bridged some moderate Democratic support.  Never mind all that, he appears to have entrenched himself on this particular issue — and now falls safely on the other side of that 40 percent line — the solid block of Republicans who can be trusted to line up behind Mr. 30 percent approval rating “William Kristol says that History will Vindicate Him” President Bush.
Jim Webb, meanwhile, has as interesting a pedigree as any Senator, and I noted that a pair of commenters from the Reason Magazine and American Conservative magazine high-fived each other at his election victory for holding up a “Libertarian” – “Paleo-Conservative” alliance.  But tricky beast, that Jim Webb.  He is, rhetorically, to my left on economic issues — and I say that noting that he compared our current economic disparity either unfavorably with or a little too one dimensionally with The Gilded Age of the end of the nineteenth century.  The rhetoric makes me question his continued allegiance to Ronald Reagan — used prominently in his Senate election bid, but I suppose I will just have to roll with it — and say that I imagine sometime in the future, the political crosswinds will shift, alliances will change, and he will be “on the other side” again.

It is the Kurt Vonnegut quotation again: “Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.”

But for the moment he isn’t “on the other side”.   At the moment, he is one of the most dynamic of Democratic Senators, and by all rights the point person for the party on Iraq and National Security.  I have not gotten a chance to watch the brohauhau with Lindsey Graham — full of tight-lipped references to their “friendship” and brittle and nasty references to each other’s current state of mind.

Political theater, much needed to keep as aware that the body politic isn’t stifled in the quest to appease the 40-60 percentiles of the Senate.

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