Liberal Values Defending Liberty and Enlightened Thought

While I was growing up long before the days of blogs, talk radio, and Fox I regularly read National Review and Human Events. Initially (for a very brief time) I found them to be of interest because they spoke of advocating freedom, and they reported on things which I didn’t read about in the more mainstream newspapers and magazines I read. It didn’t take long, even as a teenager when I began reading these publications, to realize that they spoke of freedom in an Orwellian sense, and the material they reported on was generally either trivial or  probably fictitious. In other words, not all that much has changed in the conservative media.

Despite this revelation, I continued to read the two publications, among many others, for several years as a means to keep up with what those I disagreed with were thinking. Plus back in those days it was far more common than today for conservatives to sometimes have something of value to say. In more recent years I have dropped many of my subscriptions, including to the two conservative magazines, as a variety of views are now easily available on the internet at no charge. This includes both on line versions of magazines and blogs.

It definitely makes sense to read conservative views first hand, even if for no other reason than to know the “enemy.” I could suggest some conservative bloggers, but for some reason those I find to make the most sense have found their popularity in the conservative movement diminish. Conservatives tend to frown up conservative bloggers who write that conservative economic ideas wound up screwing up the economy, and they especially don’t like those who write about how the conservative movement has been taken over by people who are bat-shit crazy.

As my choices for conservatives who are worth reading will not give a good insight into the current conservative movement, I’ll defer these recommendations to a conservative blog. Right Wing News has compiled a list of the 40 Best Conservative Blogs. There’s even some I haven’t read which I’ll have to check out, although I fear I might become disappointed if I go in expecting some sanity. As a quick test, it would be interesting to see how many of these off the wall beliefs, now far too common in the conservative movement, are expressed in them: Support for creationism, opposition to the scientific consensus on climate change, belief that Barack Obama is a Muslim, belief that Obama is not a natural born American citizen, belief that Saddam was involved in 9/11, belief that there was WMD in Iraq which threatened us at the onset of the war, belief that tax cuts always lead to increased revenue, belief that health care reform was a “government takeover of health care,” belief that Sarah Palin is qualified to hold national office, or belief that anything Glenn Beck says can be taken seriously.