The Country Thinker

This fea­ture is intended to pro­vide a lit­tle lev­ity at the end of the work week, but will fail mis­er­ably at that objec­tive today.

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Andrew Bre­it­bart died unex­pect­edly yes­ter­day, and the news hit me a bit hard. He was 43, and yes­ter­day was my first as a 44-​​year-​​old. I’m not old enough for peo­ple my age dying to have become commonplace.

Any­how, the Wall Street Jour­nal pub­lished an excerpt from his book Right­eous Indig­na­tion: Excuse Me While I Save the World in its Notable & Quotable sec­tion, and he expressed the same sen­ti­ment about his polit­i­cal involve­ment as I feel about mine. As I explained dur­ing my talk to the North Cen­tral Ohio Con­ser­v­a­tives last night, I’m a guy who trea­sures anonymity and doesn’t like pol­i­tics, yet I’m excited about every chance to intro­duce myself to new peo­ple and talk politics…

Bre­it­bart explains how this can hap­pen, although I would add “Bush,” “Rom­ney,” and “Fox News” to the list of culprits.

Make no mis­take: Amer­ica is in a media war. It is an exten­sion of the Cold War that never ended but shifted to an elec­tronic front. The war between free­dom and sta­tism ended geo­graph­i­cally when the Berlin Wall fell. But the exis­ten­tial bat­tle never ceased.

When the Soviet Union dis­in­te­grated, the bat­tle sim­ply took a dif­fer­ent form. Instead of mis­siles the new weapon was lan­guage and edu­ca­tion, and the inter­na­tional left had suc­cess­fully con­structed a global infra­struc­ture to get its mes­sage out.

Schools. News­pa­pers. Net­work news. Art. Music. Film. Television.…

If the polit­i­cal left weren’t so joy­less, humor­less, intru­sive, tax­ing, over­tax­ing, anar­chis­tic, con­trol­ling, rud­der­less, chaos-​​prone, pedan­tic, unre­al­is­tic, hyp­o­crit­i­cal, clue­less, polit­i­cally cor­rect, angry, cruel, sanc­ti­mo­nious, ret­ribu­tive, redis­trib­u­tive, intolerant—and if the polit­i­cal left weren’t hell-​​bent on expan­sion of said unpleas­ant­ness into all aspects of my family’s life—the truth is, I would not be in your life.

If the Demo­c­ra­tic Party were run by Joe Lieber­man and Evan Bayh, if it had the slight­est ves­tige of JFK and Henry “Scoop” Jack­son, I wouldn’t be on the polit­i­cal map.

If the Amer­i­can media were run by biased but not evil Tim Russerts and David Brink­leys, I wouldn’t have joined the fight.…

If America’s pop-​​cultural ambas­sadors like Alec Bald­win and Janeane Garo­falo didn’t come back from their for­eign trips to tell us how much they hate us, if my pay cable didn’t high­light a com­edy show every week that called me a racist for embrac­ing con­sti­tu­tional prin­ci­ples and lim­ited gov­ern­ment, I wouldn’t be at Tea Par­ties scream­ing my love for this great, char­i­ta­ble, and benev­o­lent country.

I am a reluc­tant cul­tural warrior.

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Have a nice week­end if you so choose.