Iain Dale reports that the Metropolitan Police is running the above Google ad. Is there a reward? It’s been a while since I’ve been linked by Michelle Malkin. Maybe I’ll turn her in.

Libertarian Randall Hoven, at American Thinker, sticks up for the social conservative trads.

I agree with him. The threat to liberty these days is not coming from bible thumpers. It’s coming from bien pensant liberals.

Social conservatism is taking a beating lately. Not only did it lose in the recent elections, it is being blamed for the Republican losses. If only the religious right would get off the Republican party’s back, the GOP could win like it is supposed to again. I beg to differ.

I’m anything but a social conservative. In nine presidential elections, I voted Libertarian in six. I am a hard core “limited government” conservative/libertarian; I want government out of my pocket-book and out of my bedroom. Concerning my religion, it’s none of your business, but I’m somewhere in the lapsed-Catholic-deist-agnostic-atheist spectrum; let’s just call it agnostic.

Having said all that, I have no problem with “social conservatives” or the “religious right” and their supposed influence on the Republican party. I base this not on the Bible or historical authority, but on the love of liberty and the evidence of my own eyes.

Who are the true liberty killers?

The most obvious point to me is that it is the do-gooding liberals who are telling us all what we can and can’t do. The religious right usually just wants to be left alone, either to home school, pray in public or not get their children vaccinated with who-knows-what. Inasmuch as the “religious right” wants some things outlawed, they have failed miserably for at least the last 50 years. Abortion, sodomy, and pornography are now all Constitutional rights. However, praying in public school is outlawed, based on that same Constitution.

Just think for a moment about the things you are actually forced to do or are prevented from doing. Seat belts. Motorcycle helmets. Bicycle helmets. Smoking. Gun purchase and ownership restrictions. Mandatory vaccines for your children. Car emissions inspections. Campaign ad and contribution restrictions. Saying a prayer at a public school graduation or football game. Trash separation and recycling. Keeping the money you earned. Gas tax. Telephone tax. Income tax. FICA withholding. Fill in this form. Provide ID.

For the most part, the list just cited is post-1960. Neither Pat Robertson nor James Dobson ever forced any of that on us.

P.J. O’Rourke is bitter about GOP’s recent defeat, and contends that we conservatives have only ourselves to blame.

In the manner of sophisticated libertarians, he blames, firstly, conservatism’s reliance on non-elite Southerners and people of faith. I’m afraid I don’t agree with the we’d-be-winning-if we-just-kept-the-conservative-movement-for-the-Yuppies-like-us theory. We really do need a few more votes to win nationally. I was actually beginning to wonder if he would start complaining about Sarah Palin and marvelling at how articulate and really really deep Barack Obama is.

Still, I think he’s quite right about prominent portions of the movement being dead wrong on immigration. “Keep those hard-working Roman Catholics with strong family values out of here!” Obama carried the Hispanics, despite McCain’s record of sympathy toward illegal immigrants. McCain was obviously severely disadvantaged by the general GOP party line favoring border fences, heavy-handed immigration law enforcement, and deportations.

Despite certain tendencies toward effete Northeastern elitism, P.J. O’Rourke is witty as ever, and does make some good points.

Let us bend over and kiss our ass goodbye. Our 28-year conservative opportunity to fix the moral and practical boundaries of government is gone–gone with the bear market and the Bear Stearns and the bear that’s headed off to do you-know-what in the woods on our philosophy.

An entire generation has been born, grown up, and had families of its own since Ronald Reagan was elected. And where is the world we promised these children of the Conservative Age? Where is this land of freedom and responsibility, knowledge, opportunity, accomplishment, honor, truth, trust, and one boring hour each week spent in itchy clothes at church, synagogue, or mosque? It lies in ruins at our feet, as well it might, since we ourselves kicked the shining city upon a hill into dust and rubble. The progeny of the Reagan Revolution will live instead in the universe that revolves around Hyde Park.

Mind you, they won’t live in Hyde Park. Those leafy precincts will be reserved for the micromanagers and macro-apparatchiks of liberalism–for Secretary of the Department of Peace Bill Ayers and Secretary of the Department of Fairness Bernardine Dohrn. The formerly independent citizens of our previously self-governed nation will live, as I said, around Hyde Park. They will make what homes they can in the physical, ethical, and intellectual slums of the South Side of Chicago.

The South Side of Chicago is what everyplace in America will be once the Democratic administration and filibuster-resistant Democratic Congress have tackled global warming, sustainability, green alternatives to coal and oil, subprime mortgage foreclosures, consumer protection, business oversight, financial regulation, health care reform, taxes on the “rich,” and urban sprawl. The Democrats will have plenty of time to do all this because conservatism, if it is ever reborn, will not come again in the lifetime of anyone old enough to be rounded up by ACORN and shipped to the polling booths.

None of this is the fault of the left. After the events of the 20th century–national socialism, international socialism, inter-species socialism from Earth First–anyone who is still on the left is obviously insane and not responsible for his or her actions. No, we on the right did it. …

Although I must say we’re doing good work on our final task–attaching the garden hose to our car’s exhaust pipe and running it in through a vent window. Barack and Michelle will be by in a moment with some subsidized ethanol to top up our gas tank. And then we can turn the key.

Read the whole thing.

Ross Douthat argues that a more successful McCain campaign with better poll results would have stiffened the spines of those representatives of the center-right punditocracy currently finding all sorts of reasons (“first class temperament”) requiring them to desert the Republican cause and make peace with a Marxist democrat.

Suppose that you accept the most cynical account of, say, Peggy Noonan’s uncertainty about whom to vote for in this election, or Christopher Buckley’s Obama endorsement – that they’re just craven, self-interested bandwagon jumpers who want to keep getting invited to all those swanky cocktail parties I keep hearing about. Suppose that you regard every right-of-center writer – or single-issue fellow traveler with the Bush Republicans, in the case of Christopher Hitchens – who’s publicly hurled brickbats at the McCain campaign as a quisling and a coward, a stooge for liberalism and a rat fleeing a fast-sinking ship. In such circumstances, what’s the best course of action – denouncing the rats, or trying to figure out why the hell the ship is sinking? Even if Brooks and Noonan and Buckley and Dreher and Kathleen Parker and David Frum and Heather Mac Donald and Bruce Bartlett and George Will and on and on – note the ideological diversity in the ranks of conservatives who aren’t Helping The Team these days – are all just snobs and careerists who quit or cavil or cover their asses when the going gets tough and their “seat at the table” is threatened, an American conservative movement that consists entirely of those pundits with the rock-hard testicular fortitude required to never take sides against the family seems like a pretty small tent at this point. And if I were Hanson or Levin or Steyn I’d be devoting a little less time to ritual denunciations of heretics and RINOs, and at least a little more time to figuring out how to build the sort of ship that will make the rats of the DC/NY corridor want to scramble back on board, however much it makes you sick to have them back. Who knows? It might just be the sort of ship that swing-state voters will want to climb on board as well.

Douthat is right in observing that, when you’re winning, the wimps, opportunists, and trimmers have neither need nor incentive to take French leave, but, alas! no political party, no philosophical school of thought can always win. Sometimes fate and circumstances are against you. Sometimes victory in a particular contest, in a particular election year, is impossible. And it is at those unfortunate times that we get to discover that in the contemporary political wars not everyone is another Roland or another Leonidas.

Read the whole thing.

Chris Buckley snidely takes his leave of National Review (and the Conservative Movement), indignantly remarking on the narrowness and intolerance of a Conservatism which prefers moose-hunters to Harvard men, and which has a problem with supporting an ultra-liberal democrat with a closet-full of unsavory radical connections for the White House on the same kind of class consciousness basis that led Dean Acheson to refuse to “turn (his) back on Alger Hiss.”

Within hours of my endorsement appearing in The Daily Beast it became clear that National Review had a serious problem on its hands. So the next morning, I thought the only decent thing to do would be to offer to resign my column there. This offer was accepted—rather briskly!—by Rich Lowry, NR’s editor, and its publisher, the superb and able and fine Jack Fowler. I retain the fondest feelings for the magazine that my father founded, but I will admit to a certain sadness that an act of publishing a reasoned argument for the opposition should result in acrimony and disavowal.

My father in his day endorsed a number of liberal Democrats for high office, including Allard K. Lowenstein and Joe Lieberman. One of his closest friends on earth was John Kenneth Galbraith. …

My point, simply, is that William F. Buckley held to rigorous standards, and if those were met by members of the other side rather than by his own camp, he said as much. My father was also unpredictable, which tends to keep things fresh and lively and on-their-feet. … Finally, and hardly least, he was fun. God, he was fun. He liked to mix it up.

So, I have been effectively fatwahed (is that how you spell it?) by the conservative movement, and the magazine that my father founded must now distance itself from me. But then, conservatives have always had a bit of trouble with the concept of diversity. The GOP likes to say it’s a big-tent. Looks more like a yurt to me.

While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.

So, to paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan: I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me.

Supporting Allard Lowenstein against Nassau County Republican John Wydler, Chris is right, was an irresponsible, un-conservative abberation in which Bill Buckley obviously allowed personal friendship to outweigh principle. His support of Joe Lieberman against the egregious Republican-in-Name-Only Lowell Weicker was, on the other hand, an impeccably sound conservative decision. And Buckley père may have liked John Kenneth Galbraith as a skiing or drinking buddy, but he certainly never endorsed Galbraith’s fallacious economic opinions and pernicious political positions.

Chris shouldn’t be surprised that an October Dolchstoß (“backstab”) in favor of the most radical and exotic democrat ever to threaten the freedom of the American Republic would not cause the gang at the Conservative Movement’s favorite bar to offer to buy him any drinks.

Rich Lowry describes Chris’s resignation offer rather differently, quoting him as promising that were his offer to depart to be accepted, there “would be no hard feelings, only warmest regards and understanding.” Chris’s second Daily Beast column features plenty of hard feelings.

Too bad for us that we’re so narrow-minded that we actually allow mere political ideology to stand in the way of Ivy League Establishment solidarity, Marxists included, against those uncouth Alaskan gentiles.

Christopher Buckley has endorsed Obama.

This from the son of the man who wrote: “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”

Sharing: A lesson on human nature

I was talking to a friend of mine’s little girl the other day. I asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up and she replied, “I want to be President!” Both of her parents are liberal democrats and were standing there. So then I asked her, “If you were President what would be the first thing you would do?”

She replied, “I’d give houses to all the homeless people.”

“Wow – what a worthy goal.” I told her, “You don’t have to wait until you’re President to do that. You can come over to my house and mow, pull weeds, and sweep my porch, and I’ll pay you $50. Then I’ll take you over to the grocery store where this homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward a new house.”

Since she is only 6, she thought that over for a few seconds. While her Mom glared at me, she looked me straight in the eye and asked, “Why doesn’t the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50?”

And I said, “Welcome to the Republican Party.”

Her folks still aren’t talking to me.

James Kirchik, a liberal writing at the libertarian DoubleThink, describes undergraduate political life at Yale, the parties currently making up the Yale Political Union, and winds up ruefully paying tribute to an organization I belong to: The Party of the Right (POR).

Mr. Kirchik is misinformed on one detail. The current Conservative Party was formed in the 1990s by a gentleman who had been defeated for a second time seeking election as Chairman of the Party of the Right. The name “Conservative Party” was technically vacant, since the real Conservative Party, tracing its history back to Union’s 1930s beginning, had in a moment of 1980s flaccidity changed its name to the “Independent Party,” having become ashamed even to be called Conservative.

The Party of the Right, early in its history, chose to create a cult of devotion to the memory of King Charles I of England, on the basis of his martrydom for the simultaneous causes of Legitimacy and Liberty. The POR Chairman wears a medal commemorating Charles I, and POR toasting sessions (a formal drinking bout held at Mory’s) are opened by the Chairman reciting Charles I’s scaffold speech, which, in part, goes:

For the people. And truly I desire their Liberty and Freedom as much as anybody whomsoever. But I must tell you, that their Liberty and Freedom, consists in having of Government; those Laws, by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having share in government, that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are clean different things, and therefore until they do that, I mean, that you do put the people in that liberty as I say, certainly they will never enjoy themselves.

Sirs, It was for this that now I am come here. If I would have given way to an Arbitrary way, for to have all Laws changed according to the power of the Sword, I needed not to have come here; and therefore, I tell you, (and I pray God it be not laid to your charge) That I Am the Martyr of the People.

It’s easy for the average student to poke fun at the bow-tied, intellectual conservative. The conservatives have fewer (though closer) friends; they are not members of the once-vaunted secret societies (with few exceptions, visible campus conservatives have been unofficially barred from Yale’s secret societies); they are not characters on the campus party scene, opting instead for “game nights” with their fellow party members. But, I suspect, many Yale students know, deep down, that they are missing out on something by avoiding the political union and its misfits. Amidst all of the average Yalie’s resume-whoring extra-curricular activities, hard-partying, and frantic searching for top internships and jobs, the intellectual life they had hoped to find at Yale, indeed, that they assumed would just appear the minute they walked through its ivy gates, proves ever elusive. Having become pre-professional training colleges, the modern liberal arts university is simply not what it appears to be in the movies and novels of old. Meanwhile the right-wing subculture at Yale has become the bastion of intellectual life on campus. At the PU, I always knew that getting into a debate with a Tory, Con, or a member of the POR would be more challenging than any classroom discussion. Yale students suspect that this is more or less the truth of the matter. They just wish it weren’t so.

As the POR chairman said in a recent YPU organizational meeting speech, “Getting drunk and hungover at every opportunity may be intense, but without something more, you’ll wake up one day and find yourself as empty as the keg by your head. You may find something intense in varsity sports, musical organizations, secret societies, and debating clubs, but make sure that your college experience informs your life. You need authenticity.”

I will forever remember my days in the Yale Political Union with great fondness. There really is no body like it in the world. I know that new characters will replace the old ones, but the PU will remain its lively, irascible old self. And while I will not soon be joining any secretive conservative organizations, I will, at the very least, have a greater appreciation for Charles the Martyr.

Hat tip to Matthias Storme.

The Washington Post tells us that liberals are suffering from SCOTUS envy.

It could be seen as the sincerest form of flattery: Ask some activists on the left the kind of Supreme Court justice they would like to see a President Obama appoint, and the name you hear most is the same justice they most often denounce.

They want their own Antonin Scalia. Or rather, an anti-Scalia, an individual who can easily articulate a liberal interpretation of the Constitution, offer a quick sound bite and be prepared to mix it up with conservative activists beyond the marble and red velvet of the Supreme Court. …

as the Supreme Court takes its traditional spot in the background of the presidential campaign, there is a longing on the left for a justice who would energize not only the court’s liberal wing, but also the debate over interpreting the Constitution.

“Someone with vision,” said Doug Kendall, who recently helped found a new liberal think tank called the Constitutional Accountability Center. “Someone who looks hard at the text and history of the Constitution, as Justice Scalia does, and articulates a very clear idea of how that text points to liberal and progressive outcomes.”

“It is a court with no true liberal on it, the most conservative court in 75 years,” said Geoffrey Stone, a law professor at the University of Chicago, where Obama once taught constitutional law. “What we call liberals on this court are moderates, or moderate liberals, if you want to get refined about it.”

Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and David Souter aren’t liberals?

Heck, liberals don’t even need to win presidential elections to get liberal Supreme Court Justices appointed. Conservative Republican presidents will appoint some for them.

Speaking more seriously, though, I think our friends on the left are missing the point. They are on the defensive on the Court, not really because of a paucity of kindred spirits, but because they have, for decades, been losing the battle of ideas in jurisprudence and Constitutional Law at the law schools and in the law journals.

Face it, what liberals really want is a return to an uncritical era of legal intuitions, emanations, and emotional sloganeering. They want the William O. Douglas and Earl Warren kind of “no brainer” liberal court decisions which merely use a few orotund generalities to raise the consensus of the liberal elite to the status of law of the land.

Marc Thiessen reminds the media and the liberals why the late Senator Jesse Helms will live on in the nation’s memory, and the world’s.

With the passing of Sen. Jesse Helms, the media have demonstrated one final time that they never fully understood the power or impact of this great man. Consider, for example, The Post’s obituary of Helms; here are some things you would not learn about his life and legacy by reading it:

As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Helms led the successful effort to bring Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into the NATO alliance. He secured passage of bipartisan legislation to protect our men and women in uniform from the International Criminal Court. He won overwhelming approval for his legislation to support the Cuban people in their struggle against a tyrant. He won majority support in the Senate for his opposition to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. He helped secure passage of the National Missile Defense Act and stopped the Clinton administration from concluding a new anti-ballistic missile agreement in its final months in office — paving the way for today’s deployment of America’s first defenses against ballistic missile attack. He helped secure passage of the Iraq Liberation Act, which expressed strong bipartisan support for regime change in Baghdad. He secured broad, bipartisan support to reorganize the State Department and bring much-needed reform to the United Nations, and he became the first legislator from any nation to address the U.N. Security Council — a speech few in that chamber will forget.

Watching this record of achievement unfold, columnist William Safire wrote in 1997: “Jesse Helms, bete noire of knee-jerk liberals . . . is turning out to be the most effectively bipartisan chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee since Arthur Vandenberg. . . . Let us see if he gets the credit for statesmanship that he deserves from a striped-pants establishment.” This weekend, we got our answer. …

What made Helms stand out was his willingness to stand up for his beliefs before they were widely held — even if it meant challenging those closest to him. In 1985, his dear friend Ronald Reagan was preparing for his first summit with Mikhail Gorbachev when a Ukrainian sailor named Miroslav Medvid twice jumped off a Soviet ship into the Mississippi River seeking political asylum. The Soviets insisted that Medvid had accidentally fallen off — twice. The State Department did not want an international incident on the eve of the summit. But Helms believed it was wrong to send a man back behind the Iron Curtain — no matter the cost to superpower diplomacy. He tried to block the ship’s departure by requiring the sailor to appear before the Senate Agriculture Committee, which he chaired then — and he had the subpoena delivered to the ship’s unwitting captain in a carton of North Carolina cigarettes.

Despite Helms’s efforts, the ship was allowed to leave for the Soviet Union with the Ukrainian sailor aboard. Miroslav Medvid was not heard from again until 15 years later, when he came to Washington to visit the man who fought so hard for his freedom. I was working at the time on Helms’s Foreign Relations Committee staff and witnessed this emotional meeting. Yes, Medvid told Helms, he had been trying to escape — that was why he joined the Merchant Marine in the first place. When he was returned to the Soviet Union, he said, he was incarcerated in a mental hospital for the criminally insane. The KGB tried to drug him, but a sympathetic nurse injected the drugs into his mattress. Eventually he was released; today he is a parish priest in his native village in Ukraine.

In the course of dozens of interrogations, he told Helms, “the KGB didn’t fulfill its desire about what they wanted to do with me. They were afraid of something,” he said, “and now I know what they were afraid of.” They were afraid of Jesse Helms.

President Bush had it right when he said on Friday that “from Central America to Central Europe and beyond, people remember: In the dark days when the forces of tyranny seemed on the rise, Jesse Helms took their side.”

Women’s Wear Daily profiles the Republican Party’s female Celtic bard, noting that she has recently developed a certain cross-over appeal.

Ordinarily, Noonan loves giving interviews. She particularly loves boys with political roundtables, and boys with political roundtables love her back. George Stephanopoulos, Chris Matthews and the late Tim Russert have all invited Noonan on air repeatedly, partly because she is a good counterpoint to people on the left and partly because she is reliably theatrical and can be counted on to flatter her host. Nearly any time a question is directed at her, she will turn her head slightly, look off into the distance and do what might be described as a long-studied blink, followed by the signature Noonan double-nod of agreement. It’s a dramatic gesture that says that her host is so unbelievably smart he’s caused Noonan to consider, for the first time ever, something that is, in fact, her job to consider all day long. Then comes her response, which more often than not begins with a sigh and is then followed by a Dale Carnegie-esque incantation of the host’s name. Such as, “Here’s the thing, Chris” or “I’ll tell you the truth, George.” As if Noonan and he are best, best friends and she is going to tell him (and the whole audience) a big secret. “It’s full-body communicating,” says Stephanopoulos. …

in 2005, Noonan broke with President George W. Bush’s administration over the Iraq war, among other things, and it gave her an air of cross-partisan credibility going into the current presidential season. Then, as Clinton stumbled in the Democratic primaries, Noonan found herself being embraced by an unlikely coalition of Obama supporters and disaffected Republicans to whom she was no longer a boilerplate conservative, but an iconoclast who’d turned on President Bush and been vindicated by anti-Clinton sentiment that was growing among Democrats. What’s more, being a woman gave Noonan a freedom to write critically about Clinton with little risk of being labeled sexist by the senator’s supporters.

“With Peggy Noonan, not only did I share many of her views about the election, I felt she was coming at it in a fair-minded way,” says New York Magazine columnist and Obama supporter Kurt Andersen. “It wasn’t like Bill Kristol, who you know what he’s going to say before he says it.”

“This moment was made for her,” Stephanopoulos says by phone. “She has a special feel for Hillary, though I’m sure it’s not one Clinton supporters always appreciate. And she’s had tremendous insight into what has been a troubled period for the Republican party. It gave her an opportunity to show some independence.””This moment was made for her.­­”— George StephanopoulosOr, as William Greider of the left-wing staple The Nation puts it: “She’s come face-to-face with what happened to the Republican party and acknowledged it rather than pretending it’s not so or blaming the Democrats. I think she’s terrific.”

Perhaps it isn’t surprising that a sizeable chunk of the left eventually fell in love with (or at least got a crush on) Noonan

And, perhaps predictably, some of Noonan’s critics already are predicting the end of her comeback. Last week, the political blog Wonkette ran a post about her first post-primary election column, saying: “Our girlfriend Peggy Noonan has been more enjoyable than usual this year, as a tragically drawn-out Democratic primary battle provided her with endless opportunities to touch herself while Barack Obama spoke pretty things….Now, that tortured eloquence has vanished.”

Not so fast.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Neal Boortz, a conservative AM talk radio host (whose program I wish were featured on my local station) says: This speech has never been delivered at a college or a university. It was written to protest the fact that such an invitation has never been offered!

Now, I realize that most of you consider yourselves Liberals. In fact, you are probably very proud of your liberal views. You care so much. You feel so much. You want to help so much. After all, you’re a compassionate and caring person, aren’t you now? Well, isn’t that just so extraordinarily special. Now, at this age, is as good a time as any to be a Liberal; as good a time as any to know absolutely everything. You have plenty of time, starting tomorrow, for the truth to set in. Over the next few years, as you begin to feel the cold breath of reality down your neck, things are going to start changing pretty fast .. including your own assessment of just how much you really know.

So here are the first assignments for your initial class in reality: Pay attention to the news, read newspapers, and listen to the words and phrases that proud Liberals use to promote their causes. Then compare the words of the left to the words and phrases you hear from those evil, heartless, greedy conservatives. From the Left you will hear “I feel.” From the Right you will hear “I think.” From the Liberals you will hear references to groups –The Blacks, The Poor, The Rich, The Disadvantaged, The Less Fortunate. From the Right you will hear references to individuals. On the Left you hear talk of group rights; on the Right, individual rights.

That about sums it up, really: Liberals feel. Liberals care. They are pack animals whose identity is tied up in group dynamics. Conservatives and Libertarians think — and, setting aside the theocracy crowd, their identity is centered on the individual.

Liberals feel that their favored groups have enforceable rights to the property and services of productive individuals. Conservatives (and Libertarians, myself among them I might add) think that individuals have the right to protect their lives and their property from the plunder of the masses.

In college you developed a group mentality, but if you look closely at your diplomas you will see that they have your individual names on them. Not the name of your school mascot, or of your fraternity or sorority, but your name. Your group identity is going away. Your recognition and appreciation of your individual identity starts now.

If, by the time you reach the age of 30, you do not consider yourself to be a libertarian or a conservative, rush right back here as quickly as you can and apply for a faculty position. These people will welcome you with open arms. They will welcome you, that is, so long as you haven’t developed an individual identity. Once again you will have to be willing to sign on to the group mentality you embraced during the past four years.

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.