Bill Whittle certainly doesn't need any more blogosphere linkers (SDB is also in this boat) so I'll refrain from discussing / reacting to his whole, latest spiel.   BUT, there is one passage in it that hit one of my fav soapboxes perfectly - the war within the Right:

They, like me, call themselves conservatives, but we are indeed a new breed: pro-choice, pro-gay, vigorous defenders of equality of race, religion, gender and sexual orientation. We’re big on freedom and big on responsibility.

The left hates us. We are harder to attack than the racist, homophobic, misogynists that they formerly could comfortably lambaste as right-wingers. (And they deserved to be lambasted, by the way – and I’m not even sure what lambasting is, but it does sound nasty and severe.)

Some of them sneer at people like us and call us RINO’s: Republicans In Name Only, which seems to indicate to me that they can not conceive of a Republican who is not a racist, homophobic, Christian Fundamentalist. I call these people DIMWIT’s: Democrats Intentionally Misusing Words to Invert the Truth.

Great stuff!  The rest of Bill's essay - as is the case of all of his work - is worth a read with a nice hot cup of tea and a few moments of unbroken seated time.    The topic this time is Responsibility.

---

UPDATE: Great post from Jane Galt / Megan McArdle about the dual Republican Libertarian / Social Conservative constituencies vs. the Dems:

The Republicans only have two groups to please: social conservatives, and fiscal conservatives. Fiscal conservatives will, by and large, allow you to throw a bone to the social conservatives so long as you do it somewhere the fiscal conservatives don't have to look at, such as prisons and homeless shelters, or small towns in Alabama. The small towns in Alabama, so long as they are left alone and not asked to celebrate gay wedding ceremonies next to the creche in the town square, will generally leave the fiscal conservatives to their own devices except during the annual farm-subsidy festival. These two groups do not agree, but there are only two of them, and there are enough issues on which they do agree that they can generally carve out a reasonably coherent platform. (Reasonably coherent, that is, for American politics). And because their members often shade from one group to the next (such as a near relative who is for gay rights, but against gay marriage, and generally fiscally conservative, but in favor of a Medicare drug bill), there is some tolerance in the party for dissent from the platform.

---