Larison and Dan Shelley

Never thought you'd see those names with "and" between them, eh?

Here's the pertinent Larison cite:

Regardless of how one views Sarah Palin herself, the phenomenon of enthusiasm for Palin, like the grassroots mobilization for Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul we saw in the primaries, shows the powerful hunger in Middle America for someone to speak for them and defend their interests.

And here's the pertinent Shelley cite:

But the key reason talk radio succeeds is because its hosts can exploit the fears and perceived victimization of a large swath of conservative-leaning listeners.

It is interesting that Larison is flogging the (R) Party Poohbahs and Shelley is flogging Sykes--who often is a spokesman for the (R) Party Poohbahs.

Sykes would not be too pleased, I think, with the balance of Larison's column--so since Charlie took the week off, I'll give you a flavor:

On certain matters of policy, particularly concerning foreign policy and civil liberties, populist dissident conservatives are today at odds with most conservatives' views, but they have far more in common with them than "reformists" in their shared opposition to mass immigration, legal abortion, expansion of government and, most recently, the massive government intervention in the financial sector. The populists have also long anticipated popular dissatisfaction with the current "free trade" regime, and have advanced arguments against corporate power and collusion between corporations and government that are not only consistent with free market principles but which also resonate with the electorate far beyond the right.

We have often noted that the Free Trade bunch, of which Charlie is a part, are wrong in their doctrinaire stridency. Declaring that manufacturing is "so 19th Century" does not comport with the reality that manufacturing is very-much 21st Century--in China, anyway. And China has all our money, folks...

I suppose it took the collapse of the financial system to demonstrate that basing an economy on financial wizardry is not exactly prudent, but before you jump in and assert that this demands a bailout of GM, recall that GM is also losing a ton of money on financial "wizardry."