The Center of a Meeting of Country-Club Republican Imperialists

Via alicublog, Michael Totten proposes some “centrists” who won’t simply recycle hack talking points. The results are predictably hilarious:

Ann Althouse
Andrew Sullivan
Jeff Jarvis
Matt Welch
Armed Liberal
Megan McArdle
Dean Esmay

Oh, yeah, Ann Althouse–if there’s anything T.V. needs, it’s more right-wingers obsessed with meaningless personality trivia, especially about the Clenis! (I think you can see why Totten–who voted for Ralph Nader (!) because Al Gore was a “blowhard”–would find La Althouse appealing.) What’s particularly striking is that, whether good or bad, more or less Republican hacks, all of these bloggers (well, I don’t know much about “Armed Liberal’s” domestic politics; I have no interest in wading past the highly non-centrist nonsense about how American academics caused 9/11) tend to represent the pro-war/staunchly economically conservative/nominally socially liberal elite consensus that is already grossly overrepresented in the media.

But, of course, the best one is Dean Esmay. Whatever label you choose to attach to, say, crackpot HIV denialism, or believing that anyone who doesn’t think Michael Moore is a fascist is unpatriotic, “centrist” doesn’t really work.

But there’s an explanation. Let’s remember my favorite Esmay quote, “I still believe that George W. Bush was the only progressive liberal running for President in 2000.” If George Bush is a “progressive liberal,” then it’s plausible to argue that Megan McArdle and Glenn Reynolds are “centrists.” Earlier, I think Roy identified the purpose behind this silly exercise of defining reactionaries as non-partisan moderates:

I used to think that Althouse, the Perfesser, and other conservatives denied their orientation because they were ashamed of it, but time has proven that they are strangers to shame. My current operating analysis is that they’re attempting to normalize wing-nuttery — that is, if a popular writer can be identified as “not partisan” though 95% of what he professes is right-wing boilerplate, folks who are new in town may take that to mean that ordinary, untainted-by-politics people are supposed to believe exactly what right-wing political operatives believe.

It’s nice work if you can get it, and you can get it if you lie.

…oh, I had forgtten about this. The unfailingly moderate and centrist Dean Esmay on reporters who uncover illegal activities by the American government: “we should then hang them by the neck until the are dead, dead, dead.” Who else is on Totten’s centrist list, Michael Savage?

…and I should note that I am not saying all these people are wingnuts, or have bad blogs. Welch is not a Republican hack and does interesting work, AI is a perfectly good blog if you’re into complacent conservertarianism, Sullivan can write. But a list of “centrists” this ain’t.