ok maybe two months is too long

This blogging thing is harder to get round to than I previously imagined.

I just finished "The Family", which was the sort of pretty good book that makes you wish for a better one. It offered another perspective on something I've been thinking for a long time: corruption, among modern conservatives, has been considerably displaced by a sort of perfect confluence of interests. If you really, truly, religiously believe that what's good for Walmart is good for America, the money they give you isn't quite a bribe. Sharlet writes of an early Christian-right politician,

"Langlie didn't so much end corruption as legalize it. Langlie wasn't opposed to a government organized around the interests of the greedy; he just didn't want to have to break the law to serve them..."

The philosophical (if you can call it that) merger of business interests, Christianity, and liking war a lot is the defining characteristic of modern conservatism, and it's a very strange mix indeed...