A new kind of conservative

It'll be interesting to see just how conservative some of these new Democratic congresspersons will be. Jim Webb, the newly-elected senator from Virginia, may be a Democrat now but hasn't always been. Webb has a column in the Wall Street Journal's online Opinion Journal, of all places, in which he attacks the conservatism of the current government: Class Struggle. Says Webb:

America's top tier has grown infinitely richer and more removed over the past 25 years. It is not unfair to say that they are literally living in a different country.
...Despite the vaunted all-time highs of the stock market, wages and salaries are at all-time lows as a percentage of the national wealth. At the same time, medical costs have risen 73% in the last six years alone.
...A troubling arrogance is in the air among the nation's most fortunate. Some shrug off large-scale economic and social dislocations as the inevitable byproducts of the "rough road of capitalism."
...American workers have a chance to be heard in ways that have eluded them for more than a decade...

Flank Two Position, from a Tennessee blogger who claims to be a conservative, is doing a series called 'Conservative Appreciation Week'. Worth a read, especially for the analysis of positions on foreign policy, the online gambling ban, and the like.
On that gambling ban:

This hasn't really hurt anyone to any degree even approaching a need (or even a desire) for government action, and is in fact a personal choice that people make for themselves. But, hey, we're "conservatives," right? We love the government! And anyway, as we all know, the Bible says gambling is wrong. Well, it says it somewhere.

Foreign policy:

It used to be that conservatives always had one card we could always play. Oh sure, we wanted the poor to starve, the homeless to keep being homeless, and public schools to collapse, but everyone still knew that when it came to keeping things in order overseas and keeping the bad guys at bay, that the conservatives were the ones to do it.

Don't miss the terrorism chronology here:

July 23, 2004 -- Earl Stanton of Passalong, Nebraska tells wife that it just occurred to him that we are still in Afghanistan. "I thought that was over," Earl says to his wife.
...October 2004 -- In his first debate with John Kerry, President Bush seems only dimly aware that there's even a war going on.
...October 7, 2005 -- Donald Rumsfeld personally waterboards a Pentagon tour guide just to see what all the fuss is about.
...And, well, here we are in late 2006, over five years after 9/11. What do we have? Well, we are still in Afghanistan and as far as anyone seems to know Osama bin Laden is still at large. Let's check out the Axis of Evil, shall we? Iraq remains a mess.

(Via Knox Views.)