Could somebody send this to the Boy-King?

As it happens I don't know the little twerp's Prime Minister's e-mail address, so I have to ask other people to send this on. By this, I mean Roger Kimball's excellent article in which he compares Rick Perry, Governor of Texas and possible candidate for the position of Republican challenger next year, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a man who has caused more trouble in modern history than almost anyone else without ever dirtying his hands.

To start with, Dr Kimball points out:

Here’s an statistic worth pondering: 45 percent of net U.S. job creation in the last two years comes from Texas.

Yes, Texas: the state that is the poster child for right-wingery, the state with no state income tax whose population is growing at about 1000 per day (see a connection?) while bankrupt behemoths like California are bleeding jobs and people.

There are a handful of other places in the U.S. where job creation is rife. One of them is Washington, D.C., where an exploding government bureaucracy has also led to the creation of many jobs.

Many public-sector, i.e., tax-payer-funded jobs, that is. The jobs in Texas are overwhelmingly private-sector, i.e., wealth-creating jobs.

Governor Perry has, apparently, called for Texans and, in particular, those who create jobs in the private sector and make Texas such a rich and attractive state, to stop apologizing for wanting to stop the "entitlement mentality".

Sounds good to me. It is the mentality that is the problem, the notion that somehow or other one is entitled to some sort of a hand-out and if anybody suggests otherwise, they are evil, satanic and generally unpleasant. It is, according to some people, "fascist" to suggest that people who cannot afford to rent or buy expensive accommodation should not do so but buy something cheaper rather than demand money from the state to make up the difference.

All that is by the by. What I should like somebody to drum into the Boy-King and, indeed, other politicians who profess to be Conservatives, is the following:

We do not yet know whether Rick Perry will be running for president. I hope he does. He would inject a few red corpuscles into the mix. And his acknowledgment that it is pointless, indeed counterproductive, for conservatives to cater to liberals accords with Dr. Kimball’s first rule of political strategy:

Conservatives do not win elections by pretending to be liberals.

It is a curious fact, well worth pondering, that the converse is not true: conservatives do not win elections by pretending to be liberals, but liberals often win elections by pretending to be conservatives.

Got that? Conservatives do not win elections by pretending to be soft leftie liberals (in the modern American sense of the word, which is, in fact, highly illiberal).