Rise of the X-Cons

from The Nashua Advocate, the best blog you probably aren't reading.

It was really hard to get some snippets that sum up the article nicely, so here's just a bit of a tickler ...

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Neo-conservatives are not "remaking" conservatism, in other words.

They are, quite literally, pooping all over it.

Nor is neo-conservatism generally considered a popular phenomenon in America; few "average" Americans claim to be neo-conservatives, as the designation is largely limited to those in politics, the military, and (in rare instances) the academy.

So how do we term the tens of millions of self-proclaimed "conservatives" who embrace neo-conservatism in their policy positions--as witnessed most recently by the Terri Schiavo affair, which had even former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan calling progressives "lovers of death"--but who demonstrate, nevertheless, an inexplicable empathy for so-called "true conservatism" in their construction of a political self-image?

Well, we can start, improbably enough, with the "X-Games."

That's right, the darling of ESPN in the 21st Century, the so-called "X-Games": an Olympics-sized collection of "extreme sports" which desperately crave mainstream recognition and legitimacy (in many instances, even inclusion into the less-than-extreme, Greek-inspired Olympics) while drawing, in their substance and style, from radical--even extreme--developments in the culture of modern sport.
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http://nashuaadvocate.blogspot.com/2005/03/modern-conservatism-is-dead-to-be.html