I like to figure out the appropriate term for collections of things (a disorganisation of libertarians?), and upon reading the bizarre responses to Dave Cameron’s speech at the Tory Party conference, a ‘credulousness of Conservatives’ came to mind.
The Times writes of the speech, remarkably describing the entire exercise in dissembling as ‘refreshingly spin-free’:
By the time David Cameron got up to give his conference speech yesterday, it had become an awful lot easier to present him as a man of integrity in a world of spin. That was not the main theme of his speech, but it was a clear subtext. The Old Politics is failing, he said. And he explained why: top-down statism has not wrought the improvements that everyone seeks. This was an argument for limited government, not merely another shopping list.
Clearly there must be someone else in the party who just happens to share a name with party leader Dave Cameron, as obviously no one who writes for an august publication like The Times could have mistaken Dave “greener-than-thou we will match Labour’s spending on public services” Cameron for an honest advocate of limited government in any way, shape or form (or in fact a honest advocate of anything other than the notion “Dave Cameron should be Prime Minister”).
Now, if it was in fact the same Dave Cameron who runs the party who said things to indicate he is a supporter of limited government, do you think that maybe, just maybe, he is saying those things not because he believes it but because he is at a conference attended by activists for whom the term “limited government” is not a dirty word? And if so, could he just possibly be saying those things so these activists do not defect to UKIP in disgust or, more likely, spend next election day gardening or playing Halo 3 or just about anything else to deaden the pain rather than vote for someone who has lied and lied and lied to them and who is not in fact a conservative at all? Could he just possibly be saying what they want to hear in the hope they will pretend they never heard him advocate more ‘green’ taxes, sumptuary laws in the form of de facto rationing of air travel for the plebs, more public spending and more regulation, allowing those things to vanish down the ‘memory hole’ because they want to believe their woeful party still stands for limited government regardless of all the evidence to the contrary?
Just askin’.
