I’m not really up to the task of dissecting Jeff’s 1,200-word post about me. His grasp of English syntax is shaky; his sentiments, hysterical; his understanding of history, cartoonish. For him Gerald Ford and Ted Heath are Marlovian stage villains rather than real persons. He thinks that American conservatism is synonymous with a kind of triumphalist (indeed quasi-religious) moderate classical liberalism that flourished briefly in the 1980s. For him anyone whose opinions were formed in a different political or cultural context is, quite simply, an apostate. Ditto anyone more interested in getting things done than in emotional uplift. Indeed Jeff thinks that I am not “conservative” (or rather, in his characteristically original approach to English usage, “Conservative”) because I do not agree with him that spasmodic gestures are the be-all and end-all of politics. This is absurd, not least because there are many issues (immigration comes to mind) on which I am very obviously to his right. Suffice it to say that conservatism is not shock-jock talk radio to liberalism’s NPR, nor is it simply a matter of asking, “What would Reagan do?”