A useful distinction, maybe

A reader just wrote to say that he liked my book and identified with a lot of the ideas there, but he was so sick and tired of me criticizing President Bush over the war that he no longer thought of himself as a crunchy con. I responded by saying that that made no sense: there was little or no discussion of Bush in the book, and that my bloviating about Bush and the war here doesn't invalidate the ideas he liked in the book. And though I didn't mention it in my reply to him, I deliberately avoided the war in writing the book, in part because my own views were ambivalent and changing at the time I was writing it, and in part because I know people who share a lot of the same views re "small is beautiful," consumerism's destructive effect on the family, and so forth, who have come to opposite conclusions on the Iraq War. I don't see one's position on Iraq or the Bush presidency as being determinative of how one stands on the kinds of things that define crunchy conservatism.

The reader wrote back and said:

But you can understand, can't you, that a blog titled "Crunchy Cons," run by the author of the book, might speak for all of "us," right?

If not, it might be worth making some sort of distinction on the blog. If that's asking too much, I understand.

I do keep reading the blog; I have it bookmarked. But I do sometimes question why.

Well, if it matters to readers, I don't consider that I am the first or last word on any of this stuff. This is just a blog, not the Crunchy-Con Pravda, laying down the party line. As regular readers know, most of the posts here are about daily news events, and don't really have a lot to do with anything discernibly "crunchy." I'm writing editorials and columns throughout the day as I write this blog, and I usually stop to file a blog item when I've come across something in my work here at the newspaper that struck me as interesting. I try to keep the commentary here a mix of newsy stuff and more offbeat stuff. If you see something especially "crunchy" that you'd like me to consider posting to or commenting on for this site, e-mail it to me.