Actually, it’s only common in Christian cemeteries. You won’t find a cross in the resting places of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, or Hindus, Jacobi notes, adding “How did this man ever get a reputation as an intellectually respectable conservative judge?”

One Republican I know suggested [ed - Why is this anonymously sourced? Isn't she suggesting this?] that actor Gary Sinise might be our savior. According to news reports, he’s part of an underground group of conservatives in Hollywood—an act of bravery in itself. His stated belief in American exceptionalism might end up being a powerful contrast to Obama’s “American apologist” mantra. The natural strengths that an actor brings to politics would come in handy to anyone going up against Obama in 2012.

It’s not “according” to anything. Sinise is pretty open about his conservatism. Simply by writing this in the Daily Beast, Wallace has probably gotten the ball rolling on Sinise getting asked more about his politics, and it will be interesting to see whether he agrees that “American exceptionalism” means “never acknowledging other countries’ political complaints about the United States to get diplomatic favors from them.”

“The government is going to get the money back,” said Moore. “I’m not sure how, because there are real constitutional problems with some things that are being talked about, like a punitive tax on the people who took this money. It might be taken through lawsuits.”

Moore did say that the AIG bonuses were undeserved. “How can you pay bonuses to employees of a company that lost $150 billion?” he asked. “They should have lost those bonuses based on their peformance. I don’t have problem with bonuses, and I don’t have a problem with high corporate salaries, but two groups of people have been looted here — the shareholders and the taxpayers.”

1.) James S. Robbins, “Giving Up on Guantánamo” (National Review, 1/23/09)
A representative take, from the right, on the closing of Gitmo as “domestic political grandstanding, and a present to the terrorists and their sympathizers, who can claim victory over the United States.”

2.) Dick Morris, “The Obama Presidency: Here Comes Socialism” (The Hill, 1/21/09)
A good sum-up of the most hair-pulling conservative fears about the new president.

3.) Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), “A Jobs Plan That Will Work” (The State, 1/22/09)
An economic program from the hard-right senator.

4.) Michael Gerson, “Two Faces of Obamania” (The Washington Post, 1/23/09)
The former Bush speechwriter expresses outrage at giddy enthusiasm for the new president.

5.) Daniel McCarthy, “Getting Reagan Right” (The American Conservative, 1/26/09 issue)
An argument against mindless worship of the ex-president, and for some historical understanding.

6.) John Ridley, “PC Whiners Aside, Downey Jr. Deserves His Oscar Nod” (Big Hollywood, 1/23/09)
A compelling argument for Tropic Thunder’s acting nomination.

7.) Abigail Thernstrom, “One Journey Ends” (The New York Post, 1/21/09)
The conservative civil rights historian credits Obama with ending the modern age of racial grievance.

We do not have a President-elect that loves this country, or one that grew up in America, that cherishes the constitution, that plays it straight. The President elect is an internationalist, not an America firster.

Look, let’s leave aside the way Geller (accidentally?) accused herself of sympathizing with the Nazis in World War II. Her real worry is that President-elect Barack Obama is a left-wing radical who—according to some!—might be the love-child of Malcolm X. Back in October she posted a periphrastic “guest post” that argued this, before updating the post to clarify matters.

I posted it because the writer did a spectacular job documenting Obama’s many connections with the Far Left. The Malcolm X claim is one minor part of this story, and was of interest to me principally as part of the writer’s documentation that Stanley Ann Dunham could not have been where the Obama camp says she was at various times.

She? She’s perfectly reasonable. Apart from her demand that Obama release his birth certificate to prove he was born in Hawaii and that his father wasn’t Malcolm X.

Imagine if there is something on that birth certificate that disqualifies Obama from the office of the President.  What are you going to do? Start a civil war? There will be blood in the streets you try to enforce the rule of law.

Pictured above: Geller with former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton.

Sarah Palin’s saccharine shtick … candy-coated conventional Republican ideas with a bright red culture-war gloss. Palinism co-opts and deflects legitimate populist anger by allowing its adherents to hate elites without really challenging the system. A true conservative populism would not tolerate an arrangement in which the few profit at the expense of the many – which, no matter how many flags she waves or hockey games she attends, is all Palin offers.

Dreher, instead, sees the right reviving itself as a “populist,” anti-Wall Street movement, and holds up the bookish paleoconservative Caleb Stengell, a newly-elected district attorney, as an example. Over at RedState, Warner Todd Huston waves this off.

The conservative grassroots will tend to focus on the folks farther down the line from corporations. This focus won’t be a populist revolt against corporations, but rather a shift in focus that doesn’t necessarily make corporations and Wall Street into an enemy in the sort of adversarial process that populist movements always seem to fall into. In fact, if any groups become the center of conservative grassroots anger it will be the Old Media and liberals.

That’s totally unconvincing—that’s what the Right has been definining itself against since 1933 or thereabouts, and that’s the attitude it’s had towards business since roughly 1979. Since then, the American people have warmed back up to redistributive liberalism (or don’t you remember the 2005 Social Security fight?) and “Old Media” has becoming less and less powerful. I don’t know if Dreher is right, but at least he’s looking at different models of conservatism instead of repackaging some cant.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (Flickr: Tom LeGro, NewsHour)

The populist hero was born on a small farm not far from the Canadian border. As a boy, he scraped together money by raising chickens and managing a grocery store. He then worked his way through an unprestigious law school, and enlisted in the Marines to fight for his country.

My doctrine, the young Republican senator liked to say, “is Americanism with its sleeves rolled up.” Given his background, he said he identified with “real people” from rural areas and small towns “who are the heart and soul and soil of America.” He vowed to defend them against “the bright young men who are born with silver spoons in their mouth” who were “selling this nation out.”

The senator regularly presented himself as a man of strong faith. “Today,” he declared in 1950, “we are engaged in a final, all-out battle between Communistic atheism and Christianity…the chips are down – they are truly down.” His name was Joseph R. McCarthy.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Populism in America is nearly as old as the republic itself. Since President Andrew Jackson’s epic battle to shut down the “money power” symbolized by the Second Bank of the United States in 1833, politicians and citizen-activists have voiced their outrage about the “elites” who ignored, corrupted or betrayed the common people.

Right-wing populists typically drum up resentments based on differences of religion and cultural style. Their progressive counterparts focus on economic grievances. But the common language is promiscuous — useful to anyone who asserts that virtue resides in ordinary people and has the skills and platform to bring their would-be superiors down to earth

During the half-century since McCarthy’s remarkable rise and ignominious fall, his fellow conservatives have rarely stopped singing from the same populist hymnal.

“I had the privilege of living most of my life in my small town,” beamed Sarah Palin in her bravura speech to accept the GOP vice presidential nomination Wednesday night. It was, she explained, the kind of place inhabited by the people “who do some of the hardest work in America…who grow our food, run our factories, and fight our wars.” She defiantly contrasted her plain-folks view of the world to that of “the permanent political establishment” and “the Washington elite.”

Joseph McCarthy (Library of Congress)

It may be the same old song, but cultural populism has helped Republicans win many an election and has consistently put their opponents on the defensive. Richard M. Nixon championed the values of “Middle America;” Ronald Reagan damned a tax policy that took “from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned,” and George W. Bush mocked “liberal elites” for being soft on terrorism and warm towards gay marriage.

Conservatism would never have become a large and influential movement without such language; and liberals have yet to find a way to counter it. Why?

The answer has much to do with the anxieties of a racially divided consumer culture and the absence of a social movement grounded in the workplace. After World War II, most Americans, for the first time in U.S. history, considered themselves “middle class.”

But that homogeneous identity obscured big differences between a minority of “cosmopolitan” Americans — who could afford a four-year college, who lived in cities with large non-white populations, who had a professional job — and those who were not. The bitter conflicts of the 1960s and 1970s added in resentments over sexuality, religious faith and affirmative action.

President Andrew Jackson

Meanwhile, the labor movement that had done so much to build support for liberal Democrats, from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Lyndon B. Johnson, gradually lost both its numbers and its aggressive, populist spirit. Blue-collar workers had once flocked to unions and voted for politicians who bashed their opponents as “economic royalists.”

But by the 1970s, a rigorous labor movement that had helped lift incomes and gain job security for millions of wage-earners seemed to be resting on its laurels. Fast-growing unions of government workers were the exception — but as unruly public “servants,” they were unable to brighten the image of labor. With the stagflation of the Ford and Carter years, corporations were able to brand unions a fetter on productivity and growth. New movements that focused on race and gender gained the headlines and the attention of prominent liberals.

As a result, no one on the left seemed able to speak to ordinary white men and women who earned a decent income. but resented their diminished status in society.

Contrary to nostalgic mythology, Americans have never been a united people free of rancorous divisions. As Kevin Phillips once wrote, accurately if cynically, “knowing who hates who” and acting accordingly has usually been the key to electoral success.

With a dynamic labor movement behind them, liberals had been able to exploit antipathy against wealthy employers and the Republicans they bankrolled. But when conservatives began attacking liberals as an elite that was unpatriotic, condescending, ungodly and licentious, they had no rebuttal to offer.

This election will, in part, be a test of whether right-wing populism still works. Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee, will try to use the rise in foreclosures and joblessness to stir up anger at Republican policies, from which Sen. John McCain, the GOP nominee and the owner of multiple luxury dwellings, may not be able to separate himself.

McCain clearly hopes to refresh the conservative mantra of tax-eating bureaucrats and effete liberals — a charge that Palin’s small-town origins and tough demeanor may help drive home.

Conservatives have dominated the battle over populist rhetoric so long that even Americans who mistrust it bring up “elitism” and the “common-sense values” of “ordinary people” — as if they were objective realities instead of partisan talking points.

If liberals hope to win the White House again, they could think about engaging with gusto in the battle to define these terms. For better or worse, populism lives too deeply in America’s fears and expectations to be trivialized or replaced. Without it, both sides in the nation’s long-running political conflict are lost.

Michael Kazin is an American history professor at Georgetown University. He is the author of “The Populist Persuasion: An American History” and, most recently, of “A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan.”