...he endorsed Mike Huckabee and actually started working on his campaign. I'm still baffled by that choice.

"I want America to know that I'm, like, totally ready to lead." -- Paris Hilton

How have the mighty fallen! Poor old Josh, reduced to po’ mouthing about his alma mater Furman. There is another university in Greenville, South Carolina, Bob Jones University, one where various Republican candidates once went on a regular basis. Furman is as close as such Conservatives can get to the same audience without a Pastor Eruption. But it's only spitting distance, so we can safely presume the audience is similar.

I lived in the town of Dungas in Niger Republic as a small boy. The chief of Dungas had a trumpeter who would go before him, playing in fifths Ga-shi, ga-shi, Hausa for he is coming, he is coming. The trumpeter was fired for supposedly playing wu-fi, wu-fi, he is empty, he is empty.

Josh should refrain from adverbs like Cloyingly and phrases like Self-Promoting Righteousness. His whole second paragraph is nothing but just such self-promotion.

The Furman faculty is not united around the (W)e Object petition. An acquaintance of mine on the Furman music faculty did not sign the petition, two others in the music department did.

I have several passing acquaintances with Furman University faculty. Brent Nelson, the chairman of the PoliSci department is a graduate of Wheaton College, my alma mater, a mainline Evangelical school.

Nelson is pretty well known in conservative Evangelical circles. He's been writing about Protestants in the European Union, saying they are less accepting of the unification than Catholics. He, along with James Guth, have been writing and lecturing on the topic of Protestant belief in Europe, though only a tiny minority of Europeans could be considered Evangelicals by any stretch.

There are more practitioners of voodoo and spiritualism in Europe than Protestant pastors. The Protestant movement in Europe has long been on life support: its churches kept open in the interests of history by public funding. Attendance is abysmal.

Furman as a school leans far to the right, as does much of South Carolina. Beleaguered by sinking polls, Bush might have hoped to find a more receptive audience at Furman than elsewhere. Such was not the case. The (W)e Object movement surely must be a disheartening setback for the likes of Josh T. The PoliSci Department at Furman is led by a noisy exponent of a historically and theologically irrelevant branch of Protestant belief, a system I understand rather better than most, for I was raised in it as a missionary's child.

European missionaries couldn't raise the support the Americans did: as poor as we were as missionaries, and even with an attempt to distribute support among the missionaries, the American missionaries were incomparably better off than our European counterparts.

This seems to be going far afield from Josh's whine about Cloying and Self-Promoting Righteousness. I know this sort of crap when I hear it, for I have heard it all my life from unctuous carrion fowl of this sort. South Carolina is the land of my fathers, and I was born there. I remember racism in Columbia and Lexington, the wink and a nod Good Old Boys, and the slow changes they made. They got past the more overt racism but they developed an allergy to the Democratic Party they've never quite overcome. Mankind changes, but not that much, and not that quickly. That Furman has changed enough to rise up in protest, if only with a few hundred signatures, seems to me to be less a representation of some fundamental shift away from Carolina Conservatism than a sudden, violent heave of nausea, a vomiting-up of George Bush and his policies.

If you have archives, particularly older than the last year or so, let me know. I have a question.

Thanks.

Of course not!

Has a thing changed, or has the viewer's perception of a thing changed?

Things get pretty one-dimensional, very fast in the over-heated rhetorical ovens of the bloggosphere. Partisans are quick to assume that if their position hasn't been selected...it must not even have been considered!. For no sane person could reasonably reject the only reasonable position--mine!

Different circumstances can bring other facets of an object to light. Not that the facets haven't always been there...all along.

I can be very confident I've picked the best of possible options, even though I've considered the numerous other options...and it may not take very much of a change in environment, for second tier considerations to become first tier. When someone's careful weighing of the facts match my own...it's nuanced. When it doesn't, it's rabid ideology.

and note that his archives are offline for a good reason.

It's cute that he tut-tuts those awful professors who have the nerve - nerve I tell you! - to protest the President's speech. He really takes his "analysis" over the top when it "reveals a professorial group motivated not so much by politics as by love of self". This from "Joshua S. Treviño .. the founder of Treviño Strategies and Media"... He also notes his experience "leading scholars at a mid-range think tank". Yeah.

Over here on E Street, we're proud to support Obama for President. - Bruce Springsteen

to that part of the 'conservative movement' that blogs. An extreme example is Andrew Sullivan.

However, to continue our "visit to the American South" dialogue; one of the greatest changes I noted during my own was the sudden acceptance by old family friends and relatives hitherto to the right of George Wallace of new-age values like 'eating healthy' and 'going green' and 'respecting gender-preference' (no support for gay marriage though). There is even a new Whole Foods in my old home town; thus I would venture that Trevino is what is now known as a "Granola Republican", relatively liberal on lifestyle issues, while remaining relatively conservative on traditional political ones.

However, it's also worth pointing out on this Memorial day, that Republicans have historically been uncomfortable with foreign wars; both World Wars, as well as Korea and Vietnam were conducted by Democrat Presidents--the latter two ended by Republican ones. If Bush had ever enjoyed the full support of his party on Iraq (it was conservatives, after all, who first adopted the term 'neo-con'), it might have been prosecuted with more efficiency; though because his appointees in nearly every other sphere have been spectacularly incompetent, it's hard to assert this with any authority.

Our successes in Afghanistan and Iraq (and both wars are now as 'won' as any ever could be in the Islamic world--and won with an astonishingly low number of US casualties) are a credit to the resilience and persistence of the US military, not the 'conservative movement', which remains as finicky as ever about the intervention. As does the 'neo-liberal' two-thirds of the Democratic Party, which can take little credit for either its prosecution or their fainted-hearted opposition to it.