A brilliant post over at Salon.

It would maximize clarity in our political discussions if journalists could just ingest Brooks’ central point: the dominant right-wing political movement in this country that has spawned and driven the Bush presidency has nothing to do with — it is in fact overtly hostile to — the ostensible principles of Goldwater/Reagan small-government conservatism. Though today’s so-called “conservatives” exploit the Goldwater/Reagan mythology as a political prop, they don’t believe in those principles in any way. That movement is the very antithesis of those principles.

Read the whole thing.