the world." Achieving success in his first job out of college, as a radio announcer in Des Moines, Reagan made a number of local speaking engagements, "giving talks to fraternal lodges, boys' clubs and the like, telling sports stories and deriving from them Y.M.C.A. sorts of morals." We see here all the basic elements, employed for the past 28 years, of liberal condescension. Every issue of the New Yorker , Vanity Fair , or Rolling Stone makes clear that the policy positions of George W. Bush, Republicans, and conservatives in general are wicked and stupid. The real problem, however, is that everything about these people?where they reside, what they believe, how they live, work, recreate, talk, and think?is in irredeemably bad taste. To embark on a conversation with one of them, based on straight-faced openness to the possibility of learning something interesting or important, would be like choosing to vacation in Wichita instead of Tuscany. Sunday, March 15. 2009 If Jesus? parable is an extended metaphor for a life of mercy?if we are to treat those suffering souls whom chance has thrown in our way as if they were people among whom we live?then we have taken the wheels off that metaphor?s vehicle. If you do not really have neighbors, how can you understand Jesus? command to be a neighbor to others? You have to disembody it, etherealize it into a manifesto of general benevolence and almsgiving (perhaps of the political variety, whereby you stoutly sacrifice the alms of other