KINENWATCH: Blogland’s Other Glenn links to an intriguing (can’t say more, haven’t read yet, blogging at work, sorry sorry!) round-up of 24 furriners on “What we think of America.” The points about American art from the British dude sound esp. cool, and I will revisit them at more length presently.

Kinen also gets my goat (betcha didn’t know I had a goat! Shows what you know…) though, by identifying the Left with “people who talk about the poor.” Boy will there be so much more about this when Shamed, Sara and I finish that Rock’n’Roll Conservative Manifesto, but for the moment, I’ll just say that I stopped being a Leftist because I became convinced that many of the Left’s ideas were harmful to poor, oppressed, and defenseless people. Kinen could spend some time poking around the web sites of the Institute for Justice, City Journal, or, heck, The Wall Street Journal or Reason; or he could read the mostly-swift What It Means to Be a Libertarian and the very swift Losing Ground, by Charles Murray; or Marvin Olasky’s The Tragedy of American Compassion; or Maggie Gallagher’s The Abolition of Marriage; or the section “How the Right Helps the Poor,” here. I’m only vaguely a Republican, but it kills me that the Republicans so rarely make advocacy for the poor central to their message. They’re too often content to let Democrats be the ones who “care.” False, harmful, and annoying. (Uh, that wasn’t meant for Glenn, who seems like a very cool guy. Sorry, got all ranty there. Oh, and I don’t endorse anything by Murray or Olasky except the books cited–everything else I’ve seen by both of them is unimpressive.)