There is much of value in Conservatism, and I know well not all Conservatives share the "narrow ideology" I freely admit to attack--and despise. But Conservatives have allowed the cancer represented by the Far Right, TParty, whatever you want to call it, to metastasize. I know most of you never really believed Obama was a Socialist Muslim from Kenya. But not one of you stood up to challenge those who claimed it. Much the same can be said for enlightened Conservative tolerance of the racial bigotry, religious fanaticism, Social Darwinism, Gilded Age Capitalism and hatred of science and the intellect that seems to characterize so many on the contemporary Right.

By looking the other way, you have encouraged a monster to flourish, one that now threatens to devour you as well. When good men make excuses and cover up for the evil in their camp because they fear alienating a potential ally, they only allow perversions like the Nazis and the Communists to arise.

Today's Conservatives will be remembered in much the same way we remember the pathetic Liberals of the 1930s when they embraced Stalin. Still, they can plead that they were misled by the urgent need to combat Fascism in Europe, which at the time was only opposed by the Reds. Today, the Red Menace is long gone, in spite of all the efforts of the Right to find them under every upturned stone. Today's existential threats are neither atheistic, nor anti-capitalist.

As for Don Quixote, I've read it, in the original Spanish. Unlike the Anglo Saxon take on the character, as a dreamer, eccentric and noble tilter against windmills, Cervantes wrote him as a pathetic crazy old fool, one who not only embarrassed himself, but managed to betray and endanger the people who loved him.

As he was written, Don Quixote was not a sympathetic character who represented the chivalry and honor of Medieval Spain, he embodied everything that was backward and deluded in that great civilization and its vanishing traditions. Quixote was more like Lear than he was like Hamlet.

Your reference to him was right on target.