OK, it's not the whole political Right, and it's only a very small pity party, mainly centered in New York City.

But I've noticed a distinct tone of self-pity and victimization from salon conservatives.

For example David Brooks, pet conservative of the New York Times opinion page, worried that Republicans would become hostile to smart guys like him:

What had been a disdain for liberal intellectuals slipped into a disdain for the educated class as a whole. The liberals had coastal condescension, so the conservatives developed their own anti-elitism, with mirror-image categories and mirror-image resentments, but with the same corrosive effect.

Brooks tars Gov. Sarah Palin as a class warrior and laments the GOP isn't nice to urbane cosmopolitans like him in an interview with Huffington Post (Brooks is one of those conservatives HuffPost types like):

But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

I guess David Brooks doesn't read anything other than his own columns, or else he has conducted the most massive canvass in rank-and-file GOP in history and can say with authority that the GOP base is anti-idea.

How urbane.

Last week, Christopher Buckley decided endorse Barack Obama because John McCain in a Daily Beast post. I agree with one thing Buckley said: the only reason anyone cares about it is because his last name is Buckley.

But underneath all the bon vivantness, Buckley musters extremely thin affirmative reasons for endorsing the most left-wing major presidential candidate in American history:

- Buckley thinks Oabama has a "first rate temperament."

- Buckley thinks Obama's books are "first rate."

- Buckley thinks Barack is really smart and approves of his Ivy League education.

That's it.

Buckley then closes his eyes, tosses a coin down the wishing well and wishes very, very hard that President Obama won't do any of the things he's promised to do.

Buckley also spends a great deal of time blaming for being angry at his flippant endorsement of Senator Government. No respect for urbane sophistication from the rubes of the Right!

Rounding out the pity party is the Peggy Noonan with another weekly excursion into vaporous prose. This week, Peggy thinks Sarah Palin is "failing." 

Notice a pattern here? The urban sophisticates of the Right have lately turned Sarah Palin into their whipping girl. Noonan is a later arrival at that party, probably still stung by the awkward dichotomy between her published praise of Palin and off-air panning of her during the RNC.

Apparently more confident of McCain-Palin's defeat, Peggy private contempt is becoming more public:

But we have seen Mrs. Palin on the national stage for seven weeks now, and there is little sign that she has the tools, the equipment, the knowledge or the philosophical grounding one hopes for, and expects, in a holder of high office. She is a person of great ambition, but the question remains: What is the purpose of the ambition? She wants to rise, but what for? For seven weeks I've listened to her, trying to understand if she is Bushian or Reaganite--a spender, to speak briefly, whose political decisions seem untethered to a political philosophy, and whose foreign policy is shaped by a certain emotionalism, or a conservative whose principles are rooted in philosophy, and whose foreign policy leans more toward what might be called romantic realism, and that is speak truth, know America, be America, move diplomatically, respect public opinion, and move within an awareness and appreciation of reality.

But it's unclear whether she is Bushian or Reaganite. She doesn't think aloud. She just . . . says things.

Maybe one reason it is unclear is it has been only seven weeks, during which Gov. Palin has been campaigning for Sen. John McCain's policies and beliefs, not her own. She's the nominee's running mate, not the nominee -- a minor detail that seems to have escaped Noonan, who knows better: she once wrote speeches for George H.W. Bush, who famously decried Ronald Reagan's 30% tax cut as "voodoo" economics before enthusiastically embracing it as the VP nominee.

Noonan goes on:

In the end the Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics. It's no good, not for conservatism and not for the country.

Notice the emerging pattern?

Living out here in genuine Reagan Country -- Orange County, California -- maybe I a somehow able to see something that escapes these pundits of the East urbane sophisticate Right: Palin connects with a dispirited, hungry conservative base. They don't think such a connection should exist or is deserved, and yet there it is anyway.

Noonan then turns her attention to the unsophisticated conservative masses who insufficiently appreciate the urbanity of Christopher Buckley:

I gather this week from conservative publications that those whose thoughts lead them to criticism in this area are to be shunned, and accused of the lowest motives. In one now-famous case, Christopher Buckley was shooed from the great magazine his father invented. In all this, the conservative intelligentsia are doing what they have done for five years. They bitterly attacked those who came to stand against the Bush administration. This was destructive. If they had stood for conservative principle and the full expression of views, instead of attempting to silence those who opposed mere party, their movement, and the party, would be in a better, and healthier, position.

At any rate, come and get me, copper.

Oh Lord. Forgive me if I am not moved by this unbecoming concoction of false bravado, self-pity and narcissism. it's not as if Noonan, Buckley et al are pledging their lives, honor and sacred fortunes, here.

Here's my suggestion: take a long sabbatical from life in New York and dwell amongst the unwashed conservative masses for a while. It might help them to understand that the enthusiasm for Sarah Palin has nothing to do with their imagined anti-intellectualism and intolerance of the grass-roots they can't even see from the concrete caverns of NYC.

Finally, why do I get the feeling these folks are positioning themselves to be the pet conservative pundits during an Obama Administration?