Highly recommended reading.

In my immediately previous post, I touched on a particular hobby-horse of mine, which is how the terms "liberal" and "conservative" have become unmoored from their earlier definitions and have come to encompass differing and sometimes contradictory meanings. It turns out that El Cabrero, at The Goat Rope, has been thinking along the same lines, especially as regards conservatism. His reflections on Burke, here, are especially good, but it's well worth going back to the beginning of his series of posts on this subject (they start on February 26) and reading them through.