Sacrificing Conservative Principles for “Electability” Has a Price
Peggy Noonan’s interesting article explores Democratic and Republican infighting. She argues the Clintons are fracturing the Democratic Party along gender and race lines. But more interesting from my standpoint is the person held culpable for fracturing the Republican Party:
George W. Bush destroyed the Republican Party, by which I mean he sundered it, broke its constituent pieces apart and set them against each other. He did this on spending, the size of government, war, the ability to prosecute war, immigration and other issues.
Amen, Peggy. But sadly, conservatives, myself included, brought this pox on our own house. We supported President Bush even though we knew he wasn’t conservative. The main arguments for electing him came down to name recognition and he wasn’t a Democrat. Sounds an awful lot like the argument being made for John McCain, no? McCain will probably pick a token conservative vice president too.
McCain might be most “electable”, but is 4 more years of compassionate conservatism really winning? It’s more like losing a bit slower.
Archived in: Al Gore, Compassionate Conservatism, Conservatism, Conservatives, Immigration, John McCain, President Bush, Presidential PoliticsJanuary 25, 2008 at 10:43 pm | Trackback
6 comments
Thanks for bring this up, Pat. It’s true.
I never liked the first Bush; he always seemed like an effete sissy pretending to be a mensch, and I have no idea what Reagan saw in him. Old-line Republican? He was a drag on Reagan because water doesn’t make wine stronger.
Then we got the swaggering son, who seems to have no consistent philosophy at all. Noonan said a while back that Dubya acts as if the party belongs to him and he can do anything he wants with it. Clinton did the same thing with the Democrat Party.
Parties coalesce and struggle over long periods, and all of us, Democrats and Republicans alike, are the soldiers who provide the weight behind the policies.
McCain might even be worse than Dubya, but he despises conservatives and, for the most part, doesn’t pretend to be one.
I believe Americans are sick and tired of being told “NO, you can’t.”. To me it feels like we’re sitting in an idling car, wasting gas and going nowhere. We’ve gotta bust out of this somehow.
“Yes, we can!” Massachusetts Liberal Delavian politics has proven the direction of freedom there is in reverse gear.
The road is clear if freedom to live your life is important to you. It is untraveled and wide open, ahead of us…as long as we use our power, now, to control every Big Government Control Freak.
Time to take it back, cause it’s ours!
No “r” on my keypad? Jeez.
I’m getting my military desires back in strength; I want to break things.
Elections in 2012 will be ballot by bullet. When either the Vache or Sambo get into office, it will take a pair of 105’s to open the next hand for it will be their best opportunity to coalesce power.
With a straight face, tell me how much they believe in the Constitution as ultimate authority in this country.
Correction….See what happens when I try to do too much at once??? Above, Devalian instead, please, although perhaps Patrikian might have been better!
Looming about this election now is the matter of race identification, and the identity politics that has evolved since the early ’60’s. This is a poisoned pool, and it was poisoned by Progressives/Liberals. Things are changing, and it’s going to get ugly, but it has to. Something must be corrected.
I remember the age of segregation; I lived in the South as a child, and learned that there is nothing more contemptible in the human family than the redneck racing to the bottom of all things good and decent, on the greasy pole of racial identity.
But its mirror image was to elevate African-Americans to what has been called the Numinous Negro - the stereotype that the bonds of racism and institutional segregation had created a new type of human being, not only equal to, but superior to non-whites in their forebearance and understanding of the mysteries of life.
Liberalism, to this day, is burdened with this romantic fantasy, and like slavery, it corrupts them and the black people that serve as objects of their fluttering adoration. We tolerate the ooze from the likes of the moronic Al Sharpton and all the black cultural parasites because of this soft dismissal of stupidity, ugliness and baseness.
Most of the social indices for blacks have declined since the 1950’s. Barack Obama has risen above all this slippage, but he’s still a lightweight and still a collectivist liberal. The Donk establishment will NEVER nominate this guy…it might go to a brokered convention, chiefly because he’s the puzzle piece that doesn’t fit. When you build a paper house, as liberals have done, you can’t live in it for very long.