Jim Stillman
M-Kaz
True conservatism has vanished and it is the nation’s loss.
October 18th 2008 01:53
This comment is written with some sadness. A good and honorable man, John McCain entered into a bargain wherein he sold his soul and honor in return for the presidency; it now looks like he has lost both.
The 2008 election is witness to what has happened to a once proud and honorable political tradition and movement in the United States. The Conservative/Republican movement started, under Abraham Lincoln, as a liberal, progressive decent counter to the worst portions of our national nature.
The traditional role of the conservative movement in the United States has been to put a brake on liberal-progressive proposals and action, allowing periods of deliberation. At the start of the twentieth century, movements were promoted by liberal activists to grant suffrage to women, control business, regulate various industries (food processors, drug manufacturers), eliminate laws and practices that perpetuated second class citizenship for blacks and the introduction of other programs that were considered at the time to be “radical”.
The conservatives constituted a “loyal opposition” and acted to delay implementation of some of “reforms”. Conservatives, for 100 years, provided a sobering brake on too-rapid social change; we might disagree as to the values to be protected, but we all were agreed on the essential decency of the public. Generally, Democrats became the party of change and of a strong federal government regulating food, drugs, meat processing plants; again, generally, Conservatives preferred the regulation of the free market in lieu of that imposed by government.
Then in the 1960’s, the Conservative movement was perverted by the “southern strategy” which catered to those base emotions we had in the back of our minds, anti-integration, anti-intellectual, all to bring the southern states into the GOP electoral column.
And in the past 8 or 10 years, the Conservatives were kidnapped, again, this time by the neoconservatives.
And that was the start of the end.
Over the past several years, Conservatives in the United States have changed. The present brand of Conservative thought has abandoned principles which were its reason for existence:
• total abhorrence of a strong federal government which interfered in the private lives of its citizens;
• belief in the self-regulating nature of unrestricted capitalism; and
• insistence on fiscal restraint resulting in balanced (or nearly balanced) federal budgets except in most extraordinary conditions and circumstances.
Each of these core values has been abandoned.
Modern neoconservatives believe in the most interfering form of government, willing and even anxious to control the private moral behavior of citizens. These same conservatives insist on framing the issues so as to promote their agenda. Democrats have allowed this for the most part. Instead of arguing against liberal beliefs, Republicans adopted a policy of speaking only in clichés and slogans, bumper sticker stuff: belief in equal rights for all Americans is redefined as "special rights for homosexuals", a belief in the rights of those accused of crimes is now "soft on crime", a belief in freedom of religion is portrayed as "hatred of Christians", and questioning the success or failure of our foreign policy toward Iraq or North Korea is simplified as “cut and run”. If one supports providing adequate public services, he or she is a “tax and spend liberal”.
This has the dual effect of making an opponent a cartoon-like character and, at the same time, avoids addressing difficult issues. Up to now, these views have had an audience.
But the audience has left the building.
Specifics: government interference with individuals. , Conservatives continue to support and enact legislation to reverse the Supreme Court’s permitting abortion, with some limitations. Conservatives oppose making condoms available to teens, on the unproven and absurd theory that, if teens do not have birth control available, they will suddenly become sexually inactive. Conservatives spend millions of dollars nation-wide to restrict and control personal behavior of adults. Do adult establishments, strip clubs, and the like really tear the fabric of society so that their existence must be the object of police activity and enforcement? Surely the police have far more serious crimes upon which to focus than whether an adult gets a “lap dance”. Republican-conservatives give lip service to the idea that people should be free of governmental interference, but then the Shiavo case comes along and religious views direct governmental policies.
How about the idea that unbridled capitalism will self-regulate? The fall of the financial system has been so fast and far-reaching that there's been no time to fully consider its implications for the reigning economic theology of the past 30 years. But with the most right-wing administration in modern American history scurrying to nationalize the banks, the question cannot be elided indefinitely. Poor Senator McCain, he has to focus on Bill Ayers and race baiting. What's he supposed to do? Admit that unregulated capitalism, to which every GOP presidential candidate was pledging allegiance just last winter, has collapsed?
There are writers on these pages who warn of “socialism” with no idea of what that it (other than bad). We now have actual governmental ownership of banks and investment house on Wall Street!
Christopher Buckley, son of William, has endorsed Senator Obama stating that the cause of rational conservatism had been abandoned,
It’s over and if there is one aspect of the past too-long campaign that I find depressing is what has happened to John McCain. He sold his soul to gain the presidency and now will have neither. Mike Barnicle wrote eloquently about a man he obviously admired and respected:
….McCain comes to the country …, his pride and honor certainly diminished by the incoherence of his campaign and the absurdity of the choice he agreed to when it came to picking someone who would share a national ticket charged with talking, coaxing, massaging the country through a tough and turbulent time. …. America looks and listens to a different John McCain than the man who captured so many hearts when he first ran for president, only eight years ago,.., held captive by ideologues who dominate …what is left of the Republican Party. So John McCain sat there on the stage at Hofstra Wednesday night, looking and sounding like an angry old man, bitter, … uncomfortable …a cranky senior citizen seething with resentment over how his glory days are lost.
It is a sad story: a proud and independent man permits a handful of advisers to take his hard-earned reputation and alter it to such an extent that the original is now hard to recognize, nearly invisible behind a curtain of cynical ads and the preposterous pronouncements of a woman whose candidacy is an insult to intelligence.
John McCain used to know that the country was… filled with ordinary people who live their lives in the middle of a political spectrum, too busy making ends meet, to be driven to extremes by the fevers and fears that consume so many of the talk-radio set. He used to be aware that in order to win, a candidate could not simply preach to the converted, snarl and run with a resentment aimed at the fringe, the mixed mobs of the curious and angry that turn out for Palin.
Unfortunately for McCain, he did little to stop the thieves who took his honor and reputation and tossed it out like so many discarded items for a yard sale, figuring that Americans could once again -- one more time -- be fooled into voting their fears. But what they really did was take the one Republican who may have had a legitimate shot at surviving the disaster that has been the Bush administration and strip him of the basic appeal he once had for people looking for someone who could lead.
The dreary dialogue of the past few weeks has finally managed to make the man look his age, look old and tired and embarrassed to be defending Palin while awkwardly injecting the absurd -- Ayers -- into the national dialogue when nearly everyone is riveted on the obvious: the family budget.
Soon, the 'Straight Talk Express' will bank west and head for the Arizona desert and election eve. And John McCain will sit up front, staring out the window, exhausted, as the plane crosses the land he loves and the people -- millions of them -- he failed to connect with because while he was once indeed a prisoner of war, he has spent the last ten weeks letting himself become a prisoner of the past.
This country needs a loyal opposition; it has been ill served by the conservative Right.
(The substance of this material has been previously published at EXAMINER.COM)
The 2008 election is witness to what has happened to a once proud and honorable political tradition and movement in the United States. The Conservative/Republican movement started, under Abraham Lincoln, as a liberal, progressive decent counter to the worst portions of our national nature.
The traditional role of the conservative movement in the United States has been to put a brake on liberal-progressive proposals and action, allowing periods of deliberation. At the start of the twentieth century, movements were promoted by liberal activists to grant suffrage to women, control business, regulate various industries (food processors, drug manufacturers), eliminate laws and practices that perpetuated second class citizenship for blacks and the introduction of other programs that were considered at the time to be “radical”.
The conservatives constituted a “loyal opposition” and acted to delay implementation of some of “reforms”. Conservatives, for 100 years, provided a sobering brake on too-rapid social change; we might disagree as to the values to be protected, but we all were agreed on the essential decency of the public. Generally, Democrats became the party of change and of a strong federal government regulating food, drugs, meat processing plants; again, generally, Conservatives preferred the regulation of the free market in lieu of that imposed by government.
Then in the 1960’s, the Conservative movement was perverted by the “southern strategy” which catered to those base emotions we had in the back of our minds, anti-integration, anti-intellectual, all to bring the southern states into the GOP electoral column.
And in the past 8 or 10 years, the Conservatives were kidnapped, again, this time by the neoconservatives.
And that was the start of the end.
Over the past several years, Conservatives in the United States have changed. The present brand of Conservative thought has abandoned principles which were its reason for existence:
• total abhorrence of a strong federal government which interfered in the private lives of its citizens;
• belief in the self-regulating nature of unrestricted capitalism; and
• insistence on fiscal restraint resulting in balanced (or nearly balanced) federal budgets except in most extraordinary conditions and circumstances.
Each of these core values has been abandoned.
Modern neoconservatives believe in the most interfering form of government, willing and even anxious to control the private moral behavior of citizens. These same conservatives insist on framing the issues so as to promote their agenda. Democrats have allowed this for the most part. Instead of arguing against liberal beliefs, Republicans adopted a policy of speaking only in clichés and slogans, bumper sticker stuff: belief in equal rights for all Americans is redefined as "special rights for homosexuals", a belief in the rights of those accused of crimes is now "soft on crime", a belief in freedom of religion is portrayed as "hatred of Christians", and questioning the success or failure of our foreign policy toward Iraq or North Korea is simplified as “cut and run”. If one supports providing adequate public services, he or she is a “tax and spend liberal”.
This has the dual effect of making an opponent a cartoon-like character and, at the same time, avoids addressing difficult issues. Up to now, these views have had an audience.
But the audience has left the building.
Specifics: government interference with individuals. , Conservatives continue to support and enact legislation to reverse the Supreme Court’s permitting abortion, with some limitations. Conservatives oppose making condoms available to teens, on the unproven and absurd theory that, if teens do not have birth control available, they will suddenly become sexually inactive. Conservatives spend millions of dollars nation-wide to restrict and control personal behavior of adults. Do adult establishments, strip clubs, and the like really tear the fabric of society so that their existence must be the object of police activity and enforcement? Surely the police have far more serious crimes upon which to focus than whether an adult gets a “lap dance”. Republican-conservatives give lip service to the idea that people should be free of governmental interference, but then the Shiavo case comes along and religious views direct governmental policies.
How about the idea that unbridled capitalism will self-regulate? The fall of the financial system has been so fast and far-reaching that there's been no time to fully consider its implications for the reigning economic theology of the past 30 years. But with the most right-wing administration in modern American history scurrying to nationalize the banks, the question cannot be elided indefinitely. Poor Senator McCain, he has to focus on Bill Ayers and race baiting. What's he supposed to do? Admit that unregulated capitalism, to which every GOP presidential candidate was pledging allegiance just last winter, has collapsed?
There are writers on these pages who warn of “socialism” with no idea of what that it (other than bad). We now have actual governmental ownership of banks and investment house on Wall Street!
Christopher Buckley, son of William, has endorsed Senator Obama stating that the cause of rational conservatism had been abandoned,
eight years of "conservatism" have brought us "a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance."
It’s over and if there is one aspect of the past too-long campaign that I find depressing is what has happened to John McCain. He sold his soul to gain the presidency and now will have neither. Mike Barnicle wrote eloquently about a man he obviously admired and respected:
….McCain comes to the country …, his pride and honor certainly diminished by the incoherence of his campaign and the absurdity of the choice he agreed to when it came to picking someone who would share a national ticket charged with talking, coaxing, massaging the country through a tough and turbulent time. …. America looks and listens to a different John McCain than the man who captured so many hearts when he first ran for president, only eight years ago,.., held captive by ideologues who dominate …what is left of the Republican Party. So John McCain sat there on the stage at Hofstra Wednesday night, looking and sounding like an angry old man, bitter, … uncomfortable …a cranky senior citizen seething with resentment over how his glory days are lost.
It is a sad story: a proud and independent man permits a handful of advisers to take his hard-earned reputation and alter it to such an extent that the original is now hard to recognize, nearly invisible behind a curtain of cynical ads and the preposterous pronouncements of a woman whose candidacy is an insult to intelligence.
John McCain used to know that the country was… filled with ordinary people who live their lives in the middle of a political spectrum, too busy making ends meet, to be driven to extremes by the fevers and fears that consume so many of the talk-radio set. He used to be aware that in order to win, a candidate could not simply preach to the converted, snarl and run with a resentment aimed at the fringe, the mixed mobs of the curious and angry that turn out for Palin.
Unfortunately for McCain, he did little to stop the thieves who took his honor and reputation and tossed it out like so many discarded items for a yard sale, figuring that Americans could once again -- one more time -- be fooled into voting their fears. But what they really did was take the one Republican who may have had a legitimate shot at surviving the disaster that has been the Bush administration and strip him of the basic appeal he once had for people looking for someone who could lead.
The dreary dialogue of the past few weeks has finally managed to make the man look his age, look old and tired and embarrassed to be defending Palin while awkwardly injecting the absurd -- Ayers -- into the national dialogue when nearly everyone is riveted on the obvious: the family budget.
Soon, the 'Straight Talk Express' will bank west and head for the Arizona desert and election eve. And John McCain will sit up front, staring out the window, exhausted, as the plane crosses the land he loves and the people -- millions of them -- he failed to connect with because while he was once indeed a prisoner of war, he has spent the last ten weeks letting himself become a prisoner of the past.
This country needs a loyal opposition; it has been ill served by the conservative Right.
(The substance of this material has been previously published at EXAMINER.COM)
| 71 |
| Vote |
Add To: 
Subscribe to this blog
Comment by Morgan Bell
Deep Pencil
Current Business News
Movie Train
Artist Quirk
Comment by Randy Inman
Waxing Political
Football Dogz
NCstuff
The Right Side
Comment by Randy Inman
Waxing Political
Football Dogz
NCstuff
The Right Side
Comment by RubySoho
Music Zone
Thought Zone
It's okay Paul, I will always love you!
Can't say I know what McCain was like before this whole saga but I must say I found it surprising and more than a little sad to hear that his campaign staff consist of some of the same people who staged such a smear campaign against him in 2000. I guess when you want to win that badly....
But what a shame that this is how he will be remembered.
Comment by Morgan Bell
Deep Pencil
Current Business News
Movie Train
Artist Quirk
ive never heard Keating referred to as Australias greatest treasurer, in the 80s and 90s (the Hawke-Keating era) the Federal budget was routinely in deficit and unemployment was high . . . when i think of Keating in power i think of the recession
Labor in the NSW State Gov and Labor in TAS State Gov are currently running deficits
but all that being said, it think we need the ebs and flows of swapping between the two parties
sometimes it is good to loosen the belt a bit and allow some government spending to refresh community services and the arts
you cant let the Labor party run wild with the credit card . . . and you can let the Libs privatise the whole country
Comment by RubySoho
Music Zone
Thought Zone
So our economy was already in trouble when Keating became treasurer. And it would take many years before the reforms that he and Hawke initiated would take fruit. eg floating the dollar and opening up our banking system to overseas competition.
As treasurer for eight years Keating implemented the most far-reaching economic reforms in Australia's postwar history with progressive deregulation of the financial sector and float of the dollar. After winning an historic fifth-term victory for the Labor Party in 1993, Keating pursued his micro-economic reform agenda, committing himself to high productivity growth, greater efficiency in transport industries and improving Australia's international competitiveness.
He got the ball rolling, Howard and Costello reaped the rewards and took all the credit. In Keating's own words, his reforms relegated Costello's "economic stewardship to bookkeeping",
Comment by Morgan Bell
Deep Pencil
Current Business News
Movie Train
Artist Quirk
i know what you are saying about economic
policy taking some time to take effect
but on the whole the Labor Party doesnt make
it a priority to balance the budget
Comment by RubySoho
Music Zone
Thought Zone
p.s it's mainly Keating who thinks he was greatest treasurer. I just love him anyway. I love that he touched the Queen's back and pissed off the Brits. I love that he called Australia "the arse end of the earth", I love that he called Costello a big baby that was too afraid to take the leadership when he had the chance and that he would never, ever be Prime Minister, I love that he said that to him in parliament in 1996!
Seriously, he had brains and was an arrogant prick at times, but he had a vision. We would have been the Republic of Australia now if he had won that election.
The two things I still hold against him are enterprise bargaining and the mandatory detention of refugees.
Comment by Morgan Bell
Deep Pencil
Current Business News
Movie Train
Artist Quirk
Keating was a total character, the two politicians i really remember as a kid was Paul Keating and Nick Greiner (NSW Premier - Liberal - i met him in person when he visited my primary school)
i know Keating was Catholic and uttered the famous quote “I don’t care what you say – two blokes and a cocker spaniel don’t make a family”
i also remember the big mole on his wifes face! haha
i think up until fairly recently both parties were socially conservative and their economic management was the only thing that really defined them
HOWEVER
i would like to ask you your opinion on the Republicans in the USA - do you think they run such big deficits because of allocating funds to war? or do you think it it more complex than that?
Comment by RubySoho
Music Zone
Thought Zone
I don't think Republicans tax enough. They tax the middle class but the majority of the wealth is not in the working class, it's in the top 2% of the population and for some reason they don't want to tax these people. I think the reason the Democrats manage the economy better is they actually get revenue from tax and put it back into the community somewhat. And for some reason conservatives hate them for it. I think America needs to get over its hatred of taxes. You want to live in a wealthy country? It's gonna cost you.
Comment by Randy Inman
Waxing Political
Football Dogz
NCstuff
The Right Side
Comment by RubySoho
Music Zone
Thought Zone
Comment by Randy Inman
Waxing Political
Football Dogz
NCstuff
The Right Side
Comment by RubySoho
Music Zone
Thought Zone
The way I look at it someone who earns 40k a year and pays 7k in taxes in paying more tax than someone who earns 100k and pays say 10k in taxes. The real dollar value of the second taxpayer is higher, but percentage wise they are paying less tax.
Totally random figures btw. But we all know about the loopholes the wealthy go thru to avoid paying tax, so the question remains, do they really pay more tax percentage wise, or does it just seem like it because they have more money to begin with?
Comment by Randy Inman
Waxing Political
Football Dogz
NCstuff
The Right Side
Comment by Morgan Bell
Deep Pencil
Current Business News
Movie Train
Artist Quirk
Comment by RubySoho
Music Zone
Thought Zone
For those who don't know Kerry Packer was Australia's richest man. I'm talking media baron. Biliions of dollars. Didn't pay tax.
One of the reasons Australians don't love the rich as much as Americans do. We are a bit more cynical like that.