Posted on 04/13/2007 7:16:30 PM PDT by Bob J
Fiscal conservatives lose when they start agreeing with left wing premises and just haggle over the price.
Here’s a perfect example: here in Tennessee our liberal, pretending to be to the right of center, governor proposed raising the cigarette tax by 40 cents a pack “for the children” (yep, for education, again) and the incompatible reason of “getting people to quit”. Idiots.
Our “conservative” representatives solution? Try and get us involved in “lowering the 40 cent increase to 20 cents”. Haggling over the price instead of defeating the stupid idea on principle.
The GOP is Democrat-Lite and you actually lecture people like me for “staying home”? I don’t vote for the lesser of two evils. You either provide a clear alternative or, in my opinion, you are just 50% less of a monster.
By your standard I should be happy to have a worthless McCain that only wants to destroy half my rights so I won’t get a Hillary that wants to destroy them all.
Disgusting.
What do we do about that?
Bob J you know that this is impossible in the most advanced political system in history. Not a single entity can win all the time, the most important thing is that we win most of the time :)
That idea has a nasty habit of working both ways..............
The title of Bernard Goldberg's new book comes to mind: Crazies to the Left of Me, Wimps to the Right
So, you don’t like conservatives either.
What is a “conservative” to you?
Your very theory is wrong on its face. Conservatives don’t often lose. It’s just that most Republican politicians aren’t Conservatives.
Good question. I will rant in question format and hopefully some constructive answers and suggestions will be forthcoming.
It means we must ask: why is there an important case pending (Peter Paul vs. Hillary Clinton) and twice the only people making the sacrifice during weekday hours to help Peter Paul is DFU and myself?
It means we must ask: why do we have Anna Nicole Smith and other threads that go on for tens of thousands of posts—hundreds of thousands of views—and we have far too few Freepers that bother to meet the Move America Forward/Gathering Of Eagles Caravan as it was going across the country to D.C. and far too few Rallies and AARs? Not that GOE wasn’t a RESOUNDING success—it was! (California FReepers, I am the CA GOE Coordinator so Freepmail to get on that list.)
It means we must ask: why do so many people rationalize and knowingly subsidize firms that deliberately subsidize Leftist media instead of sacrificially or at least creatively doing without/finding an alternative?
It means we must ask: why do so few do and so many talk?
Last but not least, it means we must ask: why do so many talk trash about each other and about our elected and appointed leaders and so few pray for them?
I do think we should win every election. We don’t because the GOP is full of grandpas who don’t know how to play hardball. We could win in Ithaca if we had the right team.
Forget Hillary, as the election draws near and her negatives don’t drop, the PTB in the DNC that are not high on ‘shrooms will see the light and throw their weight behind the “New Bobby Kennedy”.
If we want to win in ‘08 we have to think about defeating Obama.
parity=party
Are you saying we are destined to lose?
I think this article answers it nicely--
Defining Conservatism Down by Austin BramwellIn the 1950s and ‘60s, conservatives sought not just to refute modern liberalism but to obliterate it. Thus they charged that liberals were not merely wrong but were trying to “immanentize the eschaton”—an ancient heresy! (Voegelin) Or that they were in the grip of William of Occam—an insidious 13th-century Simon Magus! (Weaver) Or they were contemptible second-handers—sub-human weaklings! (Rand) And so on. Each conservative writer claimed to have uncovered the Holy Grail—the argument or principle that would expose the errors of liberalism (and communism, socialism, feminism, etc.) once and for all.
Since then, while American conservatives have retained their passion for Big Ideas, their passion for the biggest idea of all—the Holy Grail that will refute liberalism—has waned. Most simply assume that the Grail has already been found. Thus, they breezily dismiss liberals with some of their favorite epithets—“rationalists,” “relativists,” “statists,” “utopians,” or “historicists.” (Sometimes they could hardly be more inapt. A person who regards government health care as a human right, for example, is not a “relativist” but an arch-moralist.) Never mind that liberals, nonplussed by the vituperative quality of right-wing thought, themselves reject these labels. Someone out there has already proved that one or another will stick.
Yet the Holy Grail has not been found. One can still find lapel-grabbing right-wingers who will argue late into the night that their favorite thinker has figured everything out for all time. (My personal favorite: certain libertarians believe that Alan Gewirth, a now forgotten philosopher of the 1970s, showed how the rightness of limited government derives ultimately from Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction.) This is not the place to take up the argument with them. I only wish to observe, as an empirical matter, that no one person’s ideas actually define American conservatism. If English conservatism is nothing other than Burkeanism, American conservatism is not Rothbardianism, Randianism, Jaffaism, or Hayekianism.
Indeed, the more a right-winger exalts one set of ideas, the more marginal he becomes; by contrast, the more foggy he remains about what the Holy Grail is, the more influence he can have. Thus, on the one extreme, the votaries of Ayn Rand refuse to talk to right-wingers who do not take Rand’s works as gospel; somewhere in the middle, “Claremont conservatives” sometimes castigate those who do not share their enthusiasm for the Declaration of Independence, yet stop short of trying to expunge them from the movement; finally, intellectual omnivores such as Buckley never allow themselves to be identified with one conservative theorist or another. In the end, nearly all the competing schools of thought manage to co-operate.
Conservatism has reached an unacknowledged consensus about the outcome of the theoretical debates of the ‘50s and ‘60s. The consensus holds, first, that someone has discovered the Holy Grail that will vindicate conservatism once and for all, otherwise why be a conservative in the first place? Second, it holds that, whatever the Grail actually is, it does not do any good to describe it with too much specificity. These beliefs contradict each other, yet the conservative consensus has proved remarkably stable.
Maybe, but it should be our goal and our belief...if we want to win.
No. I think we need to be more agressive.
He berated us for a good five minutes. The guy was hispanic. No one said a word. He would have probably had to attack a woman or child to get anybody moving. That's how much crap we are willing to take.
CONSERVATIVES ARE IN GROSS DENIAL..
America is becomeing a socialist country..
And are oblivious to the reality of the threat(s) to the republic..
Well, a person whose posting name on FR is “FredHunter08” is gong to be pegged as a partisan shill whose opinion can’t be trusted.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.