“I don’t think Johnson qualifies as either “Zombie Constitutionalist” or “NeoCon Ukrazie Globalist”.”
Those categories actually refer to people like you and Rev Mother.
Johnson is just typical DC Swamp.
Conservatives are endlessly fooled by the speeches given by these guys, while they ignore the agendas of their donors, sponsors and the interests they work for.
They inevitably turn into another Bush, another Boehner, another Ryan, another McCarthy, another Sessions, another Barr, another Durham.
Then conservatives feel betrayed and get all angry, but immediately latch on to the next guy with flattering rhetoric, and ignore their UniParty backers.
Rinse and repeat !
You sure nailed it with that post.
Johnson is fully supported by Donald Trump, so let's put those two in the same basket, shall we?
If you are posting on Free Republic to attack the best leaders we have now, Trump & Johnson, in favor of some insane fascist visions of Pinochet, Salazar or Franco, then you are on a fool's errand, with zero possible positive outcomes.
You may or may not grasp a key point about all fascists which is that, by definition, they are socialists, national socialists, which means they are of the Left Wing, not the Right Wing.
Sure, lunatic communists label their fellow socialists as "right wing", but that is sheer propaganda.
In truth, fascists are only slightly "right" of the most Left-Wing communists, but both are far off-the-scales leftists compared to American conservatives on our "right wing".
You mentioned Pinochet, Salazar and Franco as your ideal fascists, but they are in the same category as many others including Mussolini, Hitler and now Russia's Vlad the Invader.
None of these were good people, all were fundamentally insane and indistinguishable from Left-wing monstrosities like Stalin, Mao, the Kims, the Pots & on & on.
Whether self-professed communists or socialists, they were all tyrant monsters who broke whatever laws suited them and murdered whichever opponents they felt necessary.
Jim Robinson has always insisted that conservatives, like everyone else, have a "right of revolution", just as our Founding Fathers did in 1776.
And that is absolutely true, if you read the "parade of horribles" they listed in their Declaration of Independence, it's obvious they had no real choice except revolution.
But that is not where we are today, FRiend, far, far from it.
Today is far closer to the situation in 1860, when Southern Democrats, having lost a presidential election they themselves had rigged to lose, used their own losing political power as their excuse to declare secession and war against the United States.
There was nothing legitimate about that, nor were their actions at all thought out and the result was utter destruction of everything Confederates held dear.
That should be an effective warning to us from history.
Reverend Wright: "They inevitably turn into another Bush, another Boehner, another Ryan, another McCarthy, another Sessions, another Barr, another Durham.
Then conservatives feel betrayed and get all angry, but immediately latch on to the next guy with flattering rhetoric, and ignore their UniParty backers.
Rinse and repeat !"
What you need to understand here is that today's constitutional conservatives are descendants of antebellum Federalists, Whigs and Republicans, many of whom hated slavery and the political dominance slavery's 3/5 rule gave the South but were never able to effectively oppose them for some 70 years.
During all that time, people who loved their constitution and hated slavery could only "go along to get along" with Southern Democrats, until at last, in 1860, Democrats engineered their own defeats and then foolishly declared war on the United States, leading to the destruction of slavery and eventually everything associated with it.
That's kind of the pattern we have to follow, regardless of how sick and disgusted it can sometimes make us feel, because anything else leads only to the destruction of our Constitution and of the United States as a whole country.
As of today there is every reason to hope the 2024 elections will bring a sea-change for the better in national politics, meaning there is as yet no legitimate casus belli to exercise our God-given "right of revolution".
Much less is there ever any excuse to raise up historical fascist figures like Pinochet, Salazar, Franco or any other such monstrosities as ideals we should emulate.