Posted on 08/05/2010 6:04:18 PM PDT by pissant
These days it's getting increasingly embarrassing to publicly identify oneself as a conservative. It was bad enough when George Bush 43, the K Street Gang, and the neo-cons were running up spending, fighting an unnecessary war of choice in Iraq, incurring massive deficits, expanding entitlements, and all the rest of the nonsense I cataloged over the years in posts like Bush 43 has been a disaster for conservatives.
These days, however, the most prominent so-called conservatives are increasingly fit only to be cast for the next Dumb and Dumber sequel. They're dumb and crazy.
Conservative pundit David Kilnghoffer has a great op-ed in today's LA Times that nicely captures what I'm on about:
Once, the iconic figures on the political right were urbane visionaries and builders of institutions — like William F. Buckley Jr., Irving Kristol and Father Richard John Neuhaus, all dead now. Today, far more representative is potty-mouthed Internet entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart, whose news and opinion website, Breitbart.com, is read by millions. In his most recent triumph, Breitbart got a U.S. Department of Agriculture official pushed out of her job after he released a deceptively edited video clip of her supposedly endorsing racism against white people.
What has become of conservatism? ... With its descent to baiting blacks, Mexicans and Muslims, its accommodation of conspiracy theories and an increasing nastiness and vulgarity, the conservative movement has undergone a shift toward demagoguery and hucksterism. Once the talk was of "neocons" versus "paleocons." Now we observe the rule of the crazy-cons. ...
Conservatism wasn't just a policy agenda, a set of partisan gripes or a football team seeking victory on the electoral field. Above all, it was a satisfying, sophisticated critique of modern, materialist culture, pointing a way out and up from liberalism.
Let's tick off ten things that make this conservative embarrassed by the modern conservative movement:
1. A poorly educated ex-sportwriter who served half of one term of an minor state governorship is prominently featured as a -- if not the -- leading prospect for the GOP's 2012 Presidential nomination.
2. Tom Tancredo calling President Obama “the greatest threat to the United States today" and arguing that he be impeached. Bad public policy is not a high crime nor a misdemeanor, and the casual assertion that pursuing liberal policies--however misguided--is an impeachable offense is just nuts.
3. Similar nonsense from former Ford-Reagan treasury department officials Ernest Christian and Gary Robbins, who IBD column was, as Doug Marconis observed, "a wildly exaggerated attack on President Obama’s record in office." Actually, it's more foaming at the mouth.
4. As Doug also observed, "The GOP controlled Congress from 1994 to 2006: Combine neocon warfare spending with entitlements, farm subsidies, education, water projects and you end up with a GOP welfare/warfare state driving the federal spending machine." Indeed, "when the GOP took control of Congress in 1994, and the White House in 2000, the desire to use the levers of power to create “compassionate conservatism” won our over any semblance of fiscal conservatism. Instead of tax cuts and spending cuts, we got tax cuts along with a trillion dollar entitlement program, a massive expansion of the Federal Government’s role in education, and two wars. That’s not fiscal conservatism it is, as others have said, fiscal insanity." Yet, today's GOP still has not articulated a message of real fiscal conservatism.
5. Thanks to the Tea Party, the Nevada GOP has probably pissed away a historic chance to out=st Harry Reid. See also Charlie Crist in Florida, Rand Paul in Kentucky, and so on. Whatever happened to not letting perfection be the enemy of the good?
6. The anti-science and anti-intellectualism that pervade the movement.
7. Trying to pretend Afghanistan is Obama's war.
8. Birthers.
9. Nativists.
10. The substitution of mouth-foaming, spittle-blasting, rabble-rousing talk radio for reasoned debate. Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Hugh Hewitt, and even Rush Limbaugh are not exactly putting on Firing Line. Whatever happened to smart, well-read, articulate leaders like Buckley, Neuhaus, Kirk, Jack Kent, Goldwater, and, yes, even Ronald Reagan?
Update: Patterico says the foregoing are "reasons that conservatives should not support the Republican party," not reasons for being embarrassed about being a conservative. Fair enough. I'd accept that as a friendly amendment, but we're not friends.
I am reminded of Russell Kirk's great essay on Republican errors, in which he wrote that "in my lamenting of the present state of Republican leadership in Washington, I am more moved by sorrow than by wrath." Unfortunately, the present GOP leadership in Washington continues making many of the same errors of which Kirk complained 20 years ago. As such, sorrow begins to give way to wrath.
1. He's embarrassed about Palin, but no mention of the moron McCain who couldn't beat a rank marxist for the presidency?
2. He's embarrassed about Tancredo, yet it was Tancredo who was one of a handful of house members to oppose the vast majority of Bush's agenda, which he the good professor apparently loathed?
3. He's embarrassed about IBD editors "wildly exaggerated" take on Obama's record? I challenge the professor to name one thing the moron in chief has done remotely well, or remotely pleasing to ANY conservative sensibilities.
4,5. He decries the big government Republicanism of the GOP's last decade in power, yet the tea parties, which he also loathes, and Sarah Palin whom he also loathes, and Tancredo whom he also loathes, and Rand Paul whom he also loathes, are pushing a return to fiscal sanity and the de-scoping of grotesquely bloated federal gov't. This idiot makes no sense.
And Charlie Crist??
I give up. This man is a mental midget, perhaps in the David Brooks/David Frum category.
“Professor” Bainbridge?
Are they giving away college degrees in cereal boxes now?
“This man is a mental midget”
This dumb cluck thinks he speaks for conservatives?
Sounds more like a leftist pretending to be a conservative so that his attacks on the “conservative” side have more validity.
CINO.
Peggy Noonan’s alter-ego?
Moron!
this type of pseudo intellectual bleeding heart liberal socialist asshole’s commentary belongs on the Underground Democrat! Underground, where they freaking belong!
I see he has nothing bad to say about Jerry Ford, Or McCain, or Bob Dole.
Must be nice to get paid by the word.
5. Thanks to the Tea Party, the Nevada GOP has probably pissed away a historic chance to out=st Harry Reid. See also Charlie Crist in Florida, Rand Paul in Kentucky, and so on. Whatever happened to not letting perfection be the enemy of the good?
So this guy must be an olympia Snowe type conservative.
ANYONE embarrassed by Palin is a BHOTool.
Whats a lawyer doing in the Conservative movement?
He needs to join the Lawyer party.
Perhaps a faux conservative there, a troll maybe?
He is an elitist in the mold of Alexander Hamilton. Buckley I assure you would not be in agreement with him. The guy is an obvious idiot. These guys are never there to critique the left based on silly criteria. I would not be surprised to find he voted for Obama.
Here is a good article.
Opinion: What Would Bill Buckley Think of the Tea Party?
http://www.aolnews.com/article/opinion-what-would-bill-buckley-think-of-the-tea-party/19460893
Professor Bainbridge must be getting lambasted by his academic libtard brethren during lunches.... =.=
I agree and why would anyone WANT to put it on FR? hmmm
I’m torn.
Is this the alter-ego of John “Si Si Senor” McCain or Lindsey “Kagan is My It-Girl” Graham?
Hamilton may have been an elitist, but he also was brilliant. This guy is giving a brick a run for its money.
I think so. Every major disaster in this country seems to be driven by Ivy-League educated know-nothingings.
Please, please, please Libtards...keep thinking that.
Apparently anyone who does not attend an Ivy League school is poorly educated.
"...an minor state". I guess his own education didn't prepare him to write "an sentence" properly.
“…embarrassing to publicly identify oneself as a conservative…”
Uhm, this is your typical pop-culture psychosis laden narcissist, needing to feel important…as all weak-kneed leftists are prone to be when simply challenged to do better.
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