Posted on 07/26/2004 8:28:19 AM PDT by quidnunc
If, broadly speaking, you're a conservative, whom should you be rooting for in the American elections?
I'm not being entirely facetious here. The conservative "movement" in the U.S. is still firmly behind president George W. Bush's re-election. He uses conservative rhetoric — taking the war to the enemy, upholding conservative social values, respecting religious faith, protecting the family, and so on. He is widely regarded as one of the most conservative presidents in recent history — rivaling Reagan, eclipsing his own father in right wing bona fides. And yet if you decouple the notion of being a conservative from being a Republican, no one can doubt that the Bush administration has been pursuing some highly unconservative policies.
Start with the war. Almost overnight after 9/11, president Bush went from being a semi-isolationist, realist foreign policy president to a transformational one. He junked decades of American foreign policy in the Middle East, abandoning attempts to manage Arab autocracies for the sake of a steady oil supply, and forged a new policy of radical democratization of the Middle East. He invaded two countries — one in the grip of a theocratic dictatorship, the other brutalized by a Stalinist kleptocracy — and is in the process of trying to convert them into modern democracies. Nothing this radical has been attempted in U.S. foreign policy for a very long time. And nothing so liberal. In the 2000 campaign, Bush mocked the idea of "nation-building" as liberal claptrap. Now it's the centerpiece of his own administration. The fact that anti-American lefties despise the attempt to democratize foreign countries should not diguise the fact that Bush is, in this respect, indisputably a foreign policy liberal. He has shown none of his father's caution, little of Brent Scowcroft's realpolitik, and a rhetorical ambition not seen since Reagan and Kennedy.
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(Excerpt) Read more at andrewsullivan.com ...
Andrew has convinced me, President Bush is one of our better presidents! Four more years!
Sullivan is a brilliant man, but a tortured soul who of late has rarely achieved anything approaching coherence. It is getting hard to take him seriously.
Thankfully, he will be largely alone in concluding that Kerry is the "conservative choice."
Sullivan's comments on the war are contradictory and incoherent; he does not substantiate the charges that the conduct of the war has been "reckless"; he does not support the allegation that Bush has been urging a "theocracy." Methinks this is mostly about Bush's views on gay marriage.
Gay marriage drives Sullivan's thought. He has soured on Bush's foreign policy on account of Bush's stand on gay marriage. How do you take that kind of thinking seriously?
Well, forgive me for what I'm about to say b/c I am a Ronald Reagan style Republican. Right now, The Prez has got to do what he's got to do to win on November 2. I don't mean to come across as a political whore but right now, we have to keep the main thing the main thing at that is WINNING this election.
Therefore Sullivan supports Kerry and will engage in any contortion of the language to get others to do so.
It is worth noting that Andrew Sullivan is so fanatically opposed to the Federal Marriage Amendment that, for him, it's the tail which wags the dog. This entire screed is essentially worked up to provide filler for "President Bush is opposed to expanding gay rights, therefore I shall hate him until my dying day".
And neither can anybody else. "Theocracy" is the first cry of the left when a politician takes a moral stand. Those that throw that phrase around don't have a clue as to what a theocracy really is.
I'd imagine it's hard to think clearly with a ____ up your ___.
At heart, Sullivan is still a British Tory. He doesn't understand that American 'conservatism' is unlike any other political movement that has ever existed in Europe or elsewhere for that matter. Bush's invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, which Sullivan apparently now considers to be un-conservative, is perfectly in line with American conservative beliefs that you when someone attacks you, you fight back and that means doing the fighting on their shores and not ours. Sullivan is also strangely reticent on the issue of taxes. The British Tories don't even talk about tax cuts anymore, whereas with Republican conservatives (as Novak has said) that is why God created us -- to cut taxes. Finally, Sullivan is smoking crack if he thinks Kerry is going to cut spending if he is elected President. The only way Kerry will make any dent in the deficit (if he even tries) is to raise taxes, which should do wonders for the economy.-- but hey, at least the budget will get balanced.
As to Sullivan, I suspect that he is hedging his bets and figures why not support Kerry since the choice is so meaningless anyway.
So Andrew Sullivan calls himself a "conservative." Who shall we nominate to the title next - Leon Trotsky?
Andrew Sullivan is soooo 2002.
You can fix the deficit yourself. Send your own money to the US Treasury as a donation. You will feel better.
Sullivan is so driven by his single issue that he's intellectually dishonest.
Sullivan actually says this as though all the above were bad things. This poor man is a thoroughly confused soul.
It's ridiculous to say that Bush is more pro-big gov't than Clinton unless, that is, you want to give Clinton credit for cutting gov't spending by slashing military spending. And as far as taxes are concerned, that is some exception you point out - on the order of a multi-trillion dollar exception. I think most American conservatives would agree that that kind of some exception buys alot of relief from the ankle-biting that Sullivan routinely engages in. And speaking of ankle-biting, it is the British Tories who have engaged in just as much of it as the British left has with respect to actions against Hussein. As such, it is fair to say that the Tories appear to be hawkish only when they are attacked. They seem to begrudge it when other democracies respond to attacks against them.
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