The heck with constantly electing the lesser of two evils. The lesser of two evils. is STILL evil. Its like trying to choose between Hitler or Stalin.
Elect statesmen, not politicians.
The is a cry from the political wilderness from libertarians who have wandered there for decades because they refuse to extract the radical element from their midst. It is those radicals who are the public face of the Libertarian Party and until the moderates take over (if there are any left) they remain politically impotent.
The only correct thing in this article is the last sentence, however "disenchanted Republicans" should remember the outcome of the '92 election should they choose once again to send a message to the Republican party.
Does "Down with Madden since 1992" mean that he is gay?
The author conveniently forgets to mention several, salient points:
1. More people consider themselves religious and attend a place of worship more regularly than they have in 50 or so years. Religious belief and participation is a hallmark of a conservative society.
2. More people have an ownership stake in their society thanks to 401(k)'s, record home ownership, increased upward mobility, etc., than at any other time in American history. People with property want it protected. This is also a hallmark of a conservative society.
3. Census data does not lie: within the next 50 years, blacks (iron-clad liberal voters) will become a staistically insignificant portion of the population. The WWII generation (wedded to the New Deal) is dying off. Hispanics are the fastest growing segment of the population and they tend to be both conservative and Catholic or Evangelical Christians.
4. Slowly but surely, the entire leftist social agenda is being modified or phased out not by government fiat but by social pressure. Welfare reform, the elimination of abortion on demand, the defense of traditional marriage, etc., are all topics better left to the unwritten rules of society than they are to legislation. This is also a conservative hallmark --- it's called "self-regulation".
Put this all together and what do you have?
With the decline in the black popualtion and the dying off of the New Deal population, the Democratic base constituencies are declining. With the general increase in real wealth, more people now have more to protect and enjoy. With the increase in the numbers of people attending church and the increase of socially-conservative Hispanics, the conservative base is increasing in numbers. Social mores are on the upswing and pressing against the bastions of liberal thought silently, but relentlessly. If this doesn't make America a more conservative society than it was before Reagan, I don't know what does.
Where conservatism is failing, however, is in having to govern in a non-traditional (for conservatives) way (i.e. prescription drug benefits, increased education spending, increased social spending, etc). These are tactical retreats intended to make the conservative line more attractive to swing voters. This is what the author seems to have a problem with (i.e. Compassionate Conservatism). This is not what conservatism is, it's just the political enviornment it finds itself operating in these days.
However, we have to be aware that while republicans and conservatives are being elected in record numbers, we should not get big-headed about it and lord it over the rest of the population. A complete conservative victory in all areas of policy would be just as dangerous as a full-throttle liberal victory. If either side actually was allowed to impplement everything they stand for, there would be open revolt in the streets.
There will only be a conservative collapse when conservatives get it in their heads that they can just demand whatever they want and have it magically appear or be rubber-stamped by a conservative-majority government. We still live in a constitutional republic, you know.
Blah, blah, blah. Yammer, yammer, yammer. Once again the retards at World Nut Daily open their yaps and show their irrelevancy. Lovers of Losers Unite You Have Nothing to Lose But Victory. The Constipation Partay is just another Joke.
The Democrats are so far to the left now that Republicans have become "moderates"?
Anglo-Saxon Capitalism (Conservatism) is spreading all over the world. Are you deaf, dumb, and blind?
So, are there truly no conservatives left in the Republican Party today?
I take no one seriously who says the Republicans and Democrats are one in the same.
Conservatives principles haven't changed one bit. The writer gives conservatives way too much credit concerning past elections. We were part of a block of voters that elected Republican majorities in all three branches of government. It certainly doesn't mean that we agreed with everything those three branches said or did. Our reality at the time was do I vote for a Republican or a demoncrat? The choice was easy.
I will fault conservatives for not pressing the national party hard enough for qualified conservatives to fill Republican seats. The primaries are so important and the above mentioned reason is why. Once you get to the general election, your choices are quite limited. Every election cycle is the same for conservatives. We are always the bride's maid and never the bride.
It is obvious to me that where the Big Issues are concerned there is no functional difference between the Democrat and Republican parties. No matter which party's candidate is elected President or to any other office, the United States government will continue to grow in size and power, abortion will remain legal, there will be no end to the federal income tax, and the false "wall of separation" between church and state will be maintained.
This is why I am not a Republican or a Democrat, and why I will from henceforth vote for the candidate best suited to hold a given office, the candidate who I deem most in line with true and traditional conservative values, no matter how "fringe" or "third party" he or she may be considered.
And if that means I'm "wasting my vote" and the Democrat wins in a given election, so be it. After all, what's the difference? We get the same anti-Christian liberalism either way.
What good would that do? It is wasting votes.
Critics Squirm as Bush Rises to the Occasion
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution ^ | September 18, 2005 | Jim Wooten
Posted on 09/17/2005 1:39:20 PM EDT by new yorker 77
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1486442/posts
As he did yet again in Thursday's fireside chat with a country mired in rancor and angst, George W. Bush demonstrated the remarkably adept ability to rise to the moment. Just as his critics are pronouncing him poll-dead and his second term an abject failure, he does two things that mark him as a leader destined to join the ranks of America's greatest presidents.
In important speeches, like the president's compassionate reassurance to the victims of Hurricane Katrina that their lives will be put back together and their communities rebuilt, Bush's rhetoric connects. It attaches the urgency of the moment, inspiring confidence and trust.
The second indication of his ability to lead, and a trait that so befuddles his adversaries, is that he rebounds from pronouncements of his certain demise to reassert his vision and his agenda.
Hurricane Katrina's devastation is a perfect example. Unfairly, but predictably, Bush took the brunt of the criticism, becoming the whipping boy for the failings of state and local officials to either execute the Southeast Louisiana Hurricane Evacuation and Sheltering Plan or to make timely decisions under pressure.
Gov. Kathleen Blanco acknowledged as much this week, confiding to an aide, "I really should have called for the military." Had she called out the National Guard, or invited the president to send troops earlier, much of the looting, violence and misery could have been avoided.
Near unanimously, however, commentators, reporter/commentators reacting to what they were seeing and partisans blamed Bush, through the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Some of it was genuine frustration. Some was more sinister, an effort to destroy one of the premises of Bush's conservative governance that it is competent.
Establish that Bush is incompetent here and the premise of homeland security and the Bush foreign policy, especially Iraq, become easier to attack. And, ultimately, the entire Bush legacy, lessening the chance that his initiatives will be durable.
In his speech, Bush expressed his empathy for the victims and promised them that their government will help reunite their families and restore their lives and communities. It's a big-ticket expenditure a staggering $200 billion is the estimate that reflects conservatism at its most compassionate and generous.
But the president is not promising to rebuild New Orleans as it was, a violence-prone city with a sizable population deep into generational dependency, with little or no stake in tomorrow. The debate will rage between liberals and conservatives as to whether the reality the nation saw on TV is the result of too little or too much welfare state expansion over the past 40 years. Bush wisely avoids that.
Instead, he announced a series of initiatives that continue the approach embodied in No Child Left Behind and the prescription drug bill: more spending, often substantially more, but with real incentives to change behaviors.
Two examples are job training and home ownership. Bringing the evacuees back into public housing would continue cultivating the behaviors that rendered them passive and dependent on buses never dispatched and government too overwhelmed in crisis to protect them.
Bush promised an urban homesteading initiative, with sweat equity and favorable mortgages. He vowed, too, to give businesses incentives to create jobs and individuals up to $5,000 to buy training and services, such as child care and transportation, that they'll need to gain the skills to qualify for those jobs.
Faith-based organizations will be given incentives, too, to pitch in. As we saw in the evacuation, the caring and guidance expressed through religious institutions and faith-based organizations put a face, and a tenderness, on help extended that no government can.
New Orleans and the Gulf Coast become, in effect, a laboratory for conservatives to experiment on a grand scale, starting with a relatively clean slate, to see whether ownership and opportunity incentives can change the behaviors that keep people in poverty.
It's a grand vision and a bold agenda.
What happened here? Yesterday the critics were arranging the Failed Second Term funeral procession. Today the corpse, declining to accept political demise, is driving the procession to the destination of his choosing. And brother, it ain't the graveyard.
Jim Wooten is associate editorial page editor. His column runs Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays.
A Bushian Laboratory
By DAVID BROOKS September 18, 2005
On Oct. 5, 1999, George Bush went to the Manhattan Institute and delivered the most important domestic policy speech of his life. In what was mostly a talk about education, he made it quite clear he was no liberal. But he also broke with mainstream conservatism as it then existed
He distanced himself from the cultural pessimists, the dour conservatives who were arguing that America was sliding toward decadence. Then he bluntly repudiated the small government conservatism that marked the Gingrich/Armey era.
It's not enough to cut the size of government, Bush said, or simply get government out of the way. Instead, Republicans have to come up with a positive vision of "focused and effective and energetic government."
With that, Bush set off on a journey to define what he called "compassionate conservatism" and what others call big government conservatism.
It's been a bumpy ride. Over the past five years, Bush has overseen the fastest increase in domestic spending of any president in recent history. Moreover, he's never resolved the contradiction between his compassionate spending policy and his small-government tax policy.
But gradually and fitfully, Bush has muddled his way toward something important, a positive use of government that is neither big government liberalism nor antigovernment libertarianism. He's been willing to spend heaps of federal dollars, but he wants that spending to go to programs that enhance individual initiative and personal responsibility.
On Thursday, President Bush went to New Orleans and gave the second most important domestic policy speech of his life. Politically it was a masterpiece, proof that if the president levels with the American people and admits mistakes, it pays off.
But in policy terms, the speech pushed the journey toward Bushian conservatism into high gear. The Gulf Coast will be a laboratory for the Bushian vision of energetic but not domineering government.
Bush proposed an Urban Homestead Act, which will draw enterprising people to the area, giving them an opportunity to own property so long as they're willing to work with private agencies to put up their own homes. He proposed individual job training accounts, so much of the rebuilding work can be done by former residents. Children who have left flooded areas will find themselves in a proto-school-choice program, with education dollars strapped to each individual child.
This is an effort to transform the gulf region, which had become a disaster zone of urban liberalism. All around the South, cities are booming, but New Orleans never did. All around the country, crime was dropping, but in New Orleans it was rising. Immigrants were flowing across the land in search of opportunity, but as Joel Kotkin has observed, few were interested in New Orleans.
Now the Bush administration is trying to change all that. That means trying to get around the corruption that made the city such a rotten place to do business. The White House is trying to do this by devising programs in which checks and benefits flow directly to recipients, not through local agencies.
That means challenging the reigning assumptions. Right now the White House is fighting with Louisiana over where to house evacuees. The state wants to put temporary trailer parks on faraway military bases, where there are no jobs and where they will live in "abject dependency," as one senior White House official puts it. The Bush folks want to put temporary housing within a mile of the original neighborhoods so people can become self-sufficient as quickly as possible.
On Thursday, the president was honest about the cost of all this, but he only began to lay out a plan. The Bushies are still trying to figure out how to help people from broken families and those with mental disabilities. They're trying to figure out where to cut government to offset the costs. There are arguments about what New Orleans should try to be, a smaller controlled-growth Portland or a booming and spreading Houston.
Like Franklin Roosevelt in the New Deal era, Bush doesn't have a complete vision of what he wants to achieve. But he does have an instinctive framework.
His administration is going to fight a two-front war, against big government liberals and small government conservatives, but if he can devote himself to executing his policies, the Gulf Coast will be his T.V.A., the program that serves as a model for what can be done nationwide.
"I've been saying it for years and years and years, there's no major differences between the republican party and the democratic party."
There is a difference between the basic philosophy of the Republican Party and that of the Democratic Party.
However, the Bushes - Bush I and Bush II, have proven to be most disappointing in applying those distinctions.
Bush I was a total disgrace. He was a genuine northeastern liberal who destroyed the Reagan Revolution and tried to shore up the collpasing Evil Empire.
Bush II, after a good start in his first term in flushing out the Taliban and initiating the War on Terror, has gotten bogged down in fighting a defensive action against foreign invaders in Iraq, instead of interdicting them at the borders and seeking out and destroying those nations which are aiding and abetting them, e.g. Syria.
His border policy and continued deafness of both himself and his advisors to the screams of outrage from ALL Americans of whatever political persuasion to the violation of our borders by an invasion of foreign infiltrators and social parasites is inexcusable.
Nobody wants these people and nobody wants his bogus "guest worker" program except a handfull of big business interests who swill on the profits of cheap labor.
I am suspicious of the ultimate cost to the American taxpayer, and the negative fall-out to the Republican Party by this plan to bail out New Orleans.
New Orleans must be rebuilt, but not on the current site, and the cost of it must be carefully monitored to assure that all local funds available are first employed before raiding federal tax dollars.
His slection of advisors and lieutenants: Mineta, Freeh, Tenet, Whitman, Ridge, Brown, Tom Kean, Gonzales etc, has been most imprudent.
His apparent unwillingness to go to the mat with an unabashed conservative, strict constructionist dedicated to undoing the liberal excesses of prior Federal Court decisions is most unsettling and bodes ill for future Supreme Court nominees.
I am very unhappy with Bush II - almost as unhappy as with Bush I.
The Stafford Act - Mandates what the Federal Government must do in a disaster
http://www.fema.gov/library/stafact.shtm
Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act, as amended by Public Law 106-390, October 30, 2000
UNITED STATES CODE
Title 42. THE PUBLIC HEALTH AND WELFARE
CHAPTER 68. DISASTER RELIEF
[As amended by Pub. L. 103-181, Pub. L. 103-337, and Pub. L. 106-390]
(Pub. L. 106-390, October 30, 2000, 114 Stat. 1552 - 1575)
[snip]
Libertarians are always Mensa's, or is it visa versa?
The problem is that the Democratic Party has drifted so far to the left, that many liberals even believe that the party has left them, so they have joined the GOP and watered the party down significantly.
Actually part of this can be credited to Ronald Reagan. Reagan made the GOP palatable to many who never even gave the GOP a second thought. But it has come at a price.