Posted on 08/04/2006 12:59:47 PM PDT by churchillbuff
Variety reviewer Robert Koehler (formerly of the L.A. Times) recently reviewed a new documentary titled "Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater." The main driver behind the project is his granddaughter, C.C. Goldwater, and it's scheduled to air on HBO on September 18. The list of interviewees underlines it's not a big right-wing project: it includes Walter Cronkite, Ted Kennedy, Al Franken, Helen Thomas, James Carville, Bob Schieffer, Andy Rooney, Julian Bond, Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn, John Dean, and erstwhile Goldwater Girl Hillary Rodham Clinton. A few righties appear (Richard Viguerie, George Will) and some more centrist GOP types do, too (John Warner, Sandra Day O'Connor).
Here's how Koehler sums the film up: "Pic reflects on a contempo religious GOP right wing that would have profoundly alienated Goldwater, who rarely brought God into his politics."
Koehler extolled the film for showing "some of the contradictions of Goldwater, who opposed expansion of civil rights for African-Americans in the '60s and -- as various family anecdotes illustrate -- was tolerant toward gays and lesbians as well as female reproductive rights. (Daughter Joanne tells of her abortion as a young woman, and gay grandson Ty speaks warmly of him.)"
At first, Koehler seems unhappy there's not enough angst toward the religious right: "Even with an impressive roster of journos and political sharpies (including Hillary Clinton, who was a Goldwater Girl in '64 and a devout conservative in her teens), little is made of libertarian Goldwater's differences with the right-wing Christian movement that swept into the GOP in the 1980s. John Dean, whose new book, 'Conservatives Without Conscience,' began as a collaboration with longtime friend Goldwater, articulates best how Goldwater's straight-talking politics was rejected by his Bush-era party."
But he later concludes: "Response to the pic from GOP pundits and opinionmakers will provide a telling indicator of the current political climate. Walter Cronkite overstates the case that the older Goldwater turned liberal, while George Will is more on point, noting that what changed wasn't Goldwater but the GOP's extreme shift toward moralistic conservatism."
It will be interesting to hear if that's exactly how it sounds out of the mouth of Will.
Not really. I just get tired of responding to you then have you distort what I said and argue with it.
A typical distortion is the claim I said ANYTHING in support of gun bans. Actually it is more than a distortion, it is a flat out LIE.
Here is what my lying eyes read:
"-- I am not free to own a handgun in Chicago or Britain but that does not mean that the citizens of Britain had any substantially different degree of freedom than we have had in the last two hundred years. Not having everything we would like is not the determining factor here. --"
116 posted on 08/08/2006 8:34:32 AM PDT by justshutupandtakeit
Are you denying you wrote the above?
As I noted you cannot post one sentence of Hamilton's supporting your LIE that he was in favor of an aristocracy or a monarchy.
There was no seizure of power by the new government. There was no power to seize. Congress had collapsed and there was no government worthy speaking of.
You LIE again in claiming Hamilton believed the rich should run the world though that was certainly the way things were particularly in the South. Hamilton wanted to tie the rich to the federal government not for their benefit but for ITS benefit.
You obviously know nothing about the National Bank. Jeffersonian propaganda is not very reliable. Your babbling about that, Lowell Weicker, the Fed and the income tax has no bearing on the LIES about Hamilton though they make it clear you don't know anything about the Fed either. If you did you would know that the big Eastern bankers had fought against it for decades and it was the Western farmers and miners which wanted it beginning in the 1880s.
But hate and ideology is a sure prescription for ignorance.
The strength of the Union resulted from the elements you don't understand but hate anyway: Hamilton's financial program and the National Bank. I was not speaking of the Constitution though it certainly was intended to form a more perfect Union.
Apparently you prefer Rhetoricians to men of Action and Courage since Jefferson and Henry are your stars. They sounded good it is true.
The Alien and Sedition acts were meant to calcify the hold on America of the soon to be dead hand of the Federalist past. It was also the Whig descendants of the Federalists who spawned the anti-Catholic, anti-foreigner, xenophobic Know Nothings of the 1850s. See Millard Fillmore.
As to Jefferson:
1. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence as a young man and it is IMNSHO, the greatest document of the Revolutionary Era and probably in American history.
2. Whatever his own bizarre beliefs, he wanted his authorship of the Virginia statute guaranteeing religious rights to be on his tombstone as one of the three achievements in which he took greatest pride. You and I certainly have different religious beliefs as I am a Roman Catholic and you are not but each of us has freedom of worship thanks to men like Jefferson. As late as the eve of 1818's Connecticut constitution, it was a crime to celebrate Mass in Connecticut or to attend one. The Bill of Rights applied only to the Fedgov at that time. The Baptist Congregation at Danbury complained in 1811 in a letter to Jefferson that Connecticut only allowed Congregationalists to vote or hold land and Jefferson, in his reply, observed that the purpose of the First Amendment religion clause was to ensure freedom of worship and autonomy of religious institutions to guarantee that churches be free to hold government morally accountable without fear. This was not the reply of a man who favored a nude prostitute dancing as "the Goddess of Reason" on the altar of Paris's Cathedral of Notre Dame.
David McCullough's masterful biography of Federalist John Adams made him a vastly more appealing character than most had imagined. However, the historian has John Adams, while ambassador to Paris, attending Mass and writing to Abigail of the experience, saying that it was a good thing that the American people had not witnessed the majesty of that Mass or the reformed churches would be finished. I like to think that G-d forgave Adams his understandable Unitarian resistance to my faith which was not that of Adams.
In response to another post, as I have always told you, you cannot alienate me by sincerely holding faith views which differ from mine or political views that differ from mine for that matter. The circumstances of my life do not allow me to engage in the conversation with you as deeply as you would prefer but that does not mean that we cannot or do not share mutual respect.
Thanks for various expressions of respect on this thread.
Did you know that Robert Welch and his wife became Catholics and died Catholic???? Your local coordinator was admitting too much, illustrating the difference in the quality of thought between Belmont and many local poohbahs. I was never a member but occasionally a fellow traveler, subject by subject.
The faithlessness of today's New England is largely a product of the dual degeneration of the old Puritans. One group became self-worshipping "transcendentalists" and then Unitarian Universalists. The other became today's Congregationalists among whom the old Puritan faith is hard to find although a few congregations persist. Of course, in my own Church, Bernard Cardinal Law's colossally pathetic and probably criminal tenure at Boston has matched just about anything the descendants of the Puritans have been able to do to discredit faith in God
Thank you!
As you know, I am Catholic. Because I am Catholic I am absolutely opposed to communism. Franco's "Republican" or "Loyalist" enemies and his Anarchist enemies killed 60% of Spain's Catholic priests, burned fully half of Spain's Catholic churches, raped and murdered substantial numbers of actually Catholic nuns, all under the "authority" of Spain's leftist government. (See Professor Warren Carroll's: The Last Crusade). In my opinion, Franco was entirely too kind to those responsible but he was Spain's political savior (and also presided over an underground railroad through Spain saving tens of thousands of European Jews from Hitler). Portugal's Salazar and Chile's Pinochet are similar figures. Petain was a worthless quisling (French for Chamberlain) who ought not be grouped with them. Trujillo was a lesser figure but he is primarily hated by the usual suspects for acting against communists. If Stroessner was president of Uruguay or Paraguay and hiding Nazis, he gets no sympathy. I have no idea who Vargas may have been other than Playboy's delightful cartoonist (Bless me, Father for I have sinned....)
May you and yours be blessed. What was necessary in Spain, Portugal and Chile is, thankfully, not yet necessary here. Jefferson observed that the government which governs best, governs least. I will go with that until my nation and Church are in jeopardy after which Katie bar the door.
Finally, you are right as to much of that last paragraph. The constitution is hardly Holy Writ. When it comes to babies and marriage, among several other things, we would be a lot better off with a SCOTUS that understands and applies God's obvious Natural Law (Scalia, Thomas, Roberts, Alito) than one that imagines itself an ongoing constitutional convention without need of ratification in service to gross and often fatal libertinism (Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsberg and often Breyer who, in any event, wants to apply foreign laws).
What you wanted to say was that Black Elk has the colossal gall to disagree with your cherished fantasies as to aristocratic skullduggery in early US history. That Hamilton's contemporary electorate as well as the verdict of history trump your preferences need not be conceded by you unless you want to correct yourself.
tpaine: He has made us agree with one another which has not been common. Like you, I am not prepared to trust any regime that does not trust me with effective weapons. Our problems in Illinois generally on the RTKBA are about the worst in any state in the nation, all at the behest of the Chicago machine. Wisconsin is second worst. When I left Connecticut in 2000, it was an NRA paradise by comparison to Illinois or Wisconsin.
Oh, and gosh: I bet you think that Sidney Biddle Barrows was running a cloistered convent in Manhattan, right????
Do you like Weicker, too? He is supporting Ned Lamont (great nephew of communist Corliss Lamont) as the antiwar and pro-Islamofascist and anti-American candidate for LoLo's old Senate seat. Of course, LoLo is a trust fund baby who has never worked an honest day's work in his execrable life. AND Neddie boy is another trust fund baby whose great grandfather Thomas Lamont ran J. P. Morgan & Company.
Actually, the constitution was meant to see to it that Revolutionary War Scrip would come to an end in favor of Congress having the exclusive power to COIN money and regulate the value thereof (thank you, Roger Sherman), to levy taxes without having to beg the states (things that make you go hmmmmm!), to raise and maintain an army and navy without asking the governors pretty please for troops (thank you, Founding Fathers generally) and to fail to adequately restrain the tyranny of SCOTUS and FedCourts from CJ John Marshall through Herod Blackmun through Sandra Day O'Babykiller.
If Jefferson and Henry are not one's stars, one is not very American.
Fun, isn't he?
I am stating FLATLY that the statement in NO way supports a gun ban.
I said EXACTLY what I meant to say. Your swallowing of the LIES spread by the Jeffersonians and the ignorance you demonstrate about the financial system is appalling. I would expect such from those who go no deeper into historical research than a reporter not from one who calls himself a conservative.
Hamilton has been slandered and lied about for two hundred years PRECISELY because he was the major conservative of his day. Yet you swallow every Leftist LIE ever printed about him.
"Flatly" weird is more like it.
While it is hard to believe you could not understand what I wrote or that you actually think I said what you claim I will try again.
You have to go back and examine the first calls for a new central bank which occurred 30+ yrs BEFORE the meeting at Jeckyl Island. Recurrent transfers of specie from the west to the Money Center banks in the East collapsed western banks and ruined farmers during the late 1870s when the Populist and Greenback parties came into existence. Thus, the Populists called for Reserve banks to prevent the severe reduction of the money supply in those regions (and the Greenbackers for inflation). Big bankers fought against this for three plus decades because it would reduce their power.
They come around to the views of the Populists after the Crisis of 1907. JP Morgan was able to stop the Panic but his fellows knew he was getting old and that no one else had the clout necessary to stop these period financial fluctuations and panics. Only THEN was the Fed created.
Any competent history of the Fed will tell the story. Secrets of the Temple explains the origin of the call for a Central Bank.
The rest of your gobbledygook has no relation to anything rational and only illustrates the dementia and hatred which seem to control your thought.
What is weird is that you pretend to want to discuss serious matters then proceed to distort what is said and then fight about the distortion.
What kind of reasoning takes a statement about the historic freedom of Britain and turns it into support for a gun ban in Chicago or California?
There is no doubt that GB has historically been one of the most free nations in the world or that California has historically been one of the most free states. Yet, for me to say this FACT provokes you to claim I support gun bans. Bizarre is too mild a term for such a transmogrification.
I am a member of the NRA and have no problem with firearm owners or concealed carry so I have no idea what you think you agree with tpaine about.
You will find few more supportive of the Union anywhere. States' Rights was a code word for racist oppression. In fact, you can find threads with hundreds of posts by me fighting the States' Righters over the powers left to states.
Recognizing that the Constitution deliniated separate spheres of power for the fedgov and the states in no way implies that this means you are a States' Righter.
Our Constitution is SUPREME over all conflicting laws but that does not mean that it overrides ALL state powers within the sphere of influence left to states by the document itself.
Nor was Barron vs Baltimore decided on the basis of States' Rights but rather what the Bill of Rights was intended to apply to.
It is quite true that the northern Federalists were the ancestors of the "Know-Nothings." The South at the time was not the "Bible Belt" of today but very much under the influence of High Church Anglicanism and Catholicism, and the Southern aristocrats lamented the "Puritan religious ferment" as the source of all revolutionary tendencies. Yet today it is the South that is the scene of "Puritan religious ferment," and today's snake-handlers and "holy rollers" have much more in common with the old "burned over district" of northern evangelicalism than they do with the ante-bellum South. I am an old Southern Republican of the Puritan/Federalist school (no drinkin', smokin', or gamblin', Obadiah!) and the ante-bellum quasi European high church culture is absolutely alien to me. Naturally liberals like to blame slavery on today's Fundamentalist Protestantism, which they retroject into the Old South, but no honesty is to expected of them anyway. The Bible Belt I know is much more like Oliver Cromwell and even Ian Paisley than most conservatives like to admit or that you would be comfortable with.
Interestingly, another phase in the Federalist/National Republican/Whig/Know-Nothing/Republican development was the American Anti-Masonic movement, which was not in the least connected with conservative Catholicism but rather with anti-Catholic northern evangelicalism. The American Anti-Masonic movement was sort of a halfway house between old school conservative Federalism and radical abolitionism. In fact, it combined conservative elements who were opposed to the subversive tendencies of Freemasonry with egalitarians opposed to an American nobility (which Freemasonry basically was) and even with anti-religious types who were opposed to silly quasi-religious rituals and ceremonies.
Similarly, many other Puritanical tendencies (anti-Catholicism, temperence, prohibitionism, opposition to tobacco and gambling, etc.) historically have adherents on both the Left and Right (Prohibitionism, associated with rural America, Billy Sunday, and the Ku-Klux Klan in the minds of most today started out as a radical leftwing "reform" movement in league with abolitionism, world peace, labor unions, and women's rights). Although for religious reasons I can no longer accept the inherent sinfulness of beverage alcohol (the position of my own ancestral tradition), I continue to identify with the right wing of Puritanism and oppose gambling and tobacco and take pleasure in reminding today's ueber-libertarians of the Republican heritage. And while I certainly appreciate conservative Catholics like yourself (particularly when they are both creationist and pro-Israel), I personally continue to identify Catholicism, not with a threat to liberty (a la the British Unionists and the anti-clerical Left), but as an urban immigrant religion associated with labor unions, the inner city, the Democrat party, and all too often a liberal rationalism that manifests itself in evolutionism, higher criticism of the Bible, naturalism, and a prejudice against America's rural Fundamentalist Heartland. In other words, by ancestry and instinct I'm the kind of person you wouldn't like, but your combination of creationism and pro-Israelism simply swallows up all our differences as far as I am concerned.
I was unaware that the Robert Welch's converted to Catholicism. As you are probably aware, while he was raised a Fundamentalist Baptist he spent most of his life as a Unitarian and was as theologically liberal as he was politically conservative (he was an admitted evolutionist). However, like many palaeoconservatives, he appreciated the utility of the Catholic Church in supporting western civilization and opposing radical tendencies. I was first exposed to a positive view of Catholicism via the Society and believe my own eventual conversion stemmed from this original spark. However, my own experience leaves me wondering just what any conservatives, at least in the United States, see in the Catholic Church, which seems like a bunch of leftwing milksops compared to the humblest rural Fundamentalist Protestant church.
I would still like to know why so many palaeoconservative Catholics who defend the centralized statist regimes of Franco, Salazar, Petain, Stroessner, Pinochet, and Trujillo refuse to show similar understanding for the security measures of the United States.
Interestingly, despite his status as the leading Anti-Federalist in the country during the debate on ratification of the new Constitution, once it was ratified Patrick Henry actually became a loose constructionist, implied powers Federalist. His last public act was to argue against the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, drawn up by the legislatures of those two commonwealths and allegedly authored by Jefferson and Madison as protests against the Alien and Sedition Acts.
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