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.
I do want to go on record as agreeing with Black Elk that there are far worse things in the world than mere graft and corruption, and I'd take Boss Tweed to any number of today's politicians. I'll also always admire him for his creationism and support for Israel, but I'm an Old Republican and I have long regarded it as a tragedy that we have forgotten where we came from.
Oh, there is no comparison. Other than Madison there are no democrat-republicans whom I believe worthy of front rank status. And after Jefferson's return Madison fell to his level.
I have NO doubt that had the Jeffersonians been the first leaders the nation would not have survived. They would have ensured absolute military and financial weakness.
Hamilton and Madison both opposed the Bill of Rights and both made arguments similiar to yours. But political expediency led to its being proposed and included. There was no applicability to the states so the damage was limited until the Fourteenth amendment applied them to the states.
New Englanders proposing the Hartford Convention were the typical pro-British wealthy business interests uber alles types who were just angry that their profits were being restrained by the War of 1812. The Convention was slated for 1815, three years after Madison became president.
I come from Connecticut originally (54 years worth) and I certainly reject the notion that it is easy to sympathize with the New England moneychangerwimps of the Hartford Convention era who wanted to sell out their country to restore their profits.
Last time I checked, Jefferson was the president who actually purchased the Louisiana Territory (most of our country after the purchase) for $3 million in gold paid to Napoleon.
I had not noticed that Jefferson lost the naval war with the Barbary Pirates. In fact, his victory is part of the Marine Corps anthem. We wind up fighting the Arabs every century or so: Jefferson's War, the Perdicaris Affair of 1904 and the present necessary and preliminary unpleasantness.
Jackson also confronted the Spanish over Florida while John Quincy Adams, as the (New England Federalist lookalike Secretary of State) wanted to engage in endless diployakketyyak instead of taking Florida to stop cross-border criminality of Florida-based brigands whom Spain could not or would not control.
Jackson was a Jeffersonian and not a Whig. The Whigs did not long survive his wildly popular presidency and his crushing of another Whig institution: Biddle's Bank of the United States.
Certain traits run in families. Nicholas Biddle's distant descendant, female cathouse operator Sidney Biddle Barrows was the infamous "Mayflower Madame." I am going to go out on a limb here and guess that she is a Clinton Demonrat, and, like Old Nick, more Hamiltonian than Jeffersonian by far.
The irony is delicious that the "advocate" of the common man, Jefferson, was a TRUE aristocrat while the "shill" for the plutocracy, Hamilton, was entirely self-made, an illegitimate orphan from the islands without influential friends or sources of power outside his own brain.
You earlier mentioned you were from a rural area, if you were from a big city you might not preceive the corruption of the big cities machines so benignly. Particularly when they develop election theft to a high degree. Without those machines the Party of Treason would be a mere, unpleasant memory. And the US would be much more united and stronger thereby.
You want to allow gov't to infringe upon your rights to life, liberty or property?
How but we insist the BOR's is honored by all levels of gov't, -- rather than being ignored?
In 1976, Goldwater not only threw his support to pro-abortion Gerald Ford but actually did media ads suggesting that Republicans would not want Reagan's finger near the nuclear button in a remarkable parody of LBJ's "Little Girl with a Daisy" ads on the same theme against Goldwater in 1964. Ayn Rand also was apoplectic over Reagan and pleaded with readers of her Ayn Rand Letter to vote for Ford to save abortion.
Goldwater was facing defeat at the hands of a pro-life Democrat businessman in 1980 as the nation prepared to elect Reagan by a national landslide and to decapitate the radical ten leftist leaders of Senate Demonrats (McGovern, Church, Gaylord Nelson, et al.). He went to Arizona pro-life leaders on the Friday before the election and "surrendered" promising to vote pro-life from that point forward and not to run for re-election in 1986. Foolishly, they believed Goldwater, figured a senior and converted Goldwater would be more effective than a freshman pro-life Democrat, and moved enough of their vote to Goldwater for him to make up a 5% deficit reported in polls and squeak through.
Faced with the first pro-life voting opportunity of the new term, Goldwater voted pro-abortion. Questioned as to why "Mr. Integrity" violated his pledge to the pro-lifers wh re-elected him, he said that he imagined his late wife Peggy standing there and could not vote against her wishes and that the pro-lifers could not do anything about it anyway. He spent the rest of his Senate career as the social libertine he had always been.
After leaving office, he bragged about personally taking his daughter for an abortion and expressed his contempt for anyone who disagreed with that action. His son Barry, Jr., lost a California Senate race while under fire over his alleged personal preferences. Barry the Elder had a grandson who was an open homosexual activist and whom Barry the Elder publicly and noisily supported.
My ancestry was Democrat on both sides. I became a Republican because of Barry Goldwater in 1963-64 but he was not vocal in his support of abortion at that time. I can say that, influenced by Barry the Elder to become a Republican, I got to be a state chairman of Reagan's challenge to Goldwater-backed Gerry Ford. By that time, I would not have supported Goldwater for dogcatcher because of his social libertinism.
In the last analysis, Barry Morris Goldwater enthusiastically revealed himself to be a rank liar, a man devoid of integrity, an enthusiast for babykilling and an enthusiast for the "rights" of those practicing the "love that dare not speak its name" in saner times and now will not shut up. If history is being re-written, the re-writing is by those who claim that Goldwater was a late convert to social issue revolutionary status. He believed in baby-killing all along.
"-- removing the Bill of Rights might solve the problem --"
You want to allow gov't to infringe upon your rights to life, liberty or property?
How about we insist the BOR's is honored by all levels of gov't, -- rather than being ignored?
You two would actually trust in State & local majorities to protect your fundamental rights?
Hamilton made his bones in the Revolution as an officer under Washington. From that point forward, it would not have mattered if his mother had been an early Sidney Biddle Barrows, Jane Fonda, Lucifer's girlfriend or a space alien from the planet Pluto, he had Washington as a very close and supportive and influential friend and many more alliance assets than Washington and, in the thankfully brief Federalist America, it did not get any better than that in terms of influential friends.
I could say that Hamilton was therefore an aristocrat wannabe but that would be unfair. He earned his aristocracy in a rare historical era whatever his ancestry. That did not mean that he was right in ruthlessly favoring vested financial interests against the nation's population as a whole. Recognizing that, the nation returned the favor by destroying Hamilton's Federalist Party after the last straw which was the Alien and Sedition Acts. Would that the public could have yanked Chief Injustice Marshall off the bench and summarily hanged, drawn and quartered him.
It is quite a stretch to blame Jefferson, the apostle of a permanent yeoman farmer America with the Chicago Demonrat Machine, its cemetary election rallies, its votes of the everliving dead techniques. Easier to imagine is that Hamilton in his advocacy of an elected lifetime king was an enemy of the expression of democratic will through the mechanism of a democratic republic, restrained by the chains rightfully imposed by the Bill of Rights.
Still easier is to suggest that you study the players and purposes of the Mount Vernon Conference and the Annapolis Conference, their motives, and their successful advocacy of the bloodless coup by which the Articles of Confederation (by its terms amendable only by UNANIMOUS vote of the states) was illegally replaced by the current constitution. Was that treason?????
Thank you for that information. Much of it is news to me. I thought Goldwater's record was solidly pro-life until late in his career.
There's much more irony than that. Despite the fact that modern FDR liberals' use of government is based on Hamiltonian principals (federal supremacy, loose construction, implied powers), they nevertheless hate Hamilton and invoke Jefferson ("that government that governs best governs least") constantly. There are plenty of neo-Confederates who consider FDR simply Hamilton reborn, yet it was Jefferson he invoked as his political idol and the guardian angel of the New Deal.
Another thing I've noticed is that, despite their own statist and centralist tendencies, European style rightwingers nevertheless seem to prefer Jefferson to Hamilton, perhaps because Jefferson was a manorial lord and Hamilton was associated with "the money power."
You earlier mentioned you were from a rural area, if you were from a big city you might not preceive the corruption of the big cities machines so benignly. Particularly when they develop election theft to a high degree. Without those machines the Party of Treason would be a mere, unpleasant memory. And the US would be much more united and stronger thereby.
I don't have a "benign" view of big city machine politics. I simply agree with Black Elk that Boss Tweed wasn't using his power to give us "gay marriage." There is no doubt that old school Democrat machine politics is a very important resource for the Left today.
I did not say that YOU worshipped Hamilton, et al. That was directed at justshutupandtakeit.
Jonathan Edwards was certainly one of the most influential and accomplished New England preachers (together with Cotton Mather and Increase Mather). Aaron Burr (a founder of Tammany Hall) was his grandson.
I am, as you know, a Roman Catholic. Jefferson's religious beliefs were bizarre but he was not acting as pope. Neither was Hamilton. Both left us protected by religious freedom to be what we respectively are.
Jonathan Edwards and the Mathers lived in Massachusetts before Ted the Swimmer but were not his religious predecessors. Nominally a Catholic Ted the Swimmer is about as Catholic as Robespierre. Ask any murdered baby whom you might encounter in heaven.
Politcally, Hamilton was his predecessor since both were inclined to unlimited central power of the fedgov.
The little secret that has escaped many is that the accession to power of FDR brought an end to the old Democrat Party of Jefferson and Jackson. Al Smith eloquently addressed this subject in endorsing Alfred Landon in 1936 at the New York Archdiocesan Charities Dinner now named for him. FDR re-made the Democrat Party as the party of centralized power run amok. It took the GOP another 32 years to throw off the mantle of me-too Republicanism (Northeast kingmaker style) and begin the march to Reagan's presidency as a significant waystation in the redefinition of the GOP.
The GOP is, to a certain extent, and will be more so in the future, the party that cares about moral values, cares about what is right and wrong individually and in the world, whether as to abortion or as to marriage or as to tyranny. Jeffersonians over Hamiltonians. Now, then and forever.
Thank you for a gracious response.
You mean you actually advocate a federal government that outlaws parents washing their kids' mouths out with soap?
I don't know that "rights" as understood by eighteenth century "enlightenment" types ever existed. I am a Theonomic positivist and a Theocrat, after all.
I voted for Ford in the general election in 1976, but I voted for Reagan in the Republican primary (the very first vote I ever cast!). You might be interested to learn that in the 1980 Republican primary, I actually voted for Philip Crane! But yes, I voted for Reagan in November.
What do old-style Euro-Catholic conservatives see in the Jacobin sympathizing Jefferson, and why do you have so little regard for the anti-Jacobin, anti-Illuminist New England clergy? And btw, the purpose of the Alien and Sedition Acts was to protect our country from infiltration by foreign revolutionaries (much like later conservative, anti-Communist legislation).
BTW, when I was in the JBS (1977-81) I noticed that the Society held to Jefferson's interpretation of the Constitution but that all its literature and publications endorsed the Federalists as the conservatives of their era. When I asked my coordinator how they could do this he said I thought too much.
good reminder
The Bill of Rights was doomed from the beginning to be converted into a grant of power to the federal government to enforce "rights" at the state and local levels. The Fourteenth Amendment sped the process along, but it would have happened anyway. Had the Constitution merely been a list of rules for the federal government we wouldn't have the ACLU today.
I hope you will explain to me why European-style conservatives, who are so supportive of centralized state power and nationalistic collectivism (and even "totalitarianism") in the form of Franco, Salazar, Petain, Stroessern, Pinochet, Vargas, Trujillo, etc., suddenly become advocates of small government, individualism, and libertarianism when it comes to the United States.
For the record, the Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian political traditions are the eternal "yin" and "yang" of American politics. Both have always been here and probably always will. I personally regard the Hamiltonian position as the correct one (and I really dislike Jefferson's rationalism and deism as well as his Jacobinical sympathies), but these are the two opposed interpretations of the Constitution that have always been here.
Let me add that I continue to admire you for your intellectual honesty and internal consistency. I've never understood people who defend the Constitution as though it were divinely inspired and then insist that only the Jeffersonian/compact theory position is the true and original interpretation. Anti-federalism is a completely legitimate position so far as I am concerned, and especially so when it doesn't make the Constitution into a "golden calf."
Be well always.
Do you have some reference for it, or is it just something you randomly "believe"? His wife, Peggy, was a founder of Planned Parenthood in Arizona; were you thinking of that, by chance?
Actually, despite its minimalist heritage, the Democrat party had already began to move towards statism and centralization after the Civil War. FDR himself said that William Jennings Bryan (Democrat presidential candidate in 1896, 1900, and 1908) was the founder of the modern Democratic party, and Woodrow Wilson came twenty years before FDR. There were many statist, pro-centralization "progressives" in the Democrat party before FDR, and they all invoked Jefferson and Jackson rather than Hamilton for what they did. In fact, Smith was a "progressive" himself.
Few people possess your honesty and consistency.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.