Posted on 03/09/2007 3:18:12 AM PST by ajolympian2004
Here is what has been said the past week or so that sparked argument: Bill Maher, on HBO, said a lot of lives would be saved if Vice President Cheney had died, and Ann Coulter, at a conservative political meeting, suggested John Edwards is a "faggot."
She was trying to be funny and get a laugh. He was trying to startle and get applause.
What followed was the predictable kabuki in which politically active groups and individuals feigned dismay as opposed to what many of them really felt, which was grim delight. Conservatives said they were chilled by Mr. Maher's comments, but I don't think they were. They were delighted he revealed what they believe is at the heart of modern liberalism, which is hate.
Liberals amused themselves making believe they were chilled by Ms. Coulter's remarks, but they were not. They were delighted she has revealed what they believe is at the heart of modern conservatism, which is hate.
The truth is many liberals were dismayed by Mr. Maher because he made them look bad, and many conservatives were mad at Ms. Coulter for the same reason.
I realized as I watched it all play out that there's a kind of simple way to know whether something you just heard is something that should not have been said. It is: Did it make you wince? When the Winceometer is triggered, it's an excellent indication that what you just heard is unfortunate and ought not to be repeated.
In both cases, Mr. Maher and Ms. Coulter, when I heard them, I winced. Did you? I thought so. In modern life we wince a lot. It's not the worst thing, but it's better when something makes you smile.
(Excerpt) Read more at opinionjournal.com ...
I do confess that I thoroughly agree with your last sentence and that it expresses well-justified belief.
Also, little as I think of Goldwater, he answered the liberals' "extremist cliche" with the accurate observation that when you hire a cashier, you want someone who is extremely honest not just moderately so.
You want to watch out not to isolate poopslingers and make them feel unwelcome if you are committed to knee-jerk diversity. Aren't "poopslingers" people too???? Not very nice language, I must say.
You aren't quitting politics???? Darn!
Good 'nite', Don! ;^)
You are a good teacher. Thank you for your posts. I have enjoyed reading them.
"Also, little as I think of Goldwater, he answered the liberals' "extremist cliche" with the accurate observation that when you hire a cashier, you want someone who is extremely honest not just moderately so."
While Reagan spoke of politics as a compromise. You sure you aren't a Goldwater man?
"You want to watch out not to isolate poopslingers and make them feel unwelcome if you are committed to knee-jerk diversity. Aren't "poopslingers" people too???? Not very nice language, I must say."
Not sure I get the gist of that. Once again, you use things I didn't say as a basis for your arguement. I've not said anything about diversity or anything related to it. Matter of fact, I specifically stated that we sould conduct ourselves a certain way out of respect for OURSELVES, not our morally challenged opponents.
"You aren't quitting politics???? Darn!"
Sorry to disappoint.
"I never purposefully try to offend anyone..."
I'm the exact opposite: If they espouse political correctness I purposely provoke and insult. It's a prelude to actually get them to think, rather than conform to the rules of censorship. Ms. Noonan is right, there is nothing nice about political correctness, and for freedom lovers, it should be despised and defeated as much as any mortal enemy.
I see-- in your view, RWR is of no value.
Rather than accept someone whom most FReepers and conservatives hold as a standard, in your view, it was really all about Goldwater.
Look, sorry that I got steamed but here's what I am trying to say and let's see if you can at least see what I am getting at.
Let's say that there's a politician who is outspoken and great but only helps himself or herself. Anyone he or she "helps", well it backfires and the only beneficiary is that person.
If RWR were that kind of person, you're right, he wouldn't have campaigned for Goldwater and you're also right that he's better than Goldwater was.
But my point was in how RWR was ahead of his time and how he brought us all together.
Ann Coulter is not a politician and she does extremely well in her career, as well she should. What she does for her career may not always work well with what she does for the party. This is the heart of the issue - she meant to do R's a good turn and D's a bad one. But what she selected as the core issue was a minor one. Namecalling in jest to make a point would be fine on her own dime. At a partisan function, it only feeds the characterization that R's are knuckledragging barbarians who can't make a point and lick the floor on the way to the podium.
RWR worked so hard to undo that. Is it a shame that it took so long to elect him President? Absolutely. But the benefit of the timing that he did serve is that he could undo the hysteria and childish antics of the liberal establishment.
CPAC helped her, but her speech didn't help Romney. I don't think that she meant it that way, but that's what happened.
Reagan IS and will, for the foreseeable future, be the standard. There are NO Reagans on our current horizon.
Where once, the best we could offer was Goldwater and his variety of nutty notions, his amorality (he complained bitterly against a group called Mothers for a Moral America which did an independent expenditure campaign urging votes for Goldwater to stop the Great Society moral slide), his knee-jerk libertoonianism, his personal political treachery, Reagan gave us a far better option.
If you miss Reagan's civility, then remember to tell the border obsessives. Reagan supported the bracero program to bring in Mexican nationals to work the California agricultural fields when he was governor and he signed what is derided as an "amnesty" bill in his second presidental term. These and his sunny disposition and not toleration of immorality was Reagan's hallmark. Better to alienate pro-aborts and lavenders than normal folks.
The speech you cite in support of Goldwater was given looooong before Goldwater was ritually stabbing Reagan in the back at every opportunity.
What this is all about is what kind of future lies ahead for the GOP and the US. Crabbed, xenophobic, weepy, anti-military, anti-American, amoral, lavender, baby-killing OR open, welcoming, confident, moral, straight, pro-military, interventionist, gun-toting, pro-life and pro-family. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and choose the second set. How about you?
Still waiting for your credentials in the movement. It has been several hours. Cat got your tongue?
CPAC is not a partisan function, it is a conservative one.
I sent a follow up post.
I've been a Reagan conservative since 1980. Charles Krauthammer started the work when he wrote a piece in the late 70s for the Nation about the Arms negotiations and how we should just let them drop. That was the end of me as a moderate.
I didn't think that Reagan could accomplish what he did, but within the first six months in office he had done everything he'd set out to do.
I wasn't as enthused about his second term as it seemed as though Nancy was looking to see how things would show up in the history books,but he did bring down communism.
As far as GHWB, he was a good President. Not great, and there were things I disagreed with him on. He should never have caved in to Panetta about the budget.
Do you need more?
Correction duly noted.
Please note that many individuals running to be on the R ticket for President were there.
Goldwater is gone. Your point is that RWR shouldn't have helped him. My point is that RWR did what he thought was the good of the party and the good of the nation.
Almost all of them.
John McCain was noticeably absent.
Exactly
Peggy Noonan has been very strange of late. Maher's comment was vicious - he was wishing death on Cheney - Ann was calling Edwards a girly boy which he is.
I am somewhat amazed at how much willful misunderstanding there is about all of this.
Elk, you are from the same Connecticut I am from, a state that now lies in near ruins. I am about the same age as Ann Coulter, also from Connecticut, and the first time I heard the word "faggot" was in fourth grade in a public elementary school. I asked my friend Patrick what "faggot" meant, and he said "a boy who acts like a girl." My older brother confirmed it. Homosexuals were called homos (I didn't hear THAT word until sixth grade), and they and various other flavors of deviants were referred to as "queers" or sometimes "fruit" for a more subtle reference. Maybe the rest of the country is different, but Ann Coulter said she did not mean to call Edwards a gay, but that she did mean to call him a faggot, a boy who acts like a girl.
One of the dictionary entries is "effeminate."
A modern synonym for that type of faggot now is "metrosexual", but it has lost its negative connotation among the cogniscenti, as they (the faggot/metrosexuals) make wonderful waiters and stylists.
Combine that fact with the New York Giant who called Bill Parcells a "homo" and the TV actor who DID mean homo when he said faggot, and you have Coulter mocking all of the new taboos.
For my part, I will feign indignation when broadcast television is decent enough for my children to watch and sports radio decent enough for me to listen to.
I like Peggy, but but Gramma's decency went out in the cultural revolution that started in the '60s (and probably earlier) and continues to this day. Okinawa, Tombstone, inner Detroit and 21st century political warfare is no place to be playing by Queensbury's rules. Since we don't like to lie, and the left does, we must use the truth as fiercely as we morally can.
The ghost-writer was L. Brent Bozell, a mid-thirties senior editor of National Review in the early 1960s; he wrote the draft and Senator Goldwater edited and corrected every word.
Actually, when I bought the book forty-three years ago I did not care who wrote it. It had Goldwater's name on the cover and his definition of conservatism inside.
If Goldwater was such rascal as you suggest why did he oppose the civil rights legislation? That cost him dearly.
Do you have sources for your charges against Goldwater? Yes, I know that in later life he offered views that offended some. Those were not issues in the 1964 election and he may or may not have held those views at that time.
Apology accepted.
RWR was certainly ahead of his time. It was said during his career by his enemies as well as by his friends that his power resided in the fact that he was the one candidate that most Americans would gladly invite to their house for dinner and several hours of good-natured political conversation. Pat Brown and Jesse Unruh were defeated by Reagan in gubernatorial races. Both warned national Demonrats but they were not listening. The Demonrats preferred to tell Bedtime for Bonzo jokes. When Reagan carried even Taxachusetts in 1980, that was a wakeup call. When he carried Taxachusetts again in 1984, we had a trend going. Walter Mondale is not my idea of a good president but he wasn't lunchmeat either. Gallant Reagan canceled a scheduled two-day campaign swing through Minnesota on the last pre-election weekend (when he had a small lead there) to give poor Mondale a smidgeon of mercy.
Whatever my posts may look like, I prefer that Reagan style. Who would not? If you want the Reagan style, however, first you must have the Reagan. It is kinda like squirrel stew that requires squirrel.
I have been a genune New York Yankee fanatic (my dad was a, gulp, Red Sox fan) since I was 5 years old in 1951 and Mickey Mantle was a rookie. He and Whitey Ford were my maximum childhood heroes. I have been waiting nearly forty years since their retirements to see their like in pinstripes again. We (the Yankees) are now utterly loaded with top drawer minor league pitching prospects and still no second Mickey in sight. It may even be that we have no Whitey in sight since none of the pitchers are unhittable left-handed junkballers with a flair for damaging baseballs whenever necessary (like when you want to strike out Willie Mays on a bet in an AllStar Game and leave him sprawled in the dirt which Whitey did at Candlestick Park). Maybe there will never be anther Mickey or Whitey. As I age, I want to be spoiled as much as I was spoiled by the 1949-1964 "Dynasty" team that I watched in youth.
Politics is another area that produces similar feelings. Reagan was sooooooo good at it, such an absolute natural, that, like Mickey and Whitey, we may never see his like again. Like many Republicans, my ancestry is in a working class Democratic Party in Kentucky, Indiana, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and, above all, Connecticut where I grew up. Veterans, drunks, union guys and some union leaders, religiously and politically conservative Catholics, great gamblers and card players, Knights of Columbus, anti-communist to the core but anti-nazi, anti-klan, anti-fascist, as well. I am also anti-dilletante, populist, anti-elitist.
I have no problem with reasonable violations of unreasonable laws (Roe vs. Wade, lavender "rights" laws, people who pay a little less than Uncle Sugar might prefer, exceeding speed limits but not too much, refusing to bow to bureaucrats before each breath.
We each make our own record in life as well. See previous list of conservative activism. Jesuit prep school grad way back when the Jebbies were still Catholic and militantly so. Am I old or what? B.A. cum laude. Phi Theta Kappa. Juris Doctor from a leading law school. Lawyer for pro-lifers and gun guys. No one in my family had graduated high school before me.
I am not a knuckledragger and I'll bet the people I am arguing with here aren't knuckledraggers either. If the left thinks we ar, that's the left's problem, not ours.
Let's stop worrying about what others think and let them wory about what WE think. When we let the opinion of others guide us, we are guilty of pandering to what my Church calls "human respect." Such pandering is the source of much sin. As surely as my Yankees were nearly sure American League champions when I was a kid, that's how sure I am that we are right and that the enemies are wrong.
If the Yanks had Mickey Rivers in center field, (base stealer .300 hitter, speedy fielder with no throwing arm, 20-25 HRs a year, attitude problem extraordinaire), it would be folly to expect Mickey Rivers, as good as he was, to be Mickey Mantle.
Printed reports after Reagan was shot and hospitalized stated that he was trying, out of regard for the nurses and orderlies, to walk in pain to the bathroom rather than bothering the staff to get him a bedpan and empty it. One day a nurse found that he was not in bed. Terrified, she looked into the bathroom and found him on his hands and knees wiping up a urine spill with paper towels rather than inconvenience her. Superficially, not a glamorous or heroic scene....until you think about it. He was he very best human being to ever hold the office of president. He will always be loved even more than my Democrat ancestors loved FDR. He deserves that and sooooo much more.
No one in sight now, NO ONE, is the next Ronald Reagan. Not Annie. Not anyone. We have to do what we have to do and not play nostalgic make-believe. We shall prevail. I do want to be spoiled again politically as we were spoiled by Ronaldus Maximus.
It is not so much that Goldwater was a rascal as that he was not very bright and worshiped his freedom to do as he pleased without regard to morality above all. Reagan was the real deal. Goldwater was not. Also, as to abortion, I repeat that his beloved wife Peggy was on the National Board of Directors of Planned Barrnhood for about 35 years. Dorothy Bush (Prescott's wife and Dubya's grandmother) was also on the PP board for many years and had a cow when GHWB and then GWB went pro-life. GHWB had been known as "Congressman Rubbers" during his brief tenure in Congress from Houston.
If Barry followed Planned Barrenhood completely it would have been a natural to vote against the Civil Rights Act since Planned Barrenhood's history is replete with eltism, eugenics, and racism. Sort of an American Kennel Club for humans. As it is, I revile hs memory but I AM willing to accept his explanation that he objected to two provisions that he saw as unnecessarily coercive having to do with public accommodations. When he cast his vote, he gave a televised address explaining it and pointed out that he had forced the racial integration of the Arizona Air National Guard as a high-ranking officer in it.
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