Posted on 04/16/2007 9:23:04 AM PDT by areafiftyone
I think much of the opposition to Romney is exactly that, people are worried about his faith, but won't come out and say it. Instead they have to make up reasons in their mind to oppose him in different ways.
FReeper rbookward posted this on another thread, and I repeat it here because its' quite enlightening.
Richard Mouw, President of Fuller Theological Seminary:
I know that I have learned much in this continuing dialogue, and I am now convinced that we evangelicals have often seriously misrepresented the beliefs and practices of the Mormon community. Indeed, let me state it bluntly to the LDS folks here this evening: we have sinned against you. The God of the Scriptures makes it clear that it is a terrible thing to bear false witness against our neighbors, and we have been guilty of that sort of transgression in things we have said about you. We have told you what you believe without making a sincere effort first of all to ask you what you believe.
About time someone addressed what I view as some very stupid assumptions.
I'm not at all religious. I belong to no group or organized faith. But I do believe in God.
As such, I find that religions exhibit all of the human failings they proffer to understand and eliminate. To me, this is the the primary reason why I do not participate.
It is good that at least one has accepted and acknowledged what I have been trying to tell them for many years, every time I am asked why I do not participate.
It's a start.....
It seems to me that Frum has been pessimistic about the future of conservatism for a while. He seems to buy into the Judis/Teixeira hypothesis that demographic trends make an emergent Democratic majority inevitable and that conservatives can’t do anything to change it and just have to live with it.
I hope this analysis is too gloomy. After the elections of 2002 and 2004 many liberals had come to the opposite conclusion. On the other hand, 2006 and the current unpopularity of Republicans may be the first wave of a long term trend.
Part of the problem has been that conservatives are victims of their own success. The Reagan Revolution of lower taxes and less regulation launched an era of prosperity that continues to our own day. Unfortunately, this has caused people (especially young people) to take this prosperity for granted. And, as Thomas Sowell has written, no matter how many times it fails, statism/socialism always *seems* like a good idea.
So let’s give everyone health care. Let’s cap carbon emissions to “save the Earth.” Let’s regulate “urban sprawl” out of existence. Let’s “help families” by madating vacation time. Let’s lower the price of gas by imposing price controls.
To the average American all these seem like good ideas. And as the regulatory failures of the 1970s fade from our collective memories, it will become harder and harder to resist these kind of measures.
The other thing I have to say about Frum’s piece is that he seems to assume the George W. Bush is a straight-up Reaganite, although I know from Frum’s other writings that he doesn’t necessarily think this. Wasn’t Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” a repudiation of much of Reaganism? The kind of making peace with a changing nation that Frum seems to be arguing is needed by the GOP now?
Oh, this is a hard one! Could it be because it's early in the race and he's not well-known nationally yet by the rank and file?
This will change as the campaign moves forward. He's already leading in some polls in early primary states where he's been actively campaigning.
National polls at this point are little more than indicators of national name recognition.
Neither was Reagan in 1980. People seem to forget he was a former democrat.
Wow. Talk about self-delusion!
Reagan always said he didn’t leave the Democrat party, it left him. In other words their principles changed and his didn’t.
No. I said your sentence was an example of self-delusion. Your sentence said nothing about supporting our troops, which I do.
Rather, I am calling self-delusional your claim that Iraq is a victory. Maybe Iraq will one day be a victory, but to claim that it is a victory is to claim we have already won, which is just plain absurd. Iraq may be winnable, and we may eventually win, but to claim that we've already won, given our current difficulties, has got to be the most preposterous things I have ever heard.
Nailed!
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