Strategist: Rice eyeing VP spot on ticket

I appreciate your willingness to debate in a thoughtful manner. Here’s an article which sums up my feelings about Condi pretty well:

http://jewishworldreview.com/0408/west040408.php3

You just don't get it do you? You are the one who brought up her race and make unsubstantiated accusations about me. You are so obviously lost, I really feel sorry for you. You come across as even more of a racist than you did in your first post. Maybe if you could make some intelligent statements I might actually take the time to try to understand your warped views, but types like you just waste everyone's time. Honestly, you sound like a very confused individual.

Well, I see from your homepage that you would never vote for McCain, so you aren't completely lost. But why would someone who would never vote for McCain approve of Condi, who is John McCain without the elective office experience?

Sounds to me like you're the one who's a bit confused.

I suggest that you also read her biography. It may well explain why she feels that the civil rights movement was a second birthing.

This view is held by many respected people who did not go through what Rice did as she grew up. In fact many who grew up where Rice did, turned out to be Reverend Wright's, and worse. My wife is from Alabama. She had a cross burned in her front yard when she was a child. Her father participated as a Methodist minister in some of the work going on at the time and they tried to punish him for doing so. This affected him for the rest of his life and my wife as well.

That was the pain of the rebirth, as some see it. It was a turning point.

America was a little late to the slavery issue and Europeans like to use this as a way to get in a little jab or two. It seems to me that the author who wrote that piece you linked in the JR was aiming at them and hit Condi. I would say she hit the wrong target.

First of all, Condi is way, way more talented and intelligent than McCain, so that rules her out as a VP pick; McCain wants a toady, not someone with a brain. Second, like Wolfowitz & Rumsfeld, she is a very serious overachiever who has a very deep understanding of how the world really works. That puts me in the NeoCon camp, but that's how I see things. I believe in America and her ideals, hopes and dreams, and I believe that America is a force for good in the world; that those of us who have been blessed to call America our home have a moral & spiritual obligation to make the world a better place.

Third, she understands the quality of loyalty. Although she was a much better NSA than SOS, I'm beginning to think that the SOS job is one of the biggest career killers ever invented. However, unlike Colin Powell, I don't recall her ever stabbing the President in the back during her time as SOS. No doubt every time the Palestinian issue comes up in the WH, there is much moaning & gnashing of teeth; it seems to have become the "Berlin issue" of the 21st century. Like most of us here, it drives me crazy when she asks Israel to show restraint and shows support for the Palestinians. However, we are still sending Israel tons of military & financial aid and if they ever got in a real bad jam, we would probably do whatever it takes, just like in 1973, to keep them afloat. So a lot of the rhetoric that her & the State Dept spew is just that. It's mainly meant for other countries and whomever may be listening.

Unfortunately, the Middle East is a dangerous and messed up part of the world. Although it doesn't seem like it, a lot has been accomplished there in the last few years. For one thing, we have managed to get most of the ME states on our sides with regards to Syria & Iran. That may not seem like a big thing to some, but it's a lot more important to me than whatever happens to the Palestinians. Both Syria and Iran are responsible for the killing and maiming of thousands of our soldiers. Although there are a lot of people who would rather we attack them militarily or bomb them back to the stone-age, other, hopefully wiser minds, have decided otherwise, at least for now. However, I doubt Israel could be putting on the show it has putting on lately without a lot of secret diplomacy going on. For that, I give Condi & Bush a lot of credit.

So I could go on, but I think you get the point.

God Bless America.

Thanks again for a polite and reasoned response. I don't object to Condi talking about her memories of the civil rights era. But this talk about a “rebirth” is insulting because it basically disparages the Founding Fathers and every generation of Americans prior to about 1964.

The “birth defect” reference is even more insulting. If it hadn't been for slavery, there would not even be a significant black population here. So what, exactly, is her complaint? Is she suggesting that we should have imported large numbers of blacks circa 1776 and then invited them to the Constitutional Convention a few years later, so that they could have added some African input to the Constitution? And then given them full voting rights, and given the vote to women (whose exclusion from the franchise is also seen as evil by modern liberal sensibilities) as well?

If that had happened, there would have been no Bill of Rights and no America as we today understand it. Not to mention that the reason we imported slaves from Africa was because that's where slavery was most widely practiced and thus where slaves were cheap and plentiful. Condi would never attack the history of African nations the way she's attacked ours. If America had a birth defect, those places are terminal cancers. They'd still be practicing slavery in Africa today if the Europeans hadn't put a stop to it.

If she wants to say America isn't always perfect, that's one thing, though saying it on the world stage may not be the best idea. The reason so many of us here respect Clarence Thomas so much is that he doesn't dwell on our nation's faults. He understands the disrespect for the Constitution that would inevitably flow outward if he repeatedly rambled on and on about how our Founders gave us a defective nation that badly needed correcting, and how as a black American he still sees our nation's "birth defects". It's even more dangerous to do this in the international arena when dealing with terrorist states and violent despotisms.

She's projecting modern liberal and neo-con sensibilities onto the world stage. Democracy may be fine, but the idea that everyone is “ready” for it at any given time is ludicrous. To simply announce that everyone on earth should live in a democracy, and that America was defective until circa 1964 because we weren't a perfect democracy, is a very irresponsible program for a secretary of state to be pursuing.

Ultimately this is Bush's doing, because he believes all this nonsense as well. It's straight out of the neo-con playbook. It's why neo-con books often have utopian titles such as “The End of Racism” or “The End of History”. All we have to do is establish democracy and all those racial problems, or other problems, will be solved. We can invite millions of third worlders into the U.S. and it won't change a thing because we have a “democracy”. We can establish democracy in Iraq and people who have hated each other for a thousand years will suddenly sing kum-ba-ya. We won't really even have history any more, because history is a record of change and conflict, and once everyone lives in a democracy there will be no need to ever change and no need to ever fight.

That's Bush-McCain-Condi, and it's practically destroyed the GOP. McCain may win this election because Obama is so horrible to contemplate, but he'll damage conservatism even more once in office.

Thank you for a nice response! I don’t fully agree with your analysis but it’s late and I just finished a long post. Plus, you wrote so pleasantly, so I won’t argue with you! :-)

I will agree with you on this, though:

GOD BLESS AMERICA!

Also, I apologize for being so harsh earlier. I can be mean sometimes! :-)

But this talk about a “rebirth” is insulting because it basically disparages the Founding Fathers and every generation of Americans prior to about 1964.

No, it was not meant that way, so why take it that way, unless of course, their is some axe grinding going on, which is what I detected in that article.

More to the point, you can't argue a intellectual observation with a common sense logical response. The two are on different planes of logic and thought.

You are looking at race with a gut level response that states the general point of the futility of it all. The never ending anger and victimization plays that are a part of modern day activism. Much of it does incite resentment from the majority. I am well aware of that.

Condi was looking at it from a different perspective as a historical turning point in the U.S. cultural growth. The founding fathers have no dog in that hunt. They laid a foundation. The rest is and was up to us. They began with "All men are created equal". A salient point in racial relations. They actually began the process that resulted in Condi's rebirth, as she puts it eloquently from a intellectually expanded use of a simple analogy.

You are attacking the analogy and not understanding the underlying comparison. It was a cultural rebirth because something new came from it and it hurt to accomplish it. It hurt a lot.

Women often use this analogy. How many times have you heard a woman compare a task to child birth. Men don't use it because we don't birth. We create.

I don't know if you are male or female, but it should not matter. Condi was not inferring that everything that came before was not relevant. She was saying that the relevancy of the constitution had finally born fruit in this one respect. This one concept of the many that the founders incubated. All of those concepts have stood the test of time, but the equality part of the one concept is always a work in progress socially, even though the laws have been written. This was the the case in 1950 Alabama. It took a huge social earthquake of sorts to adjust the social norms. Yet to be frank, the Constitutions words had been in print for over 150 years.

That's what she refers to, and she is right. A new social understanding of what those words meant and to whom, was born.

In fact, we are still sorting it out. To be honest.

That's Bush-McCain-Condi, and it's practically destroyed the GOP. McCain may win this election because Obama is so horrible to contemplate, but he'll damage conservatism even more once in office.

They are the administration of all, not just Conservatives.

Society is in the process of a common change that occurs periodically like a pendulum swinging to and fro.

We are shifting from center right to center and some more left. Bush is the last truly socially conservative president that you will see for a while. I can't say how long because these shifts are occurring with more speed than before due to communications improvements, and some draw backs in the truth. All this will be sorted out in time.

Conservatives of the social variety are being pushed back by their own party in this election. That's just a fact. It happened to the nativist right wing isolationists in past elections and it's continuing. The Republican party is adjusting to meet the political constraints of the present day body politic.

Wait around long enough, and it will all change again, like the weather and it's seasons.

I've been around long enough to see this occur and it's not going to stop simply because I am aware of it.

I think McCain can win, but I doubt I can vote for him. The truth is, the party has stuck us with this guy, and they did it because they believe he was the chosen one. The one who can win in this political climate. They maybe right.

I don't like this change any more than you do. Perhaps even less, but I understand what is occurring, and why issues like immigration were poison in this cycle. Why the hard right conservative part of the base will be in limbo for a while.

The fact is, we had our chance and we blew it, but that's a entirely different subject for much debate.

The idea of politics is to win, not to hold a broad based coalition together. The coalition that elected Bush twice is dead. It's worse than dead.

A new one will form for 2012. It's already in the works.

Condi may not have meant that the “rebirth” of America in the sixties wiped the slate clean of pre-sixties America, but that's the inevitable consequence of that thinking. Once a nation decides that “tolerance” and “non-discrimination” will be its most important mission, it's doomed. From that point on, there will be an ever-expanding number of groups with an ever-increasing number of demands. Racial groups, feminists, homosexuals....you name it. History is slowly refashioned to benefit the desires of these various groups and their demands.

This doesn't happen overnight. It's a slow process. But the trend line is easily discernible. You can see it even in something as trite as pop culture. When the “Dukes of Hazzard” TV show aired in the early 80s, no one got their panties in a twist over a car called the General Lee with a rebel flag on the roof. When the movie version was made a few years ago, it triggered “controversy”. Now, a few years later, people are forced to grovel and apologize for having a souvenir coffee mug from Gettysburg sitting on their desk, because it has both the Union and Confederate flags on it.

Over time, the same “logic” used to eradicate Confederate history will be used against the Founding Fathers. It's already starting. We have a vague “president's day” now instead of celebrating George Washington. Only Martin Luther King gets his own holiday, soon possibly to be joined by Cesar Chavez, and in another 25 years by Gloria Steinem Day or Barney Frank Day. Schools named after Washington, Madison, Jefferson, and others will slowly be renamed.

I work in a college environment and there's been a sea change in the past 25 years among students. Very few give a damn about the Founding Fathers. They just aren't relevant to them. If they think about them at all, it's that they were slaveowners, sexists who didn't give women the vote, racists who stole land from the Indians and later the Mexicans. They were homophobes and bigots.

Eventually, they'll be “wished into the cornfield”, to steal a phrase from the Twilight Zone. This obsession with equality and non-discrimination eventually leads to cultural suicide because the various groups we go out of our way to tolerate don't reciprocate. Occasionally people see this, and they always act shocked, but then they shrug and go back to business as usual, which is the dismantling of our nation and its history.

For example, people were “shocked” that Obama attends a hate-filled racist church. The British were “shocked” when British-born Muslims carried out terrorist attacks. People in Canada are “shocked” that the nation's “gay rights” law is being interpreted as criminalizing any public disapproval of homosexuality. But the shock is never enough to wake people up because they are too programmed by liberalism to ever do anything about it. The demands for open borders in America actually increased, rather than decreased, after 9/11. The long term effect of Obama’s church being exposed will be that anti-white, anti-American rants by the likes of Jeremiah Wright will become more acceptable, while people who object to it will be increasingly marginalized and even penalized. Europe & Canada are a bit further down this road than we are. A few months ago in Belgium, people were arrested for staging a march opposing the Islamization of Europe. The march was banned because the Muslims might have reacted violently to it. In Holland, Geert Wilders had to put his film on the internet after the Dutch government banned it. But any attack on traditional European or Judeo-Christian culture is permitted and even subsidized by those governments.

Obama got a little bit of heat for his association with Wright, and he had to vaguely “explain” it, but guess what? He's still in the race and many people have forgotten about it. Imagine if a white candidate belonged to a comparable racist white church with a raving loon pastor. He'd have been driven out of the race and would have had to resign his Senate seat. Trent Lott got demoted and nearly run out of town because he told old Strom Thurmond on his 100th birthday that he should’ve been elected president way back in ‘48. Unlike Obama, Lott had to grovel for weeks and apologize and beg forgiveness, and all he did was say a kind word to an old man on his birthday. Obama sat in the pews of a hate monger for twenty years and gave him thousands of dollars and he hasn't apologized for it and never will.

To see the future of this country, just look at the behavior of Bush & McCain toward their critics. When attacked from the left, their response is never anger or name-calling. They express regret that their critics disagree with them, hold their hand out to them and offer to work more with them in the future. But when they receive heat from the right, their reaction is anger and attack. Conservatives questioned Bush's nomination of Harriet Miers and both George & Laura accused their critics of “sexism”, notwithstanding the fact that many of those critics wanted Janice Brown or Priscilla Owen to get the appointment. Bush & McCain have both called opponents of their open borders agenda “bigots” and xenophobes.

The truth is, the NeoCons are just moderate liberals. The main difference between them and the far left is this. The NeoCons see America as a flawed nation until the 1960s. Since then, we've been improving, but still have a long way to go. Those improvements are so good that we need to carry them further (importing the third world to America will help in this regard) and to export them to places like Iraq. The far left sees America as fatally flawed. Yes, the various revolutions of the sixties (racial, sexual, anti-war) helped a little bit, but really America was a bad idea from the very beginning and it's best just to pull the plug. There's no need to spread Americanism to Iraq or anyplace else because those places are better than we are already.

And so, America and other Western nations constantly move leftward. There is no real pendulum swing. We alternate between periods when we move left rapidly, and periods when we stay still or maybe creep a tad to the left. Hillary & Obama want us to move left rapidly. Bush & McCain want us to move slowly, while retaining the trappings of a historical nation, even though we have long since ceased to be that nation, a nation conceived in liberty.

BTW, since you asked, I'm a male. I'd better be, given my huge crushes on Ziyi Zhang & Takako Matsu!

Enjoyed the exchange.

While I understand and relate to your concerns, I don't give them the import and long term worry that you attribute to them.

Social changes and in fact most all changes are constantly and predictably over done and over hyped.

Changes, both good and bad occur over time, and it is not the changes that concern me, it is the overall effects and how they bode for the future that I look at. There are some things that leftward movement over time will likely result in positive things, and others, not so much.

A good example is the future of capitalism. There will come a time in our human progression where growth no longer occurs and priorities change. I could happen that capitalism become a hindrance and not a catalyst for growth as it is today and for the foreseeable future. As a smalltime investor, this change would be a big one for me....LOL...

The very definition of conservatism is essentially the resistance to change. In my case, there are some I resist and others that I accept. If this makes me a moderate, then I accept that because I view some conservative thinking as pure populism on it's face and dangerous to the future. Other issues I embrace with enthusiastic approval. Same goes for the left but to a lesser extent as they are almost always in error.

I try to give everything a fair consideration and in the area of race, I allow a great deal of leeway for experimentation and change, as long as it appears to be positive for the future. A example would be that I fully expect and do not fear the fact that as a white man I will one day be a minority. I don't see this as a negative or a positive thing. Many do however. They sure do, but they can't seem to express it or deal with it.

You are right about the pendulum swinging more in one direction then the other, but that is due to the fact that conservatism is the door stop for change, and the natural inclination over time is to overcome the door stop and change in spite of it as consensus is built within any society.

The important thing is to filter change and not stop it, in my humble opinion. If we go too far, which we did, as Republicans and we are paying for that now and since 2006, we have made a tactical error.

The price for that error will take us out of the game, if we are not careful and understand that the ground underneath has shifted.

Apology accepted FRiend! :-)