Posted on 05/16/2009 9:07:01 AM PDT by EternalVigilance
If the modern conservative movement has a patron saint, it’s Oscar Mayer.
I recently attended a conference to address media bias. Present were representatives of several DC-based conservative groups.
Some were hesitant about a counterattack on the mainstream media. Why bite the hand that bashes you?
How can we expect them to work with us, if we begin by assailing them, they plaintively inquired? For a minute, I thought I’d wandered into the recovery room for male pups who’ve been clear-cut.
Conservatives working with the liberal media? Swell idea! It would be like the Chief Rabbi of Berlin working with Goebbels back in the day.
While impersonating journalists, mediatoids continually agitate and indoctrinate for collectivism, the deconstruction of the family and a prostrate foreign policy.
They portray conservatives as bigots, warmongering Neanderthals, religious fanatics and heartless proponents of Social Darwinism. A Zionist would get more of a break at a Hamas rally than conservatives do from the mainstream media.
While we’re at it, maybe we should try working with George Soros, Janeane Garofalo and Barney Frank too.
With honorable exception, the D.C. conservative leadership has a pathological need for respectability and a corresponding aversion to sounding radical. The good opinion of their enemies means more to them than the convictions of those they claim to represent.
How many conservative luminaries are willing to publicly confess that which they know to be true: that Barack Obama is a socialist who’s dedicated to destroying freedom in this country; that the media are anti-American twits; that Islam is the religion of terrorism; that homosexuality is a mental disorder and that a belief in God is incompatible with the Democratic Party?
The right has repaired to the fainting couch after a severe attack of the vapors.
Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who’s usually a lion when standing for conservative principles, became a small, cheese-eating creature when interviewed by Mark Halperin on MSNBC recently.
Referring to Obama’s forthcoming Supreme Court nomination, Halperin asked Sessions: “Could you vote for an openly gay justice?”
Correct answer: No. Next question.
Sessions: “Well… it depends on their personal ethics and standards, and their legal skill and ability. I don’t think a person who acknowledges that they have gay tendencies is disqualified (from) the job. We’ll have to see.” Squeak.
Where do ethical standards come from if not Judeo-Christian morality? What are the personal ethics and standards of someone addicted to buggery who seeks to subvert the moral order?
But, like many in the movement’s leadership, Sessions dreads being called a homophobe. I wonder if the Alabamian could give us an example or two of homosexuals whose personal ethics and standards would qualify them to rule on the Constitution. As a preacher friend of mine says: The same Bible that tells me murder and theft are wrong also condemns sodomy.
Those conservatives who’ve had the greatest impact on the republic in the 20th century – Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan – were also the most direct and unapologetic.
Goldwater’s 1964 campaign was a failure in every way save one: He had the guts to express the views that made him a pariah at the time, but which established a political beachhead for anti-communism, the free market and limited government.
Recall the establishment’s horror at that memorable line in Goldwater’s acceptance speech: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice no virtue.” I can imagine Beltway conservatives restating that as: “Defending freedom is nice – as long as extremism is avoided – and justice is okay too, in moderation.”
Does anyone remember what, if anything, Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney and Henry Cabot Lodge stood for? Goldwaterism meant something (even if the Senator did get squishy in his dotage). If not for Goldwater in 1964, there would have been no Reagan in 1980.
Ronald Reagan gave the most radical articulation of conservative values in the entire ’64 campaign, with his “A Time for Choosing” speech.
During the boom years of the early Johnson administration, when the Great Society seemed so sensible, forward-looking and compassionate, and the nation worshipped at the shrine of “our martyred president,” the Gipper had the audacity to warn: “We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”
Reagan’s tough-talk catapulted him into the governorship of California two years later and the presidency 16 years hence. The weenie conservatives all want to be Ronald Reagan. But haven't the vaguest idea of how to act like him.
The modern conservative movement was built on radicalism – the courage to call a communist a communist, a socialist a socialist and John F. Kennedy a bumbling idiot who followed in the statist footsteps of another silver-spoon socialist, Franklin Dumbano Roosevelt.
Patriots are confrontational by nature.
In the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers damned George III in words that left no doubt of their contempt for the British monarch. (“The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states.”) Aw, come on! Isn’t that harsh?
How did they expect King George to work with them if they began by attacking him? Answer: They’d tried working with him. It didn’t work.
We’ve spent 45 years trying to work with the media, which is more shamelessly biased today than it was four decades ago. During the past campaign, members of the fourth estate became Obama’s Monica Lewinsky, metaphysical knee-pads and all.
In the 1930s, a once-prominent member of the British Parliament was warned by cooler heads to moderate his views regarding Germany’s new government. (After 1.1 million British dead in the Great War, nobody wanted to hear about a rising menace on the continent.) For his fiery rhetoric, he suffered years of political exile.
Other than history buffs, is the name Stanley Baldwin familiar to anyone? Neville Chamberlain’s name is synonymous with appeasement.
Winston Spencer Churchill stands for courage and a gritty determination to preserve Western Civilization in the face of a new barbarism which at times seemed unstoppable.
Many contemporary conservative leaders are more Chamberlainian than Churchillesque.
They’re comfortable with their DC offices and their staffs. They want to be talking heads on Sunday shows. They don’t want to be thought of as radical or unreasonable, especially by the media whose attention they crave. Losing like ladies and gentleman comes naturally to them.
As a general principle, wisdom and fortitude are found in conservative leaders in direct proportion to their distance from D.C. Thus St. Louis-based Phyllis Schlafly and Don Wildmon, down in Tupelo, Mississippi, are among the toughest voices on the right, and the most effective.
You would have thought our present affliction would incite a determination to tell the unvarnished truth – to describe reality in the stark terms befitting a nation hurtling toward the abyss.
There’s a very committed and very clever collectivist Caligula in the Oval Office, who’s dedicated to the destruction of the old America, so a brave, new empathy-driven, income-redistributionist republic can arise from the ashes.
Besides giving Washington a stranglehold on business, starting with the banks and auto industry, he intends to destroy the hard-earned assets of the middle class through taxes and inflation, the better to make us dependent on the state. With national health care, he seeks to give bureaucrats life-and-death power over the American people, all in the name of compassion.
He intends to so entrench the power of his party as to make future elections meaningless – by conferring citizenship on hordes of illegal aliens, financing a partisan army out of the treasury, allowing labor leaders to bludgeon workers into their ranks via the so-called card-check system (increasing labor money, from forced dues, flowing into Democratic coffers) and cutting off the legs of his opponents (that would be us).
We saw the first stage in the Department of Homeland Security’s smear equating pro-lifers, gun owners and tax-protestors with terrorists.
Stage II will include destroying talk-radio, via local content boards (Son of the Fairness Doctrine), which will be used to deny license-renewal to stations with conservative programming.
Stage III will criminalize speech (guess whose?) in the name of fighting hate crimes.
Meanwhile, the party of socialism, sodomy and surrender has never had more of a death-grip on the House and Senate. Congress is close to becoming as independent and deliberative as North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly
In the face of the foregoing, some conservative notables still pull their punches to guard their reputations. They can imagine no greater catastrophe befalling humanity than their not being invited on the Sunday news shows or asked to write op-eds for The Washington Post.
They’ve convinced themselves that hesitancy is credibility, that we can’t lose our heads by throwing around words like “socialists,” “anti-American” and “traitor,” however applicable they may be.
If caution worked, John McCain would be president. He refused to attack the messiah’s connections to a rabid racist (Wright), an unrepentant ex-terrorist (Ayers) and a Nazi (Farrakhan).
The result was a man who’d served in government for almost a quarter-century losing to the farthest left, most inexperienced, presidential candidate in history.
Then there’s Alan Keyes. Last week, the former U.N. ambassador and erstwhile presidential candidate was arrested on the grounds of Notre Dame University for protesting Obama’s May 17 commencement speech at the ostensibly Catholic university.
“I will step foot on the Notre Dame campus to lift up the standard that protects the life of innocent children of this and every generation,” the ex-ambassador explained.
“I will do it all day and every day from now until the Master comes if need be, though it means I shall be housed every day in the prison house of lies and injustice that Obama and Jenkins (Notre Dame’s president) and their minions now mean to construct for those who will never be still and silent in the face of their mockery of God and justice, their celebration of evil.”
What’s this? Is Keyes accusing the President of the United States of lying, mocking God and justice and celebrating evil? He is – and God bless him for it.
Alan may have a penchant for quixotic campaigns. But when it comes to candor and clarity, he’s the ayatollah of tell-it-like-it-is. Keyes isn’t merely saying the president is wrong and misguided but one who mocks God and justice and celebrates evil – in other words, is evil himself.
The left had no trouble calling Bush evil (at worst, he was misguided). Why is it so hard for us to tell the truth about Obama and the media?
What good does it do to get arrested? What good does moral clarity do? What good will it do to tell the American people that the media are liars and propagandists who’ve turned journalistic ethics into a sick joke?
They may be small steps toward waking the American people from their trance and helping them to understand that this administration and its media Orcs are monsters who, if allowed to proceed unchecked, will destroy our economy, security and rights as Americans.
As they’re hauled off to reeducation centers, the Miss Manners conservatives – polite and reasonable to the end – can take comfort in the fact that they kept their cool.
Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant. He also maintains his own website, DonFeder.com.
I wholly concur with his exposition of what has happened to the so-called conservative movement. It lines up with my own experience exactly.
Great piece.
Compromising with evil is what evil wants because that is how they always win.Integrity is staying loyal to one’s principles.
It's time to get active, and loud, people!
Let's roll!
I'm no fan of Obama, but this is a poor metaphor.
Caligula was an insane, blatantly sexually deviant wierdo. For all we can tell at this distance, he had no particular political goals other than outraging the aristocracy by making his horse consul, declaring himself a god, etc. He also got a kick out of killing friends, relations and political opponents.
For all Obama's flaws, there's not much evidence he meets any of these criteria for being a new Caligula.
"They portray conservatives as bigots, warmongering Neanderthals, religious fanatics and heartless proponents of Social Darwinism."
True. But some are talking like Social Darwinists.
It's a strange phenomenon: some talking like Social Darwinists while liberals promote the atheist and evolutionary side of Darwinism and at the same time claiming to be egalitarian. True conservatism doesn't have anything to do with this. Hillary's hero, Margaret Sanger, was into the eugenics and Social Darwinism.
Another 15 minutes of fame for Alan Keyes doesn't begin to lay the groundwork for conservatives either retaking control of the GOP, or beating back the secularists who now control WashDC. Political firebrands like Keyes are a great delight, especially on issues like abortion. However, what conservatives really need today is, leadership.
Fox showed a clip this morning that should have shook Christians to their knees: A sick, elderly priest being arrested at Notre Dame, asking the police who were loading him on a gurney to put him in the paddy wagon, “Why are you arresting a priest who only wants to save the lives of babies?” Good question. When God punishes the USA, and He most definitely will because we richly deserve it, we will have the answer to the priest’s plaintive question.
Anyone who can recite Monty Python from memory is familiar with the name Stanly Baldwin!
Re Alan Keyes, he's an interesting guy, but he's nuts.
It's because Notre Dame is currently being controlled by people who are not Catholics, who think it is more important to be connected with Obama than Christianity or Catholic moral teachings. There was no sensible reason to arrest that guy who was only protesting peacefully.
Notre Dame's Kabuki Dance with Obama and the Culture of Death
No. He’s the sanest person I’ve ever met. It’s most of the rest of the country that has lost their ever-loving minds. Sad to see you pushing the Alinskyite Obama talking points against this good and courageous man.
Your party, just like Washington DC, is almost entirely bereft of true leadership. Wake up.
As to Keyes, your comment shows that you have lost the ability to recognize leadership. You think politics is a fun spectator sport or something.
Most Republcan politicians are hoping to sneak into office through the side door, without having to actually take a position that will draw hostile fire.
Its the wrong strategy. What is the right strategy?
Hold your flag high. Hold your principles high, and attack, attack, attack. Always on principled grounds, because thats the only way you educate and persuade the great unwashed unprincipled middle. Forget bipartisanship, if it means you deny your principles. Because if you’ve got yourself voted into office under false pretenses, you may as well be a Democrat.
Is Alan Keyes crazy? Wrong question. The right question is, where were the other so-called conservative so-called leaders? If you want to know who our conservative leaders are, its easy to find them. They’re in the mosh pit, mixing it up, swinging for the jaw. You don’t see many of our leaders in there? Its because either they aren’t conservatives, or they aren’t leaders. Is a crazy man all we’ve got? Then either he’s not crazy, or some of our other supposed leaders had better get off the bench and get into the fight.
I'm not a luminary, but I will affirm it to be so.
Follow his LoyaltoLiberty.com blog. There’s already a lot of substance there about all this, and after this particular battle is over, you can be sure that he’ll be writing more.
Wow. That’s spot on.
Do we really need to be ‘moderate’ now? Where has it got us? /dumbass rhetorical question
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