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.
Not to mention, giving a scumbag socialist like Obama and the Dems a stronger political hand to play.
What hand are you referring to?
All I remember hearing about is the "president's failed policies" of vetoeing the SCHIP bill leaving millions of children without healthcare, along with millions of adults by not promoting commie healthcare for all.
His failure to mandate enough environazi green energy crap, instead of insisting on drilling here, now!
Then of course President Bush's biggest failed policy, in the eyes of the DemonRATS and Paulites, that of remaining steadfast in the WOT, supporting our troops and our allies, and not abandoning the Iraqis!
MeInsane and all those that forced his selection are the only ones that gave the "scumbag socialist" ineligible, islamofascist, foreign born, communist basturd the People's House.
Conservatives and republicans are two different animals. Hopefully, with the help of Alan Keyes, conservatives will not have to wander in the wilderness. I could care less what happens to the republicans.
If you want to hate the GOP, that's your decision. In my book, you're nothing but a malcontent and a hypocrite.
You'd rather have your efforts go towards a fringe political party and a crazy kook named Alan Keyes. So be it. Let me know when the AIP gets one of their own elected.
vetoeing = vetoing (Duh!)
Supporters of Alan Keyes were among the earliest supporters of Doug Lamborn.
Is that all you can do is regurgitate the Obama/RINO talking points?
So, I take it you’re admitting that you didn’t lift a finger to help Rosanna Pulido, just like the entire “leadership” of your party, even though she was “your” nominee.
Top Contributors to Douglas L. Lamborn (R) during the 2006 Election Cycle
Rank Donor Amount (US Dollars)
1 Every Republican is Crucial PAC $ 10,000
1 Independent Community Bankers of America $ 10,000
1 Keep Our Majority PAC $ 10,000
1 National Auto Dealers Assn $ 10,000
1 Together for Our Majority $ 10,000
1 Minuteman PAC $ 10,000
Source: The Center for Responsive Politics' www.OpenSecrets.org site. Note: Contributions are not from the organizations themselves, but are rather from the organization's PAC, employees or owners. Totals include subsidiaries and affiliates.
How's that?
Sure can. Ever hear of the Medicare prescription drug program that Bush promoted while a candidate for potus in 2000? Started out as a $150-billion ten year program for the elderly poor. Quickly turned into the largest expansion of the federal bureaucracy since Medicare itself became law under LBJ. Current price tag: one-trillion dollar government entitlement program covering just its first ten years.
How about Bush`s more than doubling of the Dept of Education budget from $57 billion to $118-billion. And lets not forget Bush`s huge increases in non-military discretionary spending.
Btw, the WOT is related to foreign policy, not domestic policy. I supported Bush`s foreign policy, b ut it was his Iraq policy by which he lost his Independent supporters and became mired in the 30% range. If it wasn't for conservative Republicans standing with the President, he would have had even lower support.
McCain was a weak candidate. Choosing Palin as his VP running mate saved McCain from a Goldwater level defeat. But it was Bush43 who did the serious damage to the GOP and help to undermine conservatism. Bush43 is why we have Obama in the WH today.
I see you're a Bush supporter and a Keyes supporter. Now that makes very strange political bedfellows. LOL
Now, how much did YOU personally send to Doug Lamborn?
Btw, Rosanna Pulido was not my candidate and I don't represent the GOP.
Again, tell me when an AIP candidate gets elected to office. Until then, you’ re just blowing hotair.
>>>>>Is that all you can do is regurgitate the Obama/RINO talking points?
ROTFLMBO
Let me know when the Republican Party “leadership” finds even a single backbone among the whole lot of them.
It's no secret the GOP is shrinking as a political party and for it to grow, serious changes will have to be made. But there are plenty of good solid conservatives in the House and a few in the Senate for the GOP to build on. Also, recent numbers show the GOP and the Dems tied in recent generic polling.
OTOH, where is the AIP? I'll tellya --- NOWHERE. When it comes to electing their own candidates, the AIP has nothing going for it. If you want people to join your AIP, you'll have to get a better strategy. I must say, right now you sure have a weird way of going about recruiting folks to join you. IMO, your association with Alan Keyes isn't helping increasing your membership either.
Well .. aside from the fact that Mr. Feder seems to have assumed that all the DC-based Republican groups are “conservatives” .. he fails to understand that republicans and conservatives are TWO DIFFERENT THINGS.
Also, mixed in with both of those groups are the extreme right and independents.
It’s ignorant to lump all of those groups together. It’s even more ignorant to call them all “conservatives”.
I am a conservative - my sister is a republican. We understand the difference, and realize we do not agree on some things.
This sentence is the clue: “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; ... and that a belief in God is incompatible with the Democrat Party?” THE CORRECT WORD HERE IS “REPUBLICAN LUMINARIES” .. not “conservative luminaries”.
You can only judge a “conservative” if you put him/her upside a person like Rush Limbaugh. Rush never hides from saying the truth about the democrats or the “weenie” republicans. When you’re a conservative .. you are a conservative first .. and you never give up on what you believe .. no matter what.
There is no such thing as a “so-called conservative movement” .. it’s more properly named the “moderate movement”. The moderates have their own movement - headed by John McCain, Lindsay Graham, et al. The conservatives are more properly seen in the likes of Mike Pence and Pete Hoekstra.
We cannot allow ANY OF THE MEDIA to portray conservatives as “weenie republicans” .. never, ever.
And .. for further clarification - what are the “weenie republicans” going to do with the newest polls showing that 51% of Americans claim to be PRO-LIFE .. while the moderates are pushing for the repubs to get rid of the anti-abortion stance. This item alone separates the real conservatives from the “weenie republicans”.
This is the major reason the Stupid Party will not regain control of Congress in 2010.
Their leaders are too afraid of the evening news.
Try Jack Cashill at World Net Daily.
He just did a documentary on The March for Life
http://thineeyes.org
Bishop Finn Endorses Documentary on ‘March for Life’
From last week’s issue of The Catholic Key:
‘Sobering’ yet ‘joyful’ film documents March for Life
http://catholickey.blogspot.com/2009/05/bishop-finn-endorses-documentary-on.html
Jack Cashill column: How Notre Dame Thwarted Pro-Life Film
Jack Cashill
Are you suggesting that Jennifer Granholm would be a better Supreme Court justice than Calligula’s horse?
Ms. Pulido had no chance of winning her election. It would have been foolish and a waste of time and money for the RNC to support her.
Might be a salient point except for one thing: They say that about all conservative candidates. Wake up.
The Pulido race was very winnable. All that was needed was enough resources to turn out an additional 25,000 votes. It was a poorly attended special election.
But the Republican Party doesn't even try. They have given up on the urban areas, leaving them totally to the tender mercies of the socialist Democrats.
You miss 100% of the shots you do not take.
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