Posted on 09/17/2009 6:57:22 AM PDT by Titus Quinctius Cincinnatus
As someone who enjoys standing on the moral high ground, I worry that a flash flood of insanity will knock me into the mud. The moral high ground I stand on is conservative principles. The insanity is the likes of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage, and disgruntled citizens at town hall meetings. The mud is where the line is blurred between conservatism and liberalism. I'm a good swimmer, but even I doubt that I could swim through the thick muck that conservatives have created with ludicrous attacks on Obama and other Democrats.
My father once told me that he who throws dirt loses ground. If that is the case, conservatives have lost most of their territory. Every time I visit conservative websites or turn on talk radio or popular news commentaries, I am disgusted with what conservatism has become. No longer are we the intellectual movement that embraced Barry Goldwater. No longer are we the principled movement that elected Ronald Reagan. Instead, we are the ignorant movement that harps on whether Obama has a valid birth certificate instead of his policies. Instead, we are the unprincipled movement that curses liberals like the late Ted Kennedy for his immorality while shielding Mark Sanford for his immorality.
Conservatives have embraced a brand of conservatism that makes me sick. We rally around egotistical personalities like Michael Savage and take every word he says as gospel truth. We eagerly support mentally unstable people like Glenn Beck who wrote about common sense, but has probably never read Common Sense. We blindly follow pompous, hypocritical windbags like Rush Limbaugh and even baldly say he is the face of the Republican Party. We applaud irate citizens who disrespect elected officials by threatening them, cursing them, and screaming at them. Quite frankly, we've become the tin-foil hat wearing, bomb shelter building, crazy eyed folks that we ridiculed a year ago. We've become the very thing we despised: lunatics unable to engage in intelligent discourse.
In our mad haste to recover from a resounding loss in 2008, we abandoned the principles that distinguished conservatives from liberals: reason, rationality, and independent thinking. Of course, we've been trending toward this state since the Clinton administration, but no one could have guessed how far conservatives would fall. We lost our reasoning abilities when we clung to conspiracy theories instead of doing a bit of research to discern truth. We lost our rationality when we decided to scream, rant, and rave at town hall meetings instead of calmly discussing our disagreement. We lost our independent thinking when we decided to blindly follow radio and television personalities instead of relying on our own common sense.
The current state of conservatism is broken beyond recognition. We aren't standing on what defined us: limited government; protection of life, liberty, and property; and limited spending. We are standing on: any-sized government as long as we get what we want; protection of some life, liberty, and property; and any spending as long as we spend it on things we like. And we have the audacity to accuse liberals of double standards and hypocrisy? I want my ideology back!
We are at a crossroads. We can keep going left towards the opposition, or we can go right towards the principles that defined a generation. I'm determined to claw my way back towards a conservative movement void of talking heads, talking points, and lunacy. If we want conservative principles to govern America again, we must leave ignorance, irrationality, and insanity to the liberals. Until we do this, how can we claim to be on the moral high ground? It's high time for conservatives to stop masquerading as liberals. We need to reclaim what made us great. We can change America for the better, but we will leave her in a worse condition if we continue to act like liberals. Give me change I can believe in.
Sorry, but I refuse to accept the argument that someone is a conservative if and only if they think BHO doesn't have a valid birth certificate.
“Sorry, but I refuse to accept the argument that someone is a conservative if and only if they think BHO doesn’t have a valid birth certificate. “
False analogy, and you are confusing conservatives with RINO’s.
A fun read, but a childish article.
“We lost our rationality when we decided to scream, rant, and rave at town hall meetings instead of calmly discussing our disagreement.”
Yes, be nice, speak softly, and watch the steam roller flatten you...sometimes you gotta speak up!!!!!!!!!!
Thank you!
I don’t know any conservative who shielded Mark Sanford.
I'm curious which conservatives the author thinks are shielding Sanford. All conservatives I'm aware of have called for his resignation.
Also, AFAIK, Sanforsd's immorality hasn't resulted in any young women dying.
Conservatives completely discounting Beck and Limbaugh do themselves and conservatism a disservice.
Recent history: Beck and ACORN. Do their misdeeds come to light if not for Beck? What about Van Jones?
The people that slam Limbaugh from either side, as usual, probably don’t listen to him for long stretches. His ‘amazing feats’ of predicting liberal strategy and talking points aren’t really amazing when you consider how regimented the thinking of the lefties is but he still takes the bat out their hands and that drives them mad.
If participatory democracy is considered distasteful then color me tacky.
This is a joke, right?
This article is ridiculous garbage, and completely one person’s opinion. And a stupid opinion it is, too, if I may say so.
I think insanity can be found in the likes of those who seem unable to go apesh*t about Fannie and Freddie and ACORN and abortion subsidies and still be willing to be friendly with the Franks & Pelosis and Reids and Obamas despite their involvement.
So you think that someone is a "RINO" if they don't accept the birther nonsense?
If so, then you're exactly the kind of person who needs to grow up.
So tell us, then - why is so much of Obama's past obscured? It's much bigger than whether he was born in Hawaii or Kenya - the most powerful man in this country is a cipher.
And tell us - should we just roll over for Obamacare and Cap 'n Tax and all the other liberal abominations? Genteel moderates like you are NOT the ones driving those off the rails - it is the activists who are doing such.
From recent reports from Byron York, George W. Bush held the conservative movement in disdain. He and his RINO cohorts also wrecked the GOP brand - so tell us again why we should listen to the centrists, who rationalized so much GOP wrongdoing.
In other words, shut up and get out of the way. Your side had their chance and blew it.
I went to the Renew America website and read the author’s follow up column where she says things like, “Gee, I wonder why my article roused so much anger”... Hey, you think it might be because you took broad brush swipes at Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck - and you couldn’t measure up intellectually with either one of them on your best day? - Glenn Beck singlehandedly outed Van Jones and is working hard on the ACORN situation (this points, if the young lady is reading this and wondering why I’m talking about this, this points to widespread corruption on the left and in the highest cubby holes of our govt).
So, does that help?
Dismissing Glenn Beck as mentally unstable? How original.
No, sadly, the joke is the fact that we have so many idiots running around proclaiming that you're not a "real conservative" unless you carry "Obama = Hitler" signs at a Tea Party and think Obama was born in Kenya.
The article makes the point that conservatism should be about the intellectual defence of our viewpoint, not childish screaming and carrying on. I'm sorry that you can't grasp that concept.
People who focus on being nice in a war accomplish something that is called “losing”
Anyone remember Jaun McCain
All to well.
The problem is that we have too many utterly stupid, vacuous, incapable-of-rubbing-two-brain-cells-together types out there who equate "speaking up" with "flinging poo." The former is great, the latter makes you a moron.
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