Why Neo-Conservatives Are not Real Conservatives

self

[weikel]

LOL Mencken was the man.

[logician2u]

Judge: A law student who grades his own examination papers. - H.L. Mencken.

Great one! I love it!

[Torie]

Except when he is taken up on appeal. :)

[BluesDuke]

More Mencken:

Jury - A group of twelve men who, having lied to the judge about their hearing, health and business engagements, have failed to fool him.

The lunatic fringe wags the underdog.

The theory seems to be that so long as a man is a failure he is one of God's chillun, but that as soon as he has any luck he owes it to the Devil.

The kind of man who demands that government enforce his ideas is always the kind whose ideas are idiotic.

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

[weikel]

Mencken should have been declared absolute Emperor of the world.

[BluesDuke]

Mencken should have been declared absolute Emperor of the world.

And he would have declared thus that the world was even more nuts than he already knew it to be. ;)

[Texasforever]

I assume you want an honest opinion so I will give mine. There is no such animal as a "neo-conservative" because that would make the greatest conservative president we have ever had a "neo"-conservative. He voted for FDR 4 times and called him the greatest of all presidents. He was a democrat for as long as he could and only left the democrats when it became apparent that communists heavily influenced the party. That was of course Ronald Reagan. The real debate should be, are Paleo-conservatives conservatives? The answer is no. They are what is left of the once powerful John Birch Society. They have splintered into various forms of libertarians, Southern party secessionists and Pat Buchanan Populism. They fall on the very furthest range of the far right. The conservative movement has never embodied that element.

Conservatives have always been and remain, free-market, free trade and pro-business and moderate to conservative on social issues. Conservatives are not protectionist nor are they isolationists. Conservatives can be roughly split 2 ways, Fiscally conservative but social moderates or both fiscally and socially conservative. The term conservative cannot define the extreme right because the extreme right share many of the same characteristics and goals of the extreme left and neither extreme has any ability to compromise their "principles" to make incremental gains. They brook no breach of political purity and take stances so extreme that only a tiny percentage of people see them as rational.

[weikel]

I would love for it to have happened during Woodrow Wilson's Presidency. Oh I would have loved to see Woodrow Wilson hanged.

[Mr. Mojo]

Perhaps Aaron changed his grip to the standard one between his 3rd and 4th year in the majors, when his homer total nearly doubled.

Pretty funny that Lardner didn't consider post-1920 baseball legitimate, and decided to quit his profession because of it. Imagine someone thinking that Lou Gehrig's numbers weren't "legitimate?" Just imagine what he would've thought of the tiny ballparks and nuclear baseballs of 2002?

Reminds me - not that there's any correlation - of Howard Cosell's disgust over watching Larry Holmes make mincemeat of Randall "Tex" Cobb's face (while Cobb was absorbing the punishement....laughing all the while) and then announcing that he had "finished announcing professional boxing." The guy had watched God knows how many brutal contests prior to that one, and by all accounts had enjoyed the sport immensely, but it took Tex Cobb and his "is that all you got, Larry" attitude to turn him off. I sure miss his repartee with Dandy Don Meredith on MNF though.

[logician2u]

Those are worth keeping, as many of Mencken's are.

You don't think he would be called a neo-conservative today, do you?

Not by folks who really knew him.

This is from Vin Suprynowicz:

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken

[weikel]

Here is Mencken's quote on lawyers

All the extravagance and incompetence of our present Government is due, in the main, to lawyers, and, in part at least, to good ones. They are responsible for nine-tenths of the useless and vicious laws that now clutter the statute-books, and for all the evils that go with the vain attempt to enforce them. Every Federal judge is a lawyer. So are most Congressmen. Every invasion of the plain rights of the citizens has a lawyer behind it. If all lawyers were hanged tomorrow, and their bones sold to a mah jong factory, we'd be freer and safer, and our taxes would be reduced by almost a half." –H.L. Mencken (1880-1956), "Breathing Space", The Baltimore Evening Sun, 1924 Aug 4. Reprinted in A Carnival of Buncombe.

[logician2u]

. . once powerful John Birch Society . .

ROTFLMAO

(Coca-Cola and snot on the keyboard delayed my reply.)

[Texasforever]

Actually they were powerful at one time. Both Goldwater and Reagan courted them. The JBS was the face of the "right" and is one reason the left had such an easy time i demonizing anyone that anyone that described themselves as "right"

[Mr. Mojo]

How about this one from Ambrose Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary:

POLITICIAN, n. An eel in the fundamental mud upon which the superstructure of organized society is reared. When we wriggles he mistakes the agitation of his tail for the trembling of the edifice. As compared with the statesman, he suffers the disadvantage of being alive.

[BluesDuke]

Pretty funny that Lardner didn't consider post-1920 baseball legitimate, and decided to quit his profession because of it. Imagine someone thinking that Lou Gehrig's numbers weren't "legitimate?" Just imagine what he would've thought of the tiny ballparks and nuclear baseballs of 2002?

Lardner backed away from baseball reporting but not from writing itself, entirely - though he might occasionally write a fictional piece involving baseball as he had loved it.

As for the "tiny ballparks" and "nuclear baseballs" of "2002," I would remind you that most of the ballparks in Cobb's and Gehrig's day were bandboxes or close enough to it (Wrigley Field, Fenway Park, Ebbets Field, Crosley Field in Cincinnati, old Baker Bowl in Philadelphia, were only five of the best known); even Yankee Stadium and Griffith Stadium (Washington) were bandboxes for lefthanded hitters (for righthanded hitters, mostly, they were murder). The Polo Grounds had a preposterously deep center field (483 feet straightaway) but if you were a dead pull or a straight opposite field hitter, the Polo Grounds was a bandbox for you, too.

And, I would also remind you that the balls in use since the mid-1980s have not been quite as juiced as people popularly enough believe - but even allowing for the steroid factor (and we still don't really know the extent of its usage; I don't doubt that some players have used them, but show me the evidence before someone says for certain that this or that one did), ballplayers since then, thanks to liberalised attitudes about strength training and weight workouts and the like (which were deemed unseemly and even dangerous in Lou Gehrig's day, even - and Gehrig was a bull of a man), are and have been simply stronger than they were in the Cobb-Ruth-Gehrig generations. (For that matter, even without steroids as a factor, today's football players would be far more physically strong than in the Unitas-Starr-Tittle-Butkus era, simply because they, too, have taken up more liberalised thinking about strength conditioning and weight training than their forebears, Da Bears and otherwise...)

[BluesDuke]

A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a thousand men with guns and masks. - Don Corleone, in the novel The Godfather (he never used the line in the film, oddly...)

[logician2u]

You've possibly got the JBS confused in your mind with YAF or one of the other activist groups from the '60s, Tex.

Sure, there were always some Birchers helping get conservative candidates elected, but you give the organisation too much credit for doing things its rather puny membership was incapable of.

After Nixon denounced the Evil Axis of the American Nazi Party, the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society (he always put emphasis on the last word of their name) during his comeback run at California's governorship in 1962, Welch's folks became persona non grata in the Republican Party. Whatever you may think of Nixon, you have to admit he was master of the smear.

Nixon and William F. Buckley probably did more to demonize those to their right than all the liberal pundits in NewSpeak and Slime combined.

[weikel]

Vito or Michael?

[BluesDuke]

Vito, of course. (He uttered the line in a scene retracing his younger years, when eldest son Santino got caught in a gas station heist. Sonny told the old man, "I saw you murder Fanucci," after the old man chewed him out for committing a crime. The old man shrugged and then said, "But don't you want to finish school, don't you want to become a lawyer? A lawyer with his briefcase...") The only line of his father's that Michael ever used was the more familiar, "I'll make him an offer he can't refuse."

[Texasforever]

Sure, there were always some Birchers helping get conservative candidates elected, but you give the organisation too much credit for doing things its rather puny membership was incapable of.

There "influence" was not numbers though prior to Reagan they had a membership of approx. a million. Their influence came from their reputation. They embodied what was then considered the right wing. It wasn't until they turned on Reagan that their membership came down to about eighty thousand and they became known more for conspiracy theories than for political activities. No one remembers the YAF but most of the country has heard of the JBS.