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Libertarian Ping!
Rudolph William Louis Giuliani
Michael Dale Huckabee
Ronald Ernest Paul
Willard Mitt Romney
These are the four, I will try to keep off the ticket.
None of these phonies will even use their first name.
Huckabee and Parker, two half-a$$ed, a$$holes fighting.
I’m not a libertarian either; I’m a small government conservative, which is to say, a classic liberal, and a social conservative as well. Huckabee doesn’t know how to distinguish between what he wants and what government ought to be doing.
If you disagree he thinks you’re going against the Bible.
And he was insufferable on the immigration issue.
It's genuinely difficult to determine which of the two should be more profoundly insulted by such a comparison. ;)
When Huckabee entered the race, it was obvious to me he was a big-government social conservative. But honestly, everything else matters to me less than a true social conservative. God doesn’t bless a society based on their economic policies - he blesses them on their social policies. The problem is economic conservatism before social conservatism is putting the cart before the horse. Social conservatism begets God’s blessings, one of which is economic prosperity, which in our time appears to be a free market system. Not the other way around.
While I’m no big fan of Mike Huckabee, he does have a point about libertarians. One things that has annoyed me about the libertarianesque wing of the Republican Party (in some parts, they’re called RINOs) is the way they are so blatantly trying to sucker people into destroying the Republican Party by driving away the base for the sake of a few “moderates”. And face it - anyone who is fool enough to suggest that the GOP needs to dump social conservatism after seeing that social conservatism was the only winning brand of conservatism on 4 Nov deserves every bit of opprobrium that can possibly be poured upon their heads. The whole notion is infantile idiocy, and its being floated by a bunch of craven libertarians who would rather split the party because it supports a few positions they personally don’t like than work together on the 85% of things we DO all agree on.
The GOP is properly a blend of John Locke limited government classic liberalism, rooted and guided by moral principle.
You can’t separate the two or you go off the rails. And you can’t split the two because by and large they coexist in the same people. Your small government conservatives are by and large your social conservatives. There are exceptions, of course, people for whom one half of the equation matters more than the other, but for your average conservative the difference is one of emphasis. You can’t divide the GOP into separate camps because the same people wind up in both camps.
Huckabee isn’t insufferable because he’s a bible-thumper, at least in my view, since I’m a bible-thumper. He’s insufferable because he’s a big-government guy, a statist, masquerading as a conservative. I would hope he’s also a moral man, but to me thats basic, I expect that of a Republican. Its not a qualification for higher office, I expect that of anyone.
In other words my problem with Huck isn’t the hayseed, since hayseeds are the heart of this party. Its the statist masquerading as hayseed.
I’m annoyed by Huckabees’ populist nonsense as well as Parkers piety about supporting religious life in the GOP.
Neither one of them are doing the conservative movement any good by trying to drive away factions of the conservative coalition.
We should not and cannot simply ignore or put in the closet the openly Christian Republicans and we cannot become the party of populist party of resenting the rich and pretending that anything that is popular is automatically conservative and justifiable.
We are going to have five governors running in 2012 instead of 5 (or was it 15) Senators. Automatically that will give us an infinitely more GOP-like primary. This competing senator nonsense is for their party - not ours. We aren’t the party of lawyers and professional office-holders. And if a lifetime of being in office starts becoming a turn-on in our primaries then we really don’t deserve to exist since we’ve already become ‘New Democrats’.
(By the way, anybody else notice how the demoncrat party has essentially ditched all semblance of having a conservative wing (other than the months before each election when they have to lie in their TV ads in red states) and Soros has pushed everything and everybody who isn’t rabidly anti-war and pro-marxist into hiding??)
I don’t know what I’d call myself, but I believe that any program that the government undertakes to deprive one group of its earnings in order to give to a group that refuses to work a better life is stealing. Our welfare system is a mess of a system, although slightly better than it was before the mid-nineties. I do believe we need to take care of the elderly, the orphans and those who are handicapped and need care. However, the behemoth that we have created, where many are on the dole, even though they have no real need is the problem. You only have to look at some of the programs...some senators and high-paid people who own farms get government subsidies for not farming...when the original bill was to help poor farmers keep their farms. Our prescription bill lets anybody over a certain age get help whether there is a need or not. It would be one thing if we had honest people that said, “I don’t really need the help and can easily afford to pay for this myself.”, but then you have their children who don’t want a penny of their inheritance lost, so they demand that they have the government pay for the prescriptions they can easily afford. We have all kinds of programs that have overstepped the bounds of their intent. Not to mention the pork projects that fly in under the radar...and we only hear about them after they are approved.
I’d prefer that government had more oversight into the the agencies that dole out these funds and make sure that the monies are spent appropriately. These agencies also operate under the system of use or lose...meaning that at the end of the fiscal year they need to use up the leftover funds or they go back to treasury and the budget risks being cut. So they use these funds in the last week for things that normally fall outside of budgeted expenses. There is a lot of abuse in the system.
I’d love to see what Sarah Palin would do to cut things back, on a federal scale, like she did in Alaska. I hope she gets the chance to do so. Unfortunately, the media is in overdrive to make sure she is slammed in every way possible so that in 4 years she won’t have a chance of running. I hope America learns to turn off the TV and shut the media out. Unfortunately, most have become so enslaved to the TV that their whole worldview is framed on everything they hear and see from that monster tube. We get what we deserve.
Ive always thought of Libertarians as the brain of the conservative movement and the Social conservatives as the soul. Neither one is going to do politically very well on their own..
All this venting from all sides is pointless why did we lose? bad press, and extremely unpopular president, a media darling of an opponent, a couple well promoted gaffs. What needs to change for 2010? Well we don’t need to be more socially, legally, or fictionally liberal. Maybe we could be a *touch* less picky about our candidates in the North East.
Truth is on merits any of the GOP contenders could/should have beaten Obama were the media not ‘given chills’ by Obamamania.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” - CS Lewis
Huckabee.
Remember that Jesus taught his apostles that they shouldn't just do good things themselves, they should force others to do so.
How about when He said that if others don't want to follow your teachings, don't just shake the dust off your sandals and move on, but bring the full armed force of the government against those people, confiscate their money, and do what you think are good deeds with it!
It's obvious that Huckabee is right about Jesus...Jesus definitely wasn't in favor of free will and peoples' rights.
</sarc>
True social conservatives are fine. But there seem to be few of them today, and Gov. Huckabee certainly isn't conservative.
nice post
Many of the issues that truly concern social conservatives are better addressed by libertarian Republicans and actually have a chance of getting solved, like: right to life, prayer in school, the definition of marriage, etc. When the power returns to the States and to the people, we have a better chance of dealing freely with this ourselves rather than the federal government handling it in a purely legalistic way.
But the issues that most concern libertarian Republicans are NOT addressed by social conservatives: smaller government, lower taxes, freedom of conscience.
Social conservatives are exclusive and libertarian Republicans are inclusive. So which one do you think has a better shot at winning election? The exclusive or the inclusive group?
And who are you going to believe? Huckabee, who thinks that “Libertarians are the biggest threat to the Republican Party”? Or Ronald Reagan, who said “I believe the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism.”?
I am a Christian, but any guy who refers to the Holy Communion as “Jesus juice” (ala Michael Jackson), scares me as much — if not more— as any atheistic Liberal!
Let’s nominate Huck in 2012. We’re going to lose anyway, lets discredit his brand of conservatism in the process. I think he would do much worse than McCain. He would probably only win a subset of the states he won in the GOP primary: some of the Bible belt.
It would be a sound thrashing. We could move on to the next idea.