Posted on 04/03/2005 4:15:09 AM PDT by KentTrappedInLiberalSeattle
Anyone would think it was the Republicans who'd lost the 2004 elections, and the 2002 elections, and the 2000 elections. From every corner, concerned "friends" of the party rise to offer "friendly" advice. Norman Lear, who produced all those critically acclaimed issue-confronting heroine-gets-an-abortion '70s sitcoms that seem a lot more dated than ''The Beverly Hillbillies'' these days, has now produced a People For the American Way ad in which a man who identifies himself as a "common sense Republican" objects to any attempt to end the Democratic filibuster of Bush's judicial nominees. As things turn out, the "common sense Republican" has so much common sense he's an official with a union that endorsed John Kerry.
Then there's the 59 striped-pants colossi of the Nixon-Ford-Reagan State Department who've sent a letter to the Senate calling on them to reject John Bolton's nomination as U.N. ambassador. According to the Associated Press report, the signatories include:
"Princeton Lyman, ambassador to South Africa and Nigeria under Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton; Monteagle Stearns, ambassador to Greece and Ivory Coast in the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations; and Spurgeon Keeny Jr., deputy director of the Arms Control Agency in the Carter administration."
Princeton Lyman? Monteagle Stearns? Spurgeon Keeny Jr.? If Norman Lear's shows had wacky characters like that, they'd still be in syndication. It's a good rule of thumb that anything 59 economists, bureaucrats or diplomats are prepared to sign an open letter objecting to is by definition a good thing. But that goes double when the 59 panjandrums lined up against you are Princeton Monteagle Jr., President Nixon's ambassador to the Spurgeon Islands; Spurgeon Monkfish III, President Ford's ambassador to the Lyman Islands; Dartmouth Monticello IV, President Johnson's personal emissary to His Serene Highness the Monteagle of Keeny; Columbia Long-Playing-Album, the first diplomat to be named by President Carter to the State Department's Name Control Agency; and Vasser Peachy-Keeny, the first woman to be named Vasser Peachy-Keeny. One sees their point, of course: Let a fellow called "John" Bolton become ambassador and next thing you know Earl and Bud will want the gig.
Even Sen. John Danforth, who should know better, got in on the act, taking half a page in the New York Times to give the Full Monteagle to the "religious right." Blog maestro Andrew Sullivan decided that America was witnessing a "conservative crack-up" over Terri Schiavo and the embrace of her cause by extreme right wing fundamentalist theocrat zealots like, er, Jesse Jackson and Ralph Nader. Sullivan was last predicting a "conservative crack-up" during the impeachment era, on the grounds (if I recall correctly) that Republican moralizing would dramatically cut into Strom Thurmond's share of the gay vote. In the '90s, the Weekly Standard ran innumerable special editions devoted to the subject: Conservative Crack-Up; Conservative Crack-Up 2; Conservative Crack-Up -- The Musical; Abbott And Costello Meet The Conservative Crack-Up; Conservative Crack-Up On Elm Street; Four Weddings And A Conservative Crack-Up; Rod Stewart Sings Timeless Favorites From The Great Conservative Crack-Up, etc.
The point to bear in mind when Hollywood producers, State Department diplomats, respected senators, gay mavericks, the New York Times and the rest of the media offer conservatives advice is a simple one: As that great self-esteem volume has it, He's Really Not That Into You. The preferred media Republican is an amiable loser: the ne plus ultra of GOP candidates was the late Fred Tuttle, the lame, wizened idiot dairy farmer put up for a joke against Sen. Patrick Leahy in Vermont. But, if they can't get that lucky, the media will gladly take a Bob Dole type, a decent old no-hoper who goes down to predictable defeat and gets rave reviews for being such a good loser. Republicans could well run into trouble in 2006 and 2008, but for being insufficiently conservative on things like immigration rather than for anything the media claim they're cracking up over.
The notion, for example, that poor Terri Schiavo will cost Republicans votes in a year and a half's time is ludicrous. The best distillation of the pro-Schiavo case was made by James Lileks, the bard of Minnesota, responding to the provocateur Christopher Hitchens' dismissal of her as a "non-human entity." "It is not wise," wrote Lileks, "to call people dead before they are actually, well, dead. You can be 'as good as dead' or 'brain dead' or 'close to death,' but if the heart beats and the chest rises, I think we should balk at saying this constitutes dead, period."
Just so. Once you get used to designating living, breathing bodies as "non-human entities," it's easy to bandy them ever more carelessly -- as they do in the eminently progressive Netherlands, where their relaxed attitude to pot and prostitution led to a relaxed attitude to euthanasia which looks like relaxing the Dutch people right out of business. It's all done quietly over there -- no fuss, no publicity; you go in to hospital with a heavy cold and you're carried out by the handles. (By "handles," I mean a coffin, not a ceremonial phalanx of Monteagles and Princetons.) But that's not the American way. This is a legalistic society, where grade schools can't have kids knocking a ball around without getting a gazillion dollars worth of liability insurance. I was in Price Chopper the other day and they had a little basket of Easter samples on display accompanied by a page of full print outlining the various sub-clauses of the company's "tasting policy." That's America. In Holland, you can taste a cookie without signing a legal waiver, and, if you get food poisoning from it, the doctor will discreetly euthanize you to avoid putting your family through the trauma of waiting six hours for the stomach pump to become available. That's not how the American cookie crumbles. Euthanasia here will be a 10-year court culminating in slow-motion public execution played out on the 24-hour cable channels.
The Republicans did the right thing here, and they won't be punished for it by the electors. As with abortion, this will be an issue where the public moves slowly but steadily toward the conservative position: Terri Schiavo's court-ordered death will not be without meaning. As to "crack-ups," that's only a neurotic way of saying that these days most of the intellectual debate is within the right. If, like the Democrats, all you've got are lockstep litmus tests on race and abortion and all the rest, what's to crack up over? You just lose elections every two years, but carry on insisting, as Ted Kennedy does, that you're still the majority party. Ted's quite a large majority just by himself these days, but it's still not enough.
He sums it up perfectly in this paragraph.
Always err on the side of life. Republicans did the right thing to try to stop this murder - although I tend to think they didn't go far enough - but I don't want to start that discussion again. In the long run, it will help the Republican's cause & hurt the Dims.
Steyn is right, there were alot of liberals that were appalled by the Schiavo killing too. The polls were rigged & now the American people are slowly realizing that.
thanks for the definition.....clarification is needed.
Norman Lear does endless replications of Archie Bunker conservatives and Mike "Meathead" Stivik liberals, cartoon representations no more realistic than the political caricatures of Ted Rall or Thomas Oliphant. The Lear enterprises have not presented an original thought since about the time of the Kennedy Administration, and that they stole from somebody else.
I think a lot more disable people will be voting for the GOP.
I cut up my 2005 RNC card and sent it back to the RNC with a note. I'm outta there! Jeb Bush was the last man to turn his back on Terri and walk away leaving her there to die a heinous death while her family was forced to watch helplessly in horror.
And Judge George Greer is a REPUBLICAN who was supported for re-election (not that long ago) by REPUBLICANS in that neck of the woods.
I WANT NOTHING TO DO WITH THE REPUBLICAN PARTY FOR THE REST OF MY LIFE!!!!!!!!!!! I have already re-registered "Decline to State".
I think whoever wrote this article doesn't have a lick of common sense.
Aren't those the folks always roaring about how Republicans 'eat their own', yet they have no qualms in vilifying Tom DeLay and other Republicans who spoke up for Terri Schiavo?
I haven't vilified anybody in Congress or the White House. I'm glad President Bush made that gesture in signing that bill requesting the judges take another look at evidence.
But I didn't particularly care for the act of judge shopping.
We've heard the indingation about activist judges...yet that's exactly what the GOP leadership was praying for. With 70% of the population of mind that the GOP overstepped their bounds, I hope we survive this display of political pandering.
Yep, those are the ones. Aren't they rare birds? ;-)
ping for later read
As much as I am also disgusted by the events of the last 2 weeks, I can't afford to abstain from the fight. I will work from the inside, fighting tooth and nail to get reps who believe in life, and are willing to fight for it. If they don't, like the Specter's and Snow's of the government, then I will fight to get someone in there who will respect a constituent's wishes.
bttt
Good luck.
"Aren't those the folks always roaring about how Republicans 'eat their own', yet they have no qualms in vilifying Tom DeLay and other Republicans who spoke up for Terri Schiavo?"
And they're also on every Terri thread debating and posting their opposing opinions, (which of course they are allowed to do) and then complaining that their is no room on FR any more for dissention.
I just never understood that argument.
These aristocratic-sounding surname-surnames were served up years ago by Edwin Newman in _Strictly Speaking_, when he published a list of college and university presidents with similar monikers. He proposed reading them out loud at parties to add to the jollification. My favorite was one `Forrest Brander Matthews'.
BTW, superb article by Mark Steyn. If the Dems had any sense (they don't) they would mark the forced death of Terri Schindler with the same words an English soldier cried out, when they burned Joan of Arc at the stake:
"We are lost! We have burned a saint!!"
As I recall, Princeton Lyman, an insufferable arse and know-it-all, had brothers Yale and Stanford. Elitist? Nahh.
Just LOL. Thanks for sharing that.
bttt
Right!! In a 2 party system you are giving half a vote to the Democrats. They want every conservative euthanized you will only help them!
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