My parents were Nixon Republicans. They believed in smaller government (which Nixon didn't give them), lower taxes (ditto), the outlaw of abortion (which was beyond Nixon's authority), the preservation of individual rights and liberties (including the Second Amendment), and the securing of our borders (not a big issue during that time, but Mom and Dad would have been for closed borders). They applauded when Ford pardoned Nixon, while the rest of the country (and all of the Walter Cronkite-style establishment media) ranted and cursed.
I am the son of Nixon Republicans both in my genes and my ideas, but it appears that the party has little time for me. You see, Elk, there are a few reasonable people out there (like me) who supported Ron Paul because it looked like he might be a candidate who was actually willing to do something about the size of government and its encroachment on personal liberty, willing to close the borders and let the rest of the world bear its fair share of the responsibility for leading itself.
Whatever you think of Paul, these ideas are not bad ones. They're certainly subject to debate, but that never happens on FR any more, particularly in threads where Paul's name occurs. Be that as it may, if the Republican Party would actually put those ideas on the agenda instead of just taking the conservative issues voter for granted, Ron Paul and his ilk would never have come up, would never have been a problem, would never have stepped onto the national stage.
No doubt this post of mine will cue another round of name-calling. I hope not, but I expect no better.
Go ahead and dismiss Paul. But if we can't discuss candidates, let's discuss ideas. Remember back in '94 when Gingrich & Company were going to dismantle the Deparment of Education? That was a good idea. Republicans have had the power to do that now for almost two full terms, and yet it hasn't even been on the table.
What would it take to get that idea on the table?
We keep saying he’s got alot of good ideas, but his bad ideas are so far out there that what few times he does make sense, he’s making himself his own worst enemy.
Eisenhower kissed soviet patoots with regularity as SHAEF commander. He was a military bureaucrat with little in the way of combat experience, named president of Columbia University after the war, nominated by dishonest tactics over Taft in 1952, urged by Truman to run as the Democrat POTUS candidate, stabbed Joe McCarthy with regularity, betrayed the Hungarian Revolution which occurred near simultaneously with similar events in Czechoslovakia, Poland and other captive nations, and gave us "Modern Republicanism" which was New Deal Democrat policy in elephant drag. He balanced a few budgets if anyone cared. Call that Main Street "conservatism." Green eyeshades, sleeve garters, clip coupons off bonds in the back room at the Civic Booster (strictly local) Bank & Trust. Yawn.
The best thing Nixon ever did was to bring up his daughter Julie and it is a shame that she never ran for the Senate from Pennsylvania. Other than that, Nixon loved the art of the deal with Chairman Mao, with Brezhnev and with anyone whomsoever. He very obviously disdained the idea of Ronaldus Maximus as POTUS since Ronaldus was not one of the sellout State Department loving, Glasnost enthusing establishmentarian types to whom Nixon sold his political soul at the outset. He wrote decent and informative books after he resigned. OTOH, he absolutely unforgivably appointed Herod Blackmun to SCOTUS, tried to appoint a lavender queen named G. Harold Carswell to SCOTUS and generally talked a good game while delivering little but rhetoric. Ironically, Carswell's nomination was defeated BEFORE he was arrested on his knees in a country club men's room. If you like smaller government, do you recall Nixon's wage and price controls and his monkeying with the money supply??? Then there was the choice of Feckless Ford (a Demonrat tamed puppy if ever there was one) to replace Spiro Agnew in the VP office. Once Agnew was gone and Ford was installed, Demonrats had no reason to avoid prompt impeachment. So long as Agnew was VP, the Demonrats were going to be quite reluctant to remove Nixon. He fed Agnew to the Demonrats and was himself the next item on their menu. Then Ford appointed Rockefeller himself as VP just in case we doubted the continuation of Ike's "Modern Republicanism." Charitably speaking, under Nixon and then Ford, government spenders lost no sleep worrying over losing their regular allowance increases.
You correctly credit Feckless Ford for pardoning Nixon. We had heard enough of Nixon for one lifetime and did not need a criminal trial. Then again, there was WIN: Whip Inflation Now! and some dairy product distribution program to subsidize farmers. Lett's not forget the tactics Ford used to barely postpone Ronaldus Maximus for four years and the fact that Ford gave us Carter, the toppling of the Shah, permanent Middle East troubles, whining in place of policy, giving away the Panama Canal, and being, until death overcomes him, a permanent antiAmerican foreign policy nuisance, and an ex-president who reflexively apologizes for every enemy of our country, and a buddy of Castro, of Ugo Chavez, of Ahmanutjob and a host of other international cretins.
Now, taking as Gospel truth every word you posted, you don't REALLY think that paleoPaulie could possibly reduce spending by the federals, do you??? First he would have to be nominated. You know that he never will be. Then he would have to be elected. That isn't happening either, as I suspect you know. If those two impossibilities were somehow achieved, anything he tried by way of spending money on anything other than our nation's defense, would be overturned by Congress. If he refused to spend money appropriated (impounding the funds), SCOTUS ruled back in Nixon's administration that impoundment is unconstitutional. I don't agree but my preferences on the subject or yours or paleoPaulie's mean nothing when SCOTUS almighty has ruled, as 50+ million slaughtered babies have found out the hard way since Roe vs. Wade.
Whatever you may think of moving the Berlin Wall to our Southwestern border areas, paleoPaulie was opposed to that twenty years ago when he was a more honest libertarian. Today, he just votes against appropriations to build a border fence while posing for holy pictures as though he wanted to close the border.
Whatever you may think of abortion or whatever paleoPaulie may yak yak interminably while posing for pro-life holy pictures, he refuses to DO anything federally about it. I don't care how many babies he delivered and I don't care what he thinks as a person. I care what he would DO as POTUS and the answer is he wouldn't do jackspit! Likewise as to marriage, the ordinary kind: one man, one woman, no household pets, no twelvesomes, no space aliens (whatever his curious imaginings as to the constitution).
All that Dr. Demento could possibly achieve as POTUS (which ain't gonna happen in any event) is surrendering everywhere, pulling American troops from everywhere, castrating the American military, ruining the chances to ban abortion and pervert marriage and permanently ruin the GOP by being more of a fool than Carter only in the name of the GOP. Consider Dr. Demento dismissed.
Note that I have not called YOU a single name.
That having been said, I see your proposal to abolish the Department of Education and I raise it to propose the absolute separation of school and state by abolishing each and every heathen ignorance factory known as a gummint skewel here in the entire 50 states and national territories. Then we can move on to abolish Energy Department, most welfare programs, HUD and a wide variety of other wastes of tax money and we should strive to abolish their state counterparts as well. But......
First, beef up the military, win the WOT dramatically and permanently (like, say, the Third Punic War), abolish abortion and protect marriage as noted above. Each takes priority over minimizing the size and scope of gummint. BTW, if you think bordermania is not going to cost you and everyone else their civil liberties, you are mistaken. That is not an insult. It is just the truth.
Nothing but nothing will get to the table via paleoPaulie. His presence in politics is an impediment to your agenda. The coupling of foreign/military policy cowardice with libertarianism does libertarianism no favors. We have learned our lessons on 12/7/41 and on 9/11/01 and we ain't going back.
Lead, follow or get out of the way.