Unpatriotic Conservatives

National Review Online ^ | 4/7/03 (advance) | David Frum

[u-89]

Immigration is the life blood of American economic and societal vigor

I do not deny that differing cultural appearances in dress and architecture as well as cuisine makes life interesting but you seem to be saying that without immigration America would be nothing. What made America great was freedom, period. Societally allowing class mobility, i.e. advancement combined with the free market and rule of law allowed us to grow and become prosperous. Immigration in and of itself does not make us great. Economically speaking if it were not for socialist government policy keeping the tax rate and cost of living so high Americans could afford to have larger families and we wouldn't need to import people to keep up our population. In fact without socialistic ponzi schemes like social security etc.downward flux in population wouldn't matter but we are forced to grow because of the need for an enlarging tax base to support the government hand outs.

[mac_truck]

Did I support President Bush when he first started talking about invasion? No.

There has never been a formal declaration of war.

The Constitution requires a formal declaration in Article I, Section 8.

But war has started and I will (as I always have) support fully the men and women of these United States Armed Forces in their cause, for their success, and for their safe return home.

Kind of sounds like Tom Dashle...

[Chancellor Palpatine]

I'm pinging you immediately to #314, after which I'd recommend careful review of the article and all the following posts. It is fairly instructive to consider the weight of the albatross of the paleocon right - especially when we realize just how little it has done for us. Pandering to them costs 10 votes out of the middle for every vote gained.

[hchutch]

Plus 15 from the black and Hispanic communities for every vote gained.

[u-89]

After reading the entire article, it seems the common thread here is that these "conservatives" have a real problem with Israel.

I cannot speak for anyone other than myself so I neither defend nor try to explain other individuals' stances on this issue but I can describe to you their take as I understand it.

The idea is that the American government should be concerned only with securing and protecting American freedom and property. The founding fathers warned against entangling alliances of permanent nature, showing favor to one over others internationally and importing foreign disputes to our shores because those things will imperil American lives and treasure and possibly the life of the nation itself. Immigrants were suppose to leave their attachment to the old country behind them and be loyal to and concerned for America first and foremost. The trouble is we as a nation have violated all of the advise of the founders and have spent much blood and treasure because of it. Since the mid-east is a hot spot Israel gets mentioned because not only are we allied with them but there is a passion for this foreign country held by certain American Jewish and Christian individuals and groups and this effects US policy therefore US destiny. So the trouble is a question of foreign policy strategy and its consequences. I do not deny that anti-semitism exists in this world but I do not think it is the core of this debate.

cordially,

[billbears]

Yep, that's me, little Tommy Daschle. Not a conservative at all? Did Chancellor Palpatine help you with that illucid insight or did you come up with it yourself? Sheesh, I've said I support the troops but based on the Constitution war hasn't been declared since 1941

Any more names you neocons feel like throwing out?!? Since you refuse to have an argument based on fact, it's the least I could expect

[mac_truck]

Yep, that's me, little Tommy Daschle.

Well, it becoming clear you're not a Republican.

[Chancellor Palpatine]

Hate to break for an announcement - shock and awe is happening.

[billbears]

Well, it becoming clear you're not a Republican

Nope, I'm one of those rare things, and I know you probably don't know too many based on your posts, as a conservative

[mac_truck]

Would that be a 'real' conservative or a 'true' conservative?

just wondering...

[William Wallace]

"[Clarence] Thomas calls the segregation of the Old South, where he grew up, 'totalitarian.' But that's liberal nonsense. Whatever its faults, and it certainly had them, that system was far more localized, decent, and humane than the really totalitarian social engineering now wrecking the country." — LLEWELLYN H. ROCKWELL

Yet another reason that I've got no use for Lew Rockwell and his rantings.

Exactly. I dare say Justice Thomas knows quite a bit more about the subject than Lew Rockwell. Or perhaps Lew is looking at the same system from the point-of-view of the lynch mob rather than that of its victims. I wonder what parts of "that system" the latter would consider "far more localized, decent, humane" than the current government. This vile comment of Rockwell's is a prime example of the delusional rantings of crackpots professing to be patriots.

Have you noticed how, when they aren't wistfully reminiscing about Jim Crow, these so-called "true conservatives" are invariably the first to lambast blacks for voting Democrat?

Frum's article sums up what a lot of us have been saying for some time. These bigoted cranks need a pointed reminder that there is no place for them in the party of Lincoln, Reagan and Bush. Surely they deserve to be reunited with their moral and ideological kindred spirits -- the malevolent freaks and traitors on the Left.

A swift kick in the direction of the Republican Party Exit sign is long overdue.

[hchutch]

I agree wholeheartedly with that sentiment.

I have seen what David Frum describes myself when I've not only read paleo-con sites, but on some threads here. It is poison, and it is killing our efforts to set this country right. If we do not address this, how can we expect to recieve a hearing from, much less the votes of, groups that the paleo-cons will offend?

[Chancellor Palpatine]

To Lew Rockhead and the rest of the Paleocons, the segregated south was a great place, so long as you were white, and were called "boss" or "mister" (they'd really prefer "massuh", but they know they can't say that aloud).

[Chancellor Palpatine]

We have to overtly shun them and those who give them academic cover. We can't welcome their fickle support on any issue, nor can we afford their presence on any public podium when announcing a policy. For people in elective office, they can't be met, and their telephone calls must be rejected.

Over the past 20 years, I've watched them hijack the GOP and mislead otherwise decent people. I remember Buchanan scaring people off in 1992, and have noticed the ever more virulent try to hijack the GOP in the South, and to hijack the imagery of the old Confederacy for their own purposes.

[Hoppean]

To Lew Rockhead and the rest of the Paleocons, the segregated south was a great place, so long as you were white, and were called "boss" or "mister" (they'd really prefer "massuh", but they know they can't say that aloud).

Does it make you feel virtuous that you're going to such rhetorical lengths to show that you can "feel the other ("oppressed") guy's (historical) pain?" If you were a liberal, or were Black, your comment above would make more sense, because at least then you'd have a reason or an excuse to indulge in that kind of victimological emotionalism.

Unless, of course, you're more down to earth than that and your comment truly is motivated by a desire to gain more votes for the Republican Party and thereby a more conservative direction for the country--then I would agree with your comment because it's a sound political strategy to say that in public, given the Leftie-tinged times we live in.

[Chancellor Palpatine]

I'm curious as to how you would defend Rockwell's assertion that Clarence Thomas was thinking in a liberal fashion when Thomas equated being a black man in the segregated South as living under totalitarianism.

Please tell me, from your Paleocon point of view, what is so inherently conservative about whistfully recalling legal segregation. Tell me if you think it is good that people had to live under a regime where they had no political rights, and lived under enforced economic restriction.

Even better, please point to me any effort that those we could call "paleocons" made to ease or eliminate legal segregation in the South.

I'll be waiting.

[Wavyhill]

...there's a disconnect between the "national-level" officialdom RNC-style conservatives and the more "populist" grassroots. The fact that Bush's popularity in the Republican Party is over 90%, that the war with Iraq is supported by 70% of Americans in general and a considerably higher number of Republicans, and that Israel is more popular among Republicans than Democrats (and very popular among both) proves that you are wrong. Stop spending all day drooling over your Lew Rockwell site and meet some real people.

[Hoppean]

I don't think LR was defending those aspects of segregation, per se. I think he was focusing more on the fact that while "injustices" obviously could be said by some to have existed, that in other ways "the baby was thrown out with the bathwater." Liberals, over time in the U.S., have effected a full-scale "cultural revolution" at every level of society, from the top-down, instantly ripping up tradition from its roots wherever it was found, because it was obsessed about putting an end to perceived "evils" perpetrated, of course, by "the evil white man."

Keep in mind that LR's critics are judging the South in terms of today's "standards of 'morality," standards that the liberals themselves helped to bring about in the first place by means of their propaganda and agitation.

In short, the deck was stacked against conservatives from the start by the Left on these sorts of issues, and conservatives folded.

[Chancellor Palpatine]

It is pretty easy to judge the standards of the segregated south since it was only desegregated in my lifetime, and only then by the most vigorous of action in terms of Congressional lawmaking, court action, and activism in the face of violence from both law enforcement and civilians.

I'm curious about your decrying the "standards of morality" that you claim liberals imposed. Are you saying that somehow legal segregation was moral? That some of those things were worth keeping?

I'd think that a true believer in that concept of "states' rights" would be intensely angry at those old racists for wrecking the entire concept in the eyes of a large majority of the population nationwide.

[Hoppean]

The fact that Bush's popularity in the Republican Party is over 90%, that the war with Iraq is supported by 70% of Americans in general and a considerably higher number of Republicans, and that Israel is more popular among Republicans than Democrats (and very popular among both) proves that you are wrong. Stop spending all day drooling over your Lew Rockwell site and meet some real people.

I don't doubt that issues like the war and Israel are popular in the way you say above. But there are other issues out there of importance besides those. Lots of people feel that their more immediate, domestic concerns are not being answered, such as those whose jobs are affected by the H1-B visa program, etc. Joe Hadenuf speaks very well on FR about these "blind spots."