Constant Conservative

What a kerfuffle. Sometimes I wonder if we live in the the “land of the free speech” or not. The Hill put out its Big Question for today: Is Rush Limbaugh good or bad for Republicans? and several Congresspeople answered. One of them was Senator Thune:

I think that Rush inspires the Republican base at a time when there’s a real shortage of morale out there. Like everybody, he says things that not all of us agree with. But I think that his point about the Republican Party staying true to its core values and principles is a message that is well-taken.

Well-taken on Limbaugh’s part, well-stated on Thune’s. For the details of what some other legislators said, you can go to the linked page, but here a couple more which stood out for me:

He’s another voice of the Republican Party and everybody’s welcome to join in the debate. (John McCain)

Well, I think loose lips sink ships is what they used to say during that big war. I think his comments are illustrative of that. (Frank Lautenberg)

Realizing that the Fairness Doctrine may be coming to a website near me shortly, I provide you with the following, in the interests of providing the other side of the story.

Hmm. Some people may think that I’m confused and that is the same side. They are mistaken. Mr. Fred is a man. Mrs. Fred is a woman. What part of two different sides do you not understand? (By the bye, I’m not calling Jeri “Mrs. Fred” out of misogny or chauvinism, I’m doing so because most of us know of her through her husband’s campaign and public appearances. That, and it makes for shorter post titles.)

From The New Republic, Leon Wieseltier is singing the Ballot Blues and announcing his pick for the presidency. I was cruising through the article, agreeing in part, disagreeing in others, then I hit the following double speedbump:

McCain feels with his heart, but he thinks with his base. And when he picked Sarah Palin, he told the United States of America to go [----] itself. I used to think of my dilemma this way: Obama’s conception of America is better than he is, McCain’s conception of America is worse than he is. But McCain is looking more and more like his America, which is Bush’s America: a country of capitalists and Christians. I do not know how to explain what has become of him. But the more I regard him, the more I recall Gene’s ominous words. You vote for the man.

Obama is a smart man. He is a decent man. He is an undangerous man, in the manner of all pragmatists and opportunists. He reveres reason, though he often confuses it with conversation. His domestic goals are good, though the titans of American finance, the greedy geniuses of Wall Street, may have made many of those goals fantastic. He will see to it that some liberalism survives at the Supreme Court.

There are two Americas. I simply cannot see Leon’s from here.

While one can, and should, debate the Palin selection on its merits, believing that picking her was telling 300 million people to perform impossible physical feats just doesn’t hold up to examination

To claim that all pragmatists and opportunists are undangerous men is in itself an enormously dangerous statement. Does anyone think for a moment that Fidel Castro, for example, was not incredibly pragmatic when he assured everyone shortly after his rise to power that he was not a communist? It is that very pragmatism which makes men dangerous, for they lack any calibrated moral compass.

I was saddened to hear that Bill Buckley’s son Chris recently endorsed Barack Obama. Jay Reding addresses the reasoning behind the decision, and does a good job of putting in in perspective:

His critique of McCain is that somehow McCain has become “inauthentic” and his case for Obama is that he has a “world class intellect.”

Plenty of other wrongheaded individuals were brilliantly smart—and even though Sen. Obama is unquestionably smart and capable, he represents the antithesis of everything conservatism stands for. Conservatism is an ideology that desires limited government—Obama supports an even more dramatic expansion of government that what we have seen in the last eight years. Conservatism rejects cults of political personality—and yet Obama is skating by largely on the force of his personalty than the substance of his ideals. Conservatism rejects immanentizing the eschaton—that might as well be Obama’s campaign slogan.

Hmm. I wonder if I could use “Making sure we don’t immanentize the eschaton” as a tagline. Maybe not.

Reding follows that with a very good, and timely, close:

Conservatives made the mistake of putting their trust in a politician rather than in their ideas [sic] over the past ideas. Making the same mistake again won’t be any better for the country.

Intelligent people often find themselves on the wrong side of history. One wonders if that may not be the case with a junior senator from the state of Illinois.

While I cannot subscribe to everything Rick Moran (Right Wing Nut House) is saying here about McCain and the debate, I see the benefit of striving to ensure that the Senate doesn’t go filibuster-proof liberal, regardless.

McCain must find a way to keep it close enough that he doesn’t drag 2-3 additional senate candidates down with him thus handing the Democrats a filibuster proof majority in the senate. I am at a loss as to how he might do this except my sense of the moment is telling me (and the polls somewhat confirm) that most of his attacks on Obama have backfired and he has lost support because of them. Would a “take the high road” campaign where he spends the last three weeks as a wise man/Cassandra, warning of the dangers of “Creeping Socialism” and an abandonment of classic American values work? No one knows but it’s something he hasn’t tried so perhaps it is worth looking into.

If McCain is a lost cause, it is time for the Republicans to perhaps look to salvaging what they can from the disaster. And that means fighting like hell for the filibuster in the senate. It is potentially the only brake on Obama and the Democrats and given how the far left is licking its chops at the prospect of radically changing the economic and social landscape of America, it might have come to the point that we start thinking about shifting focus from the presidency to the senate.

Many of those races are extremely close but the GOP has one advantage in many of them; incumbency. If McCain really goes off the deep end, there’s nothing much that can be done. But if he can keep the presidential race about where it is now, Republicans will lose 5-7 seats and the filibuster will be safe.

I’m not sure that McCain will be willing to play it safe at this point since he has not done so in the past at critical junctures (Palin pick, financial crisis, etc). However, I agree with Mr. Moran that McCain should use his bully pulpit to speak out on socialism and American values. If we consider the Joe the Plumber factor, crying out regarding a need to return to what make America what she was (and can be again) may be just what the apathetic middle-class need to drive away the quadrennial election day blues.

(No, the reference to blues was not racist, even though Duke Ellington was a black man.)

I must confess to being pleasantly surprised by John McCain’s performance during last night’s debate. As I mentioned to someone during the debate, he needs to get hooked up with Joe the Plumber for the rest of the campaign. It would do them both good, I’m thinking.

Now, on to the substance of the debate itself. First, John McCain got his hands a bit dirty, much like the plumber in the picture which accompanies this article. That was something which I believe needed to happen, despite how much he might have wished to keep the debate on the high road, as he is wont to do from a “bipartisan” standpoint. But he still pulled out things such as being hurt by the Lewis remarks. Of course, he remembers Wallace and Obama does not. I’m guessing most of the audience does not remember Wallace, so that interchange probably did not play well.

Both the candidates were more forceful, but that is to be expected since this is the last big public showing they will have together. Obama came through not so much as a “tax and spend” liberal as he did a “spend” liberal. Seems as though that was his answer to so many things: special needs children, healthcare, education, etc. Of course, we all know that the only way to spend more is to get more via taxes, but it would have been nice if McCain had hit that one a little harder.

McCain started in to some of the issues (Ayers and ACORN) but was not apparently willing to go the distance. Nonetheless, he gets credit for bringing it up. Obama repeated his same defense of these associations as before, but it probably won’t hurt him to do so. The average Joe probably doesn’t care about the facts as long as the presentation is smooth.

I think Palin came off better than Biden, if only because she has less history to bash.

Body language hurt Obama a lot more than McCain this time, although McCain got in a few good eye rolls.

It will be quite interesting to see the post-debate analysis. I’ll see what I can pull together.

Update

What some others are thinking:

Michelle Malkin thinks McCain held his own.

Paul Mirengoff (PowerLine) thinks that Obama didn’t lose any ground.

Ed Morrissey (HotAir) thinks that McCain came out stronger for the fight and did well.

Dan Riehl (RiehlWorldView) thinks that Obama hurt himself, so advantage McCain.

Joe the Plumber thinks . . . well, he can tell you what he thinks himself:

Tonight will see the next to last of the debates between Barack Obama and John McCain. Now that everyone is confused, let me set the matter straight. The reason I call this the penultimate debate rather than the final one is that the final one will be happening across the nation on November 04, 2008 when millions of apprehensive, clingy, ignorant (and otherwise normal and abnormal) citizens of these United States will cast their ballots, which will elect the electors to the electoral college, who will decide who the next President of the United States will be.

I’m a realist, I believe. Therefore, I expect very little red meat (venison anyone?) from tonight’s debate. McCain shows an increasing tendency to place himself closer to the liberals (thereby making it difficult for him to clearly and concisely differentiate himself from them) than to the conservatives. This I hold to be true, despite his selection of Sarah Palin as his second. (Hmm, interesting choice of words there. Now, if only this were a duel, I’m thinking McCain/Palin would have a serious advantage, but I digress). As a result of his holding to the middle (dare we call it the “maverick”) ground, he will probably not force Obama to respond to any number of issues (such as Ayers, ACORN, CRA, etc) which would allow McCain to show Obama for the socialist that he is.

The debate which will be held on November 04 will be comprised of what people remember from and about the candidates from the other debates, TV, radio, print, telephone, online and other ads, news programs, discussions over drinks (soft and hard) with friends, neighbors and acquaintances, and the classic “gut” feelings about whether a given candidate is prepared to lead, proven to be trustworthy, and, quite simply, what the majority of the populace looks for in the figurehead (though powerful, not omnipotent) of the country which was once and again called a “shining city upon the hill.”

There may be times, whether tonight, tomorrow, or on the day of the final debate when it seems as though the sun is not shining upon that city. Just remember –man debates (and proposes); God disposes.

From two clear-thinking economists at UCLA back in 2004 comes something of note: Roosevelt was the one who kept the Depression alive after it should have been long gone. How can it be that President “chicken in every pot” Roosevelt actually contributed both the general absence of edible chickens and the exorbitant price of the pot?

After scrutinizing Roosevelt’s record for four years, Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian conclude in a new study that New Deal policies signed into law 71 years ago thwarted economic recovery for seven long years.

“Why the Great Depression lasted so long has always been a great mystery, and because we never really knew the reason, we have always worried whether we would have another 10- to 15-year economic slump,” said Ohanian, vice chair of UCLA’s Department of Economics. “We found that a relapse isn’t likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill-conceived stimulus policies.”

Well, knock me over with feather, why don’t you. Economic relapses are not “likely unless lawmakers gum up a recovery with ill conceived stimulus policies.”

“High wages and high prices in an economic slump run contrary to everything we know about market forces in economic downturns,” Ohanian said. “As we’ve seen in the past several years, salaries and prices fall when unemployment is high. By artificially inflating both, the New Deal policies short-circuited the market’s self-correcting forces.”

The policies were contained in the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), which exempted industries from antitrust prosecution if they agreed to enter into collective bargaining agreements that significantly raised wages. Because protection from antitrust prosecution all but ensured higher prices for goods and services, a wide range of industries took the bait, Cole and Ohanian found. By 1934 more than 500 industries, which accounted for nearly 80 percent of private, non-agricultural employment, had entered into the collective bargaining agreements called for under NIRA.

Cole and Ohanian calculate that NIRA and its aftermath account for 60 percent of the weak recovery. Without the policies, they contend that the Depression would have ended in 1936 instead of the year when they believe the slump actually ended: 1943.

Is not there a bill in Congress right now which would increase collective bargaining power once again by doing away with the secret ballot process and make it a crime for an employer to increase salaries/wages during the period when the employees are considering the creation of a union? I think it is called the Employee Free Choice Act. Unfortunately it does nothing to make the choice of any employee “free.” Rather, it would allow for unions to know who is preventing a new group from signing up for collective bargaining so pressure can be brought to bear. John McCain is very much opposed to this bill becoming law with Barack Obama firmly in favor.

The article concludes with the following:

Recovery came only after the Department of Justice dramatically stepped enforcement of antitrust cases nearly four-fold and organized labor suffered a string of setbacks, the economists found.

“The fact that the Depression dragged on for years convinced generations of economists and policy-makers that capitalism could not be trusted to recover from depressions and that significant government intervention was required to achieve good outcomes,” Cole said. “Ironically, our work shows that the recovery would have been very rapid had the government not intervened.”

So, the conclusion of these economists is precisely the opposite of the common thought which seems to be driving the Federal governments current response: that capitalism works if one just leaves it alone.

Please, read the whole article and then send it to your representatives and senators in DC and let them know that we are not interested in a New Deal, or a Better Deal or any deal which has government further interfering with the markets. Yes, I realize that they’ve already signed the bailout bill. However, that does not mean that government intrusion in markets must continue apace.

The following email was sent by a friend of the Constant Conservative to Dave Letterman in response to the above video.

******
Dear Dave Letterman -

You will likely never see this, as I’m sure your screeners will not share it. But, if you do read this, I welcome the opportunity to discuss this with you further should you be so inclined.

Regardless, I am writing as a long time fan and viewer who has completely lost my respect and admiration for you after watching last night’s (Wednesday, September 24, 2008) show. Your continuous berating of John McCain was over the top and uncalled for.

Over the years, I have genuinely enjoyed your political humor as you have directed it toward both parties. But this election season, culminating in last night’s tantrum, you have exposed your true colors. Your bias is now obvious and your response to McCain for obviously “hurting your feelings” is humorous in itself. You behaved like a true bleeding heart liberal, one whose view of the world revolves around yourself. Obviously, in your mind, you and your show is a higher priority than matters of significance to our nation, such as the current financial dilemma. The fact that McCain would once again put his country (and his current obligation to it) before himself should be recognized for what it is, rather than ridiculed for what you make of it. Why do I get the feeling that if Obama would have taken this course of action out of his obligation to the country that you would have made something different of that decision? But, of course, we both know that Obama would never put his personal agenda on hold for anything else, even his duties as a US Senator, since he has spent his entire time as a US Senator doing little more than pursuing the Presidency! I am disappointed that you could not remain more professional than you did, but I remind myself that expecting shame and regret, let alone honesty and integrity, from a self-elevating liberal like yourself is a waste of my time.

Additionally, your “last minute fill-in” guest, Keith Olbermann, was a fascinating choice under the circumstances. You, your writers and naturally, the entire CBS company, can be proud of airing a show that more resembled a paid-advertisement for Obama than a late night talk show. I am glad that you have finally exposed your true self for all of America to see. Now your viewers can form an educated opinion about you for themselves.

Lastly, after your belligerent carrying on that followed, your weak commendation for McCain for his service to our great country was relegated to mere sarcastic patronizing. You and yours are forever indebted to McCain, along with the thousands of others in the past and present, for defending the freedoms that you hide behind. So, continue to ridicule the things that you don’t understand and condemn the things that scare you. While I can no longer watch your show, I do wish you the best.

God Bless America!

Joe M. Krizan

Husband, Father, Business Owner, Employer, Tax payer, Responsible Citizen, Capitalist, Conservative, Patriot, Proud American

Humboldt, SD

******

No, not the bailout, the history behind where we are now. This is excellent.

John McCain, the 2008 Republican Candidate for President of these United States, has compared himself favorably with Theodore Roosevelt (and not minded when others have done the same). In fact, McCain has said that he sees himself as a conservative Republican “after the Theodore Roosevelt mold.”

If McCain identifies with Teddy Roosevelt, what might that mean to conservatives? Was TR a conservative and if so, in what ways and to what extent?

Let me start by saying a few things about the man after whom the bear was named. I’ve always enjoyed reading about Teddy’s exploits (whether written by him or someone else), but then what boy wouldn’t enjoy stories of war, hunting and just all-around manly endeavors? As an writer, I view his prolific output of 35 books remarkable, considering all the other things he did and was. He’s always seemed to me to be the kind of man that a father would like his sons to emulate, at least in terms of love of life and personal character.

Roosevelt had two terms in office as President (if we discount the 6 months where he served as VP before then-President McKinley died in office) where he was defined as a “progressive” rather than a “conservative.” Of course, the meaning of those terms has changed just a bit over the last 100 years.

As an example of this, most of the conservatives of that time (at least those in the Republican party) wanted to keep the tariffs high on goods, so as to support the US market. Roosevelt, on the other hand, seemed to support a more free-market approach (though the term “free-market” is probably anachronistic if applied to 1908 rather than 2008). I say “seemed to support” because he used the tariff issue as a bargaining piece with legislators who did not call the bluff, if that is all it was.

Like many, Theodore Roosevelt distrusted large businesses. Because of this, he saw legislation passed which regulated them, though without removing them from the market entirely. However, this government involvement, though for what seemed highly necessary reasons at the time, laid the groundwork for federal government intervention into the affairs of thousands of businesses, large and small, during the Great Depression.

Sayings such as “walk softly and carry a big stick” grew from his belief that the United States was a world power and had the moral responsibility to help weaker, smaller countries, particularly those in the Western Hemisphere. In this regard, one could say that he was a strong proponent of the Monroe Doctrine and even extended it a bit. He helped to broker the end of the Russo-Japanese War (and earned a Nobel in the process).

Roosevelt is particularly well-known today for increasing the number of National Parks and other areas reserved for public use by citizens of future generations. He did so for several reasons, not the least of which was his personal love for the outdoors. He was adamant in his support of conserving natural resources, as can be seen from the following:

The conservation of natural resources is the fundamental problem. Unless we solve that problem it will avail us little to solve all others.

After leaving the presidency (and spending some quality time traipsing about Africa with his Winchester rifles), Roosevelt returned to the United States and started up the Bull Moose Party to counter what he saw as William Howard Taft’s unwillingness to challenge the status quo.

From this time of re-entry into national politics, Theodore Roosevelt clearly advocated matters which are near and dear to the hearts of liberals today: progressive income tax, inheritance tax, a minimum wage, unemployment insurance, old-age pensions, national health service and so forth, as an apparent outworking of the the following statement:

The object of government is the welfare of the people.

On the other hand, he also wanted to ensure that new Americans had allegiance to only the United States, spoke English and were fully integrated into society.

Was Teddy Roosevelt a conservative? By today’s standards, he might have been considered conservative early in his first term of office. However, by the time he had left office and started up the Bull Moose Party, one would be hard pressed to not see the author of the Square Deal as having more in common with his cousin of the New Deal than with the Great Communicator.

So then, what does John McCain mean when he speaks of himself in comparison with Roosevelt? Perhaps that he (McCain) sees himself as a man within a party (much like Roosevelt) who had little problem leaving the other members of the party when he believed them to be wrong. In addition, McCain sees himself advocating for the new “conservationism” with his support for addressing anthropogenic global warming and related issues. McCain also sees himself as a lover of country who is unafraid to use force if force is needed.

Do conservatives have reason to be concerned about a McCain presidency? Yes, but I would postulate that this is true because of McCain’s own history on issues such as immigration and global warming, rather than any perceived connection to Teddy Roosevelt’s positions or policies.  It would be interesting, though entirely without merit, to consider where Roosevelt would stand today if he could see the results of the policies which he advocated. Along those lines, I wonder what he would think of John McCain.

Books to Read

• Theodore Rex at Amazon
• When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt . . . at Amazon
• Theodore Roosevelt: An Autobiography at Amazon