Category: Conservatism 101

Obama’s Down. Can GOP Put Him Out?

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“There is only so much disaster-control you can do. When you’re in a disaster, you can spin it as ‘not that bad’ or ‘not my fault’ . . . but you cannot actually spin or speechify a horrific state of affairs into a positive one.”
— Ace of Spades, “Obama on the Ropes? Two GOP Polls Say He’s At His Lowest Point (So Far…)”

Nevertheless, Obama must try the impossible:

Having spent two decades in the pews of Reverend Wright’s church listening to the Hate America Gospel, President Zero is perhaps not familiar with the actual Bible. He therefore may not catch the near-sacrilegious resemblance between his sermon in Raleigh and Christ’s charge to His disciples: “If ye love me, keep my commandments.”

Everyone raised as a Christian will, however, recognize the hint of blasphemy in this spontaneous expression of Obama’s fundmental narcissism, and the cultic implications in the shouted adoration from his liberal flock. It’s a wonder they didn’t cover his path to Raleigh with palm fronds, or bring the blind and deaf to the rally, hoping to be healed by touching his garments. And I don’t doubt many talk-radio hosts will make the most of all that, as well they should.

Nevertheless, talk is just talk and what we need now is action to maximize the strategic momentum gained by Tuesday’s triumph. Continue reading Obama’s Down. Can GOP Put Him Out? →

Against Radical Egalitarianism

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A friend responded to my earlier post about the so-called “gender gap” with an e-mail pointing out several other statistical problems in that feminist argument. Replying to my friend’s e-mail, I found myself elaborating an argument that eventually reached nearly 1,200 words. Because it explains a lot of the fundamental principles involved in my political orientation, I thought I’d share the e-mail with readers:

Good points all, Adrienne. The real key here is understanding that the “gap” is about average differences between groups of people. This involves a sort of social-science artifact that, when reported sloppily (as is too often the case), creates illusions of widespread unfair discrimination.
It’s like aggregated test scores as a measure of school performance. We are often led to think that if School A reports that its 5th-graders average 93 on the standardized test while School B’s 5th-graders score 83 on average, then School A is “better” than School B. Yet you can come back and check test scores five years later and find that, while neither the personnel nor the curricula have undergone any significant change at either school, School B’s average will have increased to 89 while School A has declined to 87.
What happened? Well, a low-income apartment complex was built in the School A district, while a new upscale development of McMansions was built in School B’s district. So what was previously the clearly “better” school now has a larger number of 5th-graders from a lower socioeconomic background (and standardized test scores tend to reflect such factors), while the previously inferior school now has a few more 5th-graders from privileged backgrounds.
This kind of statistical perception problem occurs whenever we aggregate people into categorical groups — sex, race, whatever — and then make the differences between group averages the basis for a policy aimed at bringing about equality between these groups. But such policies almost never achieve their stated goals, and in the process usually have harmful unintended consequences, not the least of which is the fostering of unnecessary resentments between members of the groups which become playthings in these social enginering experiments. Continue reading Against Radical Egalitarianism →

VIDEO: The Man With No Plan Accuses House Republicans of Irresponsibility

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“President Snippy Pants,” as William Teach calls him, evidently believes what America needs is more lectures from him:

While accusing the House GOP of wasting time by, y’know, passing legislation, our Lecturer-in-Chief uses his weekly address to issue yet another iteration of Democrat Party talking points:

Republicans in the House of Representatives just spent precious days trying to pass a plan that a majority of Republicans and Democrats in the Senate had already said they wouldn’t vote for. It’s a plan that wouldn’t solve our fiscal problems, but would force us to re-live this crisis in just a few short months. It would hold our economy captive to Washington politics once again. If anything, the past few weeks have demonstrated that’s unacceptable.
Any solution to avoid default must be bipartisan. It must have the support of both parties that were sent here to represent the American people — not just one faction of one party. . . .
Now all of us — including Republicans in the House of Representatives — need to demonstrate the same kind of responsibility that the American people show every day. The time for putting party first is over.

One hesitates to spend “precious days” (or even precious minutes) fisking this, as the hypocritical falseness of Obama’s rhetoric really ought to be self-evident.

Let us first have done with Obama’s bogus insinuation that he represents the credible voice of “responsibility.” He hasn’t put forward any detailed plan of his own. Instead of providing a budget, he gave a speech — April 13 at George Washington University — in which he dishonestly used the phrase “my budget,” and rolled out the focus-group-tested phrase “balanced approach” (i.e., code for “tax increases”).

In his GWU speech, the president recycled the old-and-busted partisan talking-point that ObamaCare “will reduce our deficit by $1 trillion” (laughably false), and then infamously asserted that his “balanced approach” would “achieve $4 trillion in deficit reduction over twelve years.”

I say he “infamously” made this assertion, because it stands as a historic milestone in the annals of deceptive political rhetoric. Continue reading VIDEO: The Man With No Plan Accuses House Republicans of Irresponsibility →

Obama Wants ‘Largest Deal Possible’

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The president is obviously trying to turn the debt-ceiling negotiations into an opportunity to claim victory:

“I think there’s still time to get something big done,” [White House budget director Jack] Lew said. . . .
Lew said on NBC’s “Meet The Press” that the president “made clear he wants the largest deal possible.”“He wants to do the most we can to reduce the deficit,” Lew said. “But he also said that if we can’t get the most done, then in addition to extending the debt we should do as much as we can.”
House Republicans are preparing to vote this week on allowing an increase in the government’s borrowing limit through 2012 as long as Congress approves a balanced-budget constitutional amendment.
Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., called that proof that Republicans are willing to compromise and “hardly a radical idea” but the Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin of Illinois, said that bill doesn’t have the needed support in the Senate.
“This notion that we have to change the Constitution to do what we were elected to do is just plain wrong,” Durbin said. Both senators spoke on “Meet the Press.”
Lew, appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union,” also did not like the idea.
“What these ideas do is say let’s kick the can down the road so that others will deal with it,” he said. “The challenge is for Washington now to do the job the American people sent us here to do.”

Three words: Bipartisan kabuki dance.

Making the debt-ceiling increase contingent on passing a balanced budget amendment is the kind of meaningless symbolic gesture that will deceive no one with enough intelligence and knowledge to actually comprehend what the current debate is about.

Republicans evidently don’t want us to forget their uncontested ownership of the “Stupid Party” label. Continue reading Obama Wants ‘Largest Deal Possible’ →

Why Doesn’t Obama Come Right Out and Say, ‘Democrats Want to Raise Taxes’?

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There is a cynical saying among political strategists on Capitol Hill: “Do we want the bill or do we want the issue”? That is to say, is it to our advantage to pass legislation to address a specific issue, or is it to our advantage to keep the issue alive as a controversy going into the next election campaign? If all you care about is gaining political advantage, that’s how you think about such matters, and this seems to me what President Obama is doing with the current budget debate:

President Obama used his weekly address to reiterate his demand for ending tax breaks for “millionaires and billionaires” in any budget deal to raise the nation’s debt limit.
“It would be nice if we could keep every tax break, but we can’t afford them,” Obama said. “Because if we choose to keep those tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires, or for hedge fund managers and corporate jet owners, or for oil and gas companies pulling in huge profits without our help — then we’ll have to make even deeper cuts somewhere else.”

Watch the video of his weekly address:

Obama knows — or at least, he ought to know — that ending the “tax breaks” he talks about so vaguely would contribute a neglible amount of revenue in terms of shrinking a $1.4-trillion annual deficit. Furthermore, because the policy he advocates would be a disincentive to investment, it might extend the recession and actually decrease federal tax revenue.

Now let’s drop the president’s political euphemisms about ending “tax breaks” and instead speak the plain truth: President Obama wants to raise taxes.

Or does he? Continue reading Why Doesn’t Obama Come Right Out and Say, ‘Democrats Want to Raise Taxes’? →

Whatever Happened to AuH2O?

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“People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.”
— Edmund Burke, 1790

In 1964, Sen. Barry Goldwater (a) voted against the Civil Rights Act, and (b) was the Republican nominee for president. Goldwater’s argument against the Civil Right Act was that it constituted an infringement of property rights. Ron Paul made the same argument Friday on Hardball:

I believe that property rights should be protected. Your right to be on TV is protected by property rights because somebody owns that station. I can’t walk into your station. So right of freedom of speech is protected by property. The right of your church is protected by property. So people should honor and protect it. This gimmick, Chris, it’s off the wall when you say I’m for property rights and states rights therefore I’m a racist. That’s just outlandish.

When Ron Paul’s son, Rand Paul, was criticized for making a similar argument last year, David Weigel was one of the few bloggers to defend his libertarian perspective. And as I looked at the Memeorandum thread Friday night, I didn’t see a single conservative blogger defending Paul.

Even though this is, as Paul says, “ancient history” — liberal Chris Matthews ginning up a moot controversy to smear a Republican — it troubles me that conservatives have become so intimidated by the Left’s constant cries of “raaaaacism” that no one is willing to defend the position advocated by Barry Goldwater in 1964.

“Oh, well, it’s just that wacko Ron Paul,” they say. “Who cares?”

Yeah? Well, it’s also Ronald Reagan, my friend. If you’re willing to let Ron Paul be smeared as a bigot over this, then I guess you might as well throw the Gipper under the bus while you’re at it. Continue reading Whatever Happened to AuH2O? →

Carl Salonen & the Left-Wing Trolls Who Smeared ‘Advice Goddess’ Amy Alkon

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Yesterday I blogged about Amy Alkon’s encounter with the online Left which, taking offense at something Alkon had written about unwed motherhood, organized one of its characteristic “Two-Minute Hate” campaigns against her.

What I did not know was that the Left attempted to destroy Alkon’s career as a journalist, by posting defamatory fallacious Amazon “reviews” of her book I See Rude People.

Nor did I know that Alkon had named Carl Salonen and Loretta Serrano as key perpetrators of that smear campaign.

Donald Douglas has an excellent post summarizing this shocking story, of which I was previously unaware. And this is the kind of vicious behavior in which self-proclaimed “progressives” now engage routinely. These destructive tactics are the radical offspring of what Frankfurt School intellectual Herbert Marcuse advocated in his notorious 1965 essay “Repressive Tolerance”:

Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.

Elsewhere in the same essay, Marcuse denounces “pure” or “non-partisan” tolerance, which he describes as the “active, official tolerance granted to the Right as well as to the Left, to movements of aggression as well as to movements of peace, to the party of hate as well as to that of humanity.” Is anyone so blind or so ignorant of history as to miss the significance of this? Continue reading Carl Salonen & the Left-Wing Trolls Who Smeared ‘Advice Goddess’ Amy Alkon →

‘No Poor Man Ever Gave Me a Job’

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As an impoverished American — hey, buddy, you wanna try raising six kids on a freelance journalist’s income? — I look on in amusement at the self-described “Patriotic Millionaires” who insist that they should pay more taxes. I agree with Moe Lane: “Raise Your Own Damned Taxes.”

Contrary to all the class-warfare demagoguery pouring forth from Democrats and the media (but I repeat myself), conservatives do not oppose tax increases because we are beholden to the rich. Rather, the question is whether wealth does more good when it is invested in the private sector, to create jobs and economic growth, or surrendered to the federal government as taxes to support the metastatic growth of a pestiferous bureaucracy. Rich liberals have always failed to understand blue-collar conservatism, seeking to explain away working-class support of free enterprise as the consequence of a proto-fascist “Authoritarian Personality” or (more recently), bitter gun-and-Bible clinging.

Permit me to remind you exactly how old this game is:

“If you dismiss a priori the possibility that there are rational grounds for resisting the Liberal view of things, one necessarily looks elsewhere than to reason for explanations,” Buckley wrote in his 1959 classic, Up From Liberalism. Buckley observed that “one needs no advanced degrees in clinical psychology and psychoanalytic theory in order to penetrate the fallacy of The Authoritarian Personality” — the most famous work of Adorno, a leader of what has become known as the Frankfurt School of political theory.
Adorno claimed to have proven scientifically that American conservatism was rooted in psychological maladjustment, fostering a tendency toward authoritarianism, which he asserted was the fundamental source of European fascism.
However, as Buckley explained, Adorno’s argument was a tautology based on the implicit presumption that all opposition to liberalism was illegitimate and therefore irrational. Adorno’s theory was “marvelously convenient” for liberals, Buckley said, and it has been recycled periodically ever since.

In fact, whatever the cultural component of conservatism, the Ordinary American’s resistance to redistributionist Welfare State policies is rooted in a common-sense view once magnificently expressed by Ronald Reagan: “No poor man ever gave me a job.” Continue reading ‘No Poor Man Ever Gave Me a Job’ →