Previously, we enjoyed Ron Miller’s prepared remarks. Fine stuff. However, in my opinion, Ron hits his stride as he fields questions from the audience. All of the questions and answers are great, but if you’ve time, the first one offers greater philosophical insight. The rest are also good but focus more on current events.
Ron Miller’s three point sermon in under four minutes
Ron Miller Question One Triggers A Three Point Sermon
(a) No to collectivism/yes to individuality
(b) Free enterprise
(c) Forgiveness
Bob Knight asks about buyer’s remorse
Ron observes what he surmises is a Presidential bias in favor of the Ivory Tower over the Civil Rights tradition pertaining to policy style. This may be leading to some tension for the President’s supports.
Black candidates: will that trigger increased GOP support?
Ron has this wild idea of elected representatives as ‘servants’, as opposed to ‘leaders’. Crazy talk. Also, social media is starting to turn the tide, as more black conservatives link up.
Wiseguy blogger brings the snark
I’ll confess that “the soft bigotry of lowered ethical expectations” was a Stacy McCain riff. Ron references this post on his site in yet another outstanding reply.
There are another eight or so questions in the queue, so check back on Monday for further installments. And if you haven’t joined the Sellout reading club, you know what you need to do.
UPDATE III: I was unsuccessful in persuading Kate Obenshain to don the famous fedora, alas:
UPDATE IV: Wow, what a coincidence that I should run into a fellow Atlanta native here at the YAF conference:
Sarah Perkins, an alumna of Fulton County’s Westlake High, with Alyssa Cordova of the Claire Boothe Luce Policy Institute. Sarah is now attending Smith College (an elite “Seven Sisters” school), and told me that her dad went to school with Herman Cain. How cool is that, huh?
Phyllis Schlafly is one of conservatism’s great heroines. Both Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter acknowledge Schlafly’s influence as a role model. Forty-six years after her rallying cry for Goldwater, A Choice Not an Echo, and three decades after she led the crusade to stop ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, she’s still driving liberals nuts:
“One of the things Obama’s been doing is deliberately trying to increase the percentage of our population that is dependent on government for their living. For example, do you know what was the second-biggest demographic group that voted for Obama? . . . Unmarried women. Seventy percent of unmarried women voted for Obama. And this is because, when you kick your husband out, you’ve got to have Big Brother government to be your provider. . . .”
This is what we in the journalism business call a “fact”:
Take a recent report entitled “Advancing the Economic Security of Unmarried Women” by the Center for American Progress, the “progressive” nonprofit run by Bill Clinton’s former chief of staff John Podesta. The report reviews the problems of a growing segment of our society: unmarried women. They are poorer, more likely than other women to be unemployed, have less access to health care, and often struggle to care for children without support from fathers. What’s CAP’s solution? More government at every turn. Among the recommended proposals are more generous unemployment benefits, more job-training and job-placement programs, greater subsidies for child care, more generous child-nutrition programs, direct welfare payments for those with children, government intervention to prevent foreclosures, expanded low-income-housing programs, an increased minimum wage, government intervention to increase the pay of occupations dominated by women, mandatory paid family and sick leave, and, of course, government-provided health care. In other words, complete cradle-to-grave, taxpayer-provided government support.
It’s tempting to call this paper sexist: Women — especially unmarried women — are portrayed as barely able to subsist without extra protection. One could also ruminate on CAP’s view of family formation, which seems willing to substitute a dependent relationship on the government for marriage. A woman without a man is encouraged to depend on Uncle Sam.
One might disagree with that analysis, but it is hardly “extreme,” and yet the Schlafly speech making the same basic point is being seized as a campaign issue by Democrats:
Democrats aim to exploit the comments to pressure the more than 60 Republican candidates who have earned Schlafly’s endorsement. . . .
Democrats plan to jump on the 75 Republican candidates for federal office that Schlafly’s Eagle Forum has endorsed and donated to — a list that includes Todd Tiahrt in the Kansas Republican primary for Senate, Ken Buck in the Colorado Republican primary for Senate, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and his Senate Conservatives Fund and Sen. David Vitter. Already, reporters in Vitter’s home state of Louisiana are getting releases from the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee pressing them to ask Vitter if he agrees with Schlafly. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is doing the same thing to Eagle Forum-endorsed House candidates, painting Republicans on dozens of ballots — including Rep. Michele Bachmann and Scott Rigell in the competitive VA-02 race — as “extreme” and saying the candidate should refuse Schlafly’s endorsement.
I plan to renounce any Republican who renounces Phyllis Schlafly.
For the benefit of any Republican confused by all this uproar, let me explain the basic problem: The way to tackle feminism is head-on.
Feminism is a left-wing phenomenon. It is a radical egalitarian ideology based upon a fallacy, and should never be endorsed or appeased in the erroneous belief that, by kowtowing to ideologues, Republicans can win “The Women’s Vote” (capital-T, capital-W, capital-V, denoting a dubious category that is reified by feminist ideology). A brief explanation:
Insofar as men and women are different, they are not equal.
Equality implies fungibility — that two things are perfectly interchangeable, so that one thing may be substituted for the other without any difference in value. Only a fool could believe that men and women are equal in that way, and yet this is what feminists would require us to believe. And any man who dares contradict this egalitarian dogma is a sexist, an oppressor, a reactionary representative of the patriarchy.
All the other errors of feminism flow from this one fundamental error, a counterfactual insistence on the equality of the sexes. Men and women are not the same, and therefore are not equal.
Do not think that you, a Republican, can benefit by attempting some sort of “me-too” feminism, nor should you fall into the error of thinking that there is some sort of “conservative feminism” which can be mobilized to elect you. Such foolish behaviors and atttitudes only betray your lack of judgment and courage.
Most of all, do not think that you can benefit by throwing Phyllis Schlafly under the bus. Do you know how Phyllis Schlafly earned her way through college? Working in a munitions plant during World War II, when her job was test-firing .50-caliber machine-gun ammunition.
You don’t have to love Sue Lowden to understand that a 90% chance of Lowden winning is better than a 20% chance of Sharron Angle winning. Nor is there any recognition on the right that conservatives paved the way for health care reform by driving Specter out. In conservative lore, the Pat Toomey primary challenge remains a glorious triumph, when in fact it’s a disaster of historic proportions.
You can read the whole thing, but not without minding this important caveat: Jonathan Chait doesn’t want Republicans to win.
If Lowden had won the Nevada GOP primary, Chait would be busy-beavering arguments intended to help Harry Reid defeat Lowden. If Specter had stayed in the GOP and defeated Toomey in the primary, Chait would now be offering arguments to help Joe Sestak defeat Specter in November (as, in fact, the New Republic did throughout the Democratic primary).
Long ago — in February 2009, when the Tea Party movement was just being born — I explained this fundamental issue:
Among the ill effects of liberal bias in the media is that much political “news” amounts to thinly disguised DNC talking-points. The conservative must learn to think critically about news and politics, to filter out that which is misleading, or else he will internalize the funhouse-mirror distortions of reality that define the liberal weltanschauung. . . .
[O]ne of the major problems of the Republican Party, that so many of its supporters have unwittingly accepted liberal beliefs as political truths. . . .
The GIGO principle (Garbage In, Garbage Out) is as applicable to political discourse as to any other information system. If you let liberals like Chait tell you which Republican candidates you should support, you will never support any Republican candidate — except in a GOP primary, when liberals will invariably tell you to support the most liberal candidate on the ballot. As soon as the primary is over, however, your liberal friends will then return to their usual arguments of why you should vote Democrat. Sic semper hoc.
It may well be, as a source tells Ben Smith, that the Nevada GOP primary was a “total f*** up by the state and national Republicans” — Never underestimate the incompetence of the Republican establishment being another basic lesson of Conservatism 101 — but that is neither here nor there as to the task at hand, namely, defeating Harry Reid.
Chait and his friends are trying to do what liberals in the media always do, shape Conventional Wisdom to their own advantage.
“Sharron Angle Can’t Win” is the Meme-O’-Th’-Day, and liberals are going to pound it as hard and as long as they can. Why? Because they know that a lot of Republicans base their political decisions on Conventional Wisdom so that, by promoting this Angle-Is-Doomed message, liberals will erode support for Harry Reid’s opponent — especially from the Dumb and Rich Coalition who comprise the GOP’s big-money donors.
Sharron Angle can win, and should win, and will win, so long as the conservative grassroots don’t allow themselves to be bamboozled into believing the liberal Conventional Wisdom.
Obviously, you can’t expect the Dumb and Rich to write any fat checks to make that happen, so it’s up to the grassroots to give those small donations — $10, $20, $50 — that will add up to match the millions Harry Reid gets from his Democratic fat-cat friends.
