Posted on 05/30/2007 11:10:08 AM PDT by dangus
Heck. I'm ready to reclaim BOTH of them, but most importantly the latter.
Libertarians can't get themselves elected because they've made national drug policy the singular focus of their "leave me the hell alone-ism". I've not been able to talk politics for very long with any Libertarian I've met without this topic popping up; it's like their freakin' mantra, or something, a quasi-religious touchstone. This tendency has created the impression that a legislature filled with Libertarians would, first, legalize pot, then spend the remainder of the legislative session stoned.
Hardline Conservatives are nearly as protective of personal liberties, but differ greatly in how they prioritize the list of what should happen first because they temper personal liberty with the overarching value of the Republic itself. After all, it's not much use having personal liberty without a free government there to keep interloping bands of jihadis from taking it all away. So, while a legislature full of hardline Conservatives would definitely NOT be getting down to legalizing pot anytime soon, perhaps never, I'm betting that the reduction in government intrusions into nearly every other area of your life would be considered MORE than adequate compensation by all but the most voracious pot consumer.
My solution is this: No one on the public dole should be allowed a vote. NOBODY.
IIRC, it was Thomas Jefferson who argued that only property owners should be allowed a vote, a position predicated on the idea that the Constitution's system of voting would produce the best possible result is the voters were, themselves, economically vested in the outcome of elections. Perhaps unfortunately, his argument did not prevail.
Is to stay home on election day to teach those republicans in Congress a lesson.”
Once and for all: The party faithful stayed home because the Republicans acted poorly. Were Dems a better choice? Of course not.
Stop blaming voters: In lieu of a real conservative third choice the voters did what the system was designed to do: They threw the bums out. Instead of blaming voters it would better serve people to write their reps and remind them that what happened to their limp-wristed comrades in ‘06 could happen to them. Threaten to take away their access to posh Washington parties, page boys and drugs and see how fast they lean back to the right.
Yes, and this is the time for a real conservative to run against Graham in the primary.
-—I’d like to have a broad-based party that can accomodate different views, not one held hostage by social conservatives.-—
Sure! The social conservatives can stay. All they have to do is like the RINOs. Else they are purged.
If this amnesty passes, I don’t know if I can pull the lever for a Republican.
-—You guys will never get it. True conservatives are fed up with being dissed by elitist Republicans, who are happier in the minority anyway. All you care about is maintaining what little power you have left. Some of us have been dissed for the last time.-—
Maybe Tom “the Hammer” Delay can save us. Oh, never mind. He was purged.
This is a post and thread of lunacy.
It evidences again the inclination of some portions of the population to acute paranoia and self-destruction/suicide.
And yet your only refutation of it is name-calling.
>> And there lies the problem. Because we can’t afford the short run, we are guaranteed not to be able to afford the long run. <<
No, THERE’S the problem. The current GOP has never succeeded in undoing anything the Democrats have ever done. So everyone, ironically, keeps electing them because they expect that if the Democrats get to pass more laws, society ends.
That’s the mindset we have to rebel against: If we get effective conservatives, we can *gasp* UNDO Democratic damage. But for the past 70 years, we’ve had two modes: Make government more oppressive quickly, and make government more oppressive slowly. We don’t even fathom that we can make it less oppressive; the best we’ve hoped for is to make enforcement capricious and arbitrary by cutting taxes.
I don’t even believe that challenging purple-state incumbents will cost us seats even in the short run, but I’m saying we can’t be afraid to risk losing a seat.
Tom Delay wasn’t even a very conservative; he was just very partisan. (That’s a hell of a lot better than not very conservative AND being a RINO, mind you.) He was a solid vote, but he used his power to build party conformity, not to push for new conservative goals. Gingrich had more of an independent streak, (and, unfortunately a couple liberal turns as of late) but was much less afraid of challenging liberal orthodoxy. Delay was even just fine with the Clinton-Bush unfunded mandates requiring federal-funds recipients to adopt illegal aliens’ languages.
Well, thank goodness we don’t have to worry about Tom Delay anymore. The administration sure put up a fight for him didn’t they? /s :^)
It’s been a long time since anyone called me a liberal, as several here have done in response to my post. This will amaze all my friends, for sure.
In particular, your suggestion that hardline Conservatives mean freedom for the individual doesn’t surprise, much less shock me. I’ve voted for some of them.
My point was that “pure” parties don’t win national elections in this country. There have been some of them over the years, and where are they now?
Here’s what I think the GOP should stand for:
1. National Security and a strong defense.
The Democratic approach to foreign policy is to appease our enemies and take our friends for granted. One hopes the Republicans will always stand for the opposite: Stand by our friends and defeat our enemies.
2. Low taxes and the promotion of free enterprise.
3. No to the nanny state.
Here’s where one gets into a lot of disagreements. A lot of you here hate Giuliani because he supports choice on abortion and the licensing of guns. You want to outlaw abortion and let everyone carry weapons. So which is the anti-nanny state position?
4. No to liberal judges who try to legislate on social issues from the bench.
I like your proposed GOP platform, and agree that it is at point 3 where the big debates get started.
How one interprets the extent of the “no nanny state” idea hinges entirely upon how one prioritizes corporate versus individual rights.
When we recognize that certain unalienable rights are our heritage from our Creator, and establish a government with the principle function of preserving those rights for us and our posterity, there are consequences; corporate and individual, and sometimes that means an individual cannot limitlessly indulge their particular pursuit of happiness. Often, in deference to the corporate body, We cannot just go and do as we please. We rightly bar the axe murderer from his pursuit of homicidal happiness because the value of human life always trumps the value of happiness. We rightly paint lines on the pavement, plant “STOP” signs, and enforce speed limits — all controls on individual behavior — because it promotes a higher level of social order that more greatly benefits the corporate body.
There are myriad daily examples of the implementation of this basic principle: the good of many can trump the good of the few, but the just application of that principle rides on the answer to the question, “When?”
The answer to that question is just this simple: The good of the many trumps the good of the one when a higher value is given its place above a lower value.
For example, life trumps happiness. [Or you could substitute the liberal buzzword “choice”; it’s true either way.]
Whether a state is being a “nanny”, then, depends upon individuals sharing a set of properly ordered priorities. If the state is recognizing values in order of priority, then legislation does not constitute the state playing “nanny”, so laws seeking to outlaw abortion are not “nanny” laws because they rightly order the value of life over the value of happiness. Laws against suicide are not “nanny” laws because they rightly order the value of life over the value of happiness.
The place where the difficulty arises is in making a determination as to what priorities there are, and in what order they ought to be placed. Our founders didn’t have that problem, really, steeped as they were in Judeo-Christian civilization. Today, in what is, arguably, a post-Christian world, we have a really tough time with that. Still, I think we could do FAR worse than to subjugate our individual desires to a recognition of the Founders’ value set and adopt those priorities as our national priorities in the same way that we adopt the Declaration and the Constitution for ourselves as Americans.
There’s a place where ascribing value to those founding documents necessitates an individual subscription to the values and priorities upon which those documents rest, and that is the place where we look at ourselves in the bathroom mirror and decide whether we are Americans or Individualists living in America; whether the Founders’ priorities will be ours, also, or whether we will set them aside in favor of our own.
Really, this all boils down to the outcome of our individual struggle with human selfishness. Can we overcome it and embrace the Founders views, or will we succumb, and create an America in our own image?
We can’t have it both ways; we’ve got to choose.
Obviously, if we each choose the selfish path, we could have as many “American Ideals” as there are Americans, except that we wouldn’t be Americans, then, would we; we’d just be individuals living in an area geographically defined as “America”.
No, “being American” has to be more than simply wrapping ourselves in the flag, reciting the preamble to the Constitution, and rereading the Declaration now and again. It has to involve a subjugation of our selves and our priorities to a set of ideals expressed by those who crafted the founding documents and recorded them there with the intent that future generations — including us — would cherish and preserve them. To the extent that we reject their priorities, we reject our flag, our Constitution, the Declaration, and the Foundation upon which it all rests. We reject the Republic, itself.
The fear is, I think, that people would forfeit their individual direction in life if they adopt priorities that aren’t their ‘native’ priorities. I disagree, and it goes back to “the good of the many trumps the good of the one”. Like lines on the pavement, “STOP” signs, and speed limits — which we all share out there on the roads — a similarly shared set of priorities and values serve to promote a greater social order than can possibly be achieved if we selfishly cling each to our own personal priorities. The fallout is a far more satisfied, productive, and healthy society.
The disastrous alternative — each of us adhering to an individual priority set — would be the social equivalent of erasing all of the lines from the pavement, uprooting the “STOP” signs, and taking down the speed limit signs.
Nobody wins in that environment but the carrion beasts: the trial lawyers, towing companies, and undertakers.
Despite the required limitations on individual behavior, in deference to “the good of the many” hardcore Conservatives will always seek to embrace and implement the Founders’ priorities and values, as expressed in the Declaration and Constitution, because that is what will produce the best possible outcome for The Republic as a whole.
Everyone else in the political arena, then, is expressing the desire to reorder the Founders’ priorities, to some degree or another; ranging from slightly to totally, which represents a foundational disagreement with the nature of The Republic itself; a desire to have a different America than what the Founders established.
What people seem oblivious to is that America cannot be redefined much at all before it will no longer be America. If we pursue our selfish adherence to values and priorities the Founders never conceived of, we will one day awaken to a nation that no longer resembles the Founders’ vision; it will no longer be America, and The Republic will have, at last, been subsumed by the selfishness of the governed.
I am a hardcore Conservative, for the precise reason that I value preservation of the Founders’ Republic above adherence to my self-conceived priorities; that I best support the Republic by embracing and upholding the priorities upon which it rests. Whether they align with my own or not is entirely irrelevant.
_____
A sidebar interest in all of this — and this “goes macro” with this discussion — is the observation that so much energy is put into bashing hardline conservatives for things like opposing abortion — as if all there is to human life is whether or not we get to destroy our unborn — when there’s a universe filled with liberty and freedom that’s there for the taking. Does anyone take note of it?? No, they’re embroiled in their diatribe and rhetoric, scratching and clawing to preserve access to their favorite blood ritual.
When you stop to think about it, it’s weird, isn’t it?
I mean, people could go hiking in Patagonia, ski the Swiss Alps, ride a helicopter into the Grand Canyon, raft down the raging Colorado River, fish the morning “rise” on a calm, crystal blue Sierra lake, drive old Route 66, sail a yacht to Hawaii, build homes for the poor, plant trees, convert their hot water system to solar, change careers, start a business, a million plus fulfilling adventures...
What DO you want to do, today??
Pick an answer — any answer — just, please, make it something OTHER than “campaign for the right to kill the unborn”.
And, what answer to they pick???
“Uh, lemme get back to you; I gotta go to a Planned Parenthood rally.”
~~~ Aaaaaaahhh!! ~~~
It’s enough to make you wanna yank out all your hair by the roots!
Taxes have gone up-gas is over $3.00 per gallon. Honestly, I see little difference under Repubs. Also, I will not vote for any candidate that favors this immigration bill which most presidential candidates do.
Also, I am sick of Repubs bashing conservatives-especially Christian consevatives. If Republican’s win then they were successful with courting ‘swing voters’. If they lose, it’s those pesky conservatives turning off swing voters with their annoying stance on the murder of unborn children or conservatives stayed home thus letting down their elitist GOP lords-sick of it.
The right to a trial by a jury of your peers before summary execution?
I appreciate your very thoughtful reply.
As a woman — and a feminist from way back — I can understand the development of the pro-choice position. In some respects, I consider myself pro-choice on libertarian grounds. (Although I also think the abortion question should be decided by the people of the respective states, not judges.)
The need for women to control their own fertility arises out of the drive by women to participate fully in modern society. The problem, of course, is that the birth control movement in this country took its direction from the radical Margaret Sanger. Following her lead, it still insists on absolute rights without responsibility — when every sensible person knows that pregnancy is all about responsibilities. Another case of warped values, courtesy of utopian socialism.
Is to stay home on election day to teach those republicans in Congress a lesson.
Oh! We did that in 2006 and now have no majority in the House to stop this insane immigration bill.
That was a great idea, let’s do it in 2008 so that President Hillary will really teach to GOP a lesson./sarc
************
I didn't stay home in 2006. Did you?
At this point, I fundamentally agree with you, though I do think that, because our National Foundations are rooted in originating documents asserting the preeminent value of human life, there is a basis for Federal legislation. Even there, however, I remain in complete agreement that it must be a matter decided by "We, The People" through the representative legislative process, NOT by judicial fiat.
In regard to women controlling their own fertility, I agree with you as to the perversion of that concept by the assertions of those like Sanger. We have come to a place where our society now views that control as a wholly separate thing from the woman's personal responsibility. Despite the fact that personal responsibility shouts it from the mountain tops, we dare not say to women, "You abicated your right to control of your fertility when you consented to engage in potentially impregnating sexual behavior." Advocating personal responsibility over feral hedonism has become hate speech, and that's truly damnable.
I understand the point you are trying to make. In addition, no discussion of abortion, birth control,and the “pro-choice” position can be complete without an exploration as to exactly what Margaret Sanger and the movement she created were.
There are many myths created by the Left and MSM about Margaret Sanger, one of the High Priests of the pro-abortion movement, and the Planned Parenthood Movement she founded.
Here are the truths:
She was a Marxist and radical feminist
She opened America’s first “birth-control” clinic in 1916
She recommended euthanasia for those deemed irreparably unfit
She believed in Eugenics and Social Darwinism
She was a racist
She created the term “birth control” and employed it in its lieral sense : to control the number of births to poor, non-white women
From her biography at Discover The Networks, an excellent site detailing the connections of organizations to the Left and Marxism:
http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1816
In 1960, the founder of Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, vowed that she would leave the United States forever if that well-known defender of reactionary conservatism, John F. Kennedy, were ever elected to the presidency. Sanger was a fervent Marxist, a radical feminist, and, despite comical denials posted on Planned Parenthood’s website, a rabid eugenicist. According to her New York Times obituary, dated September 7, 1966, Sanger specifically recommended the practice of birth control to prevent procreation among those of the poor prone to producing heritably ‘subnormal’ children, and, in the early years of the 20th Century, the masthead of her Feminist-Socialist magazine, The Woman Rebel, defiantly proclaimed “No Gods! No Masters!” to its readership.
At first glance, one could hardly disapprove of Sanger’s attempts to promote better health practices among poor women, or seriously find fault with her call for legalized contraception as a means of reducing dangerous self-inflicted abortions. Fewer than 100 years ago, urban women still regularly succumbed to disease and died young, especially if they were poor and had repeatedly endured the physical hardships of pregnancy. In fact, Sanger’s own mother had died of tuberculosis, at 48, after bearing eleven children in rapid succession. Legend has it that it was her mother’s death, coupled with her experience as a maternity nurse among the indigent, which finally convinced her to crusade for legalization of birth control in America. But Sanger was no mere social worker, and that particular legend omits much more than it describes.
It was Sanger who actually coined the phrase “birth control,” and it was she who opened the first birth control clinic in the nation, circa 1916. Sanger also deliberately politicized her push for legalized contraception by founding the National Birth Control League in 1921, and, later, she presided over the founding of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Of course, her activism put her directly at odds with law-enforcement officials and the Catholic Church, but little discussed is the actual extent to which her early Marxism guided much of what she managed to achieve. Her good friends included ultra-radicals like John Reed and Emma Goldman, and the truth is that Sanger’s feminism, and her support for eugenic ‘sexual science’, were both simply part-and-parcel of her own unique Marxist vision. Humanitarianism, per se, had little to do with what motivated Margaret Sanger.
Simply consider Sanger’s horrific contradictions. For Sanger and her generation of radicals, the success of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia largely validated Marx’s promise of a pending new world order. As a proponent of birth control, Sanger certainly sought to remedy specific health threats impacting the lives of poor women, but as a Marxist committee member of the New York Socialist Party, she also certainly anticipated the day when poor workers would be expected to rise up, kill off significant numbers of men, women, and children within the American middle class, and fully seize the nation’s political and productive powers in efforts to establish a communist workers’ utopia. It is absolutely indisputable that the spilling of bourgeois blood was viewed as a necessary step toward achieving the expected Marxist future, and although her own Socialist tenets likely were a bit less militant than those of many of her comrades, she doubtless accepted that such bloodshed would be required.
A political pundit recently quipped that a separate, leftist faction emerges from each and every progressive activist sporting an outsized ego. The same sort of factionalism splintered alliances among the headstrong Marxists of Sanger’s era, and Sanger, herself, had her own very definite ideas about how best to run a revolution. Unlike Marx, Sanger blamed the poor for their own misery, and her hybrid views led her to sharply criticize Marx’s monomaniacal obsession with economic determinants: she did not believe for a second that the revolution’s replacement of one economic system for another would miraculously transmute degraded humanity into collectivist supermen. “In pointing out the limitations and fallacies of the orthodox Marxian opinion,” Sanger penned, in The Pivot of Civilization, “my purpose is not to depreciate the efforts of Socialists aiming to create a new society, but rather to emphasize what seems to me to be the greatest and most neglected truth of our day: unless sexual science is incorporated …and the pivotal importance of birth control is recognized in any program of reconstruction, all efforts to create a new world and a new civilization are foredoomed to failure.” Aspects of social Darwinism loomed large in the world of ideas at that time, and, for Sanger, eugenic breeding techniques were the key to molding model citizens.
Painfully aware that the miserable poor surrounding her were hardly the makings of a future political vanguard, Sanger sought to improve their revolutionary fitness by encouraging smaller families, selective breeding, and, of course, elimination of births among those deemed to be lowly intelligent. Because Marxists fundamentally believed that children were the property of society (and not that of their parents), Sanger and her followers apparently felt fully justified in demanding not only that poor families immediately begin eugenically manipulating their own procreation, but also that governments fully mandate it. In keeping with Sanger’s teachings, American communists eventually accreted the belief that it was selfish and counterrevolutionary to sire too many kids: children, especially ‘defective’ ones, interfered with the family’s ability to adequately respond to the needs of the party. The whole idea that the poor might someday soldier a revolution in America led Sanger to work tirelessly on its behalf. And, had Marx not successfully established the notion that the proletariat was a sacred class, one wonders if, for expediency, Sanger might rather have recommended euthanasia for those deemed irreparably unfit. (Luckily for them, though, she demanded only that they be segregated or sterilized.)
Like all political agitators of the Marxist stripe, Sanger also likely exploited the bourgeoisie for the benefit of the cause: in general, all non-Marxists were viewed as expendable non-persons to be cynically milked for whatever they could provide. Wealthy women who supported Sanger’s efforts regularly organized their own social circles to provide funding and political influence, but, as Sanger and her colleagues well knew, such generous, heartfelt support would not ultimately spare them the tumbrel’s ride directly to the revolution’s gallows.
It was not out of compassion for women that Sanger did what she did: her work was aimed at benefiting only a particular class of women, and, what is worse, it assisted a political ideology that, at last worldwide count, was shown to have deliberately murdered nearly 100 million innocent people. Sanger’s own activities were part of a broad radical agenda calculated to upset the political, religious, and social orders of the day, and, collectively, all were intended to hasten the expected collapse of bourgeois America. In the Marxist universe, clever lies, rationalized by dialectic sophistry, ingeniously obscured sordid truth, and Sanger’s own efforts were always disingenuously cloaked within the mantle of social justice.
Pol Pot, to take but one example, eventually achieved in Cambodia what Sanger and her Marxist friends apparently longed for in America, i.e., the deliberate extermination of millions to jumpstart a hideous revolution. Public awareness of these psychopathic hopes should alone suffice to bar Ms. Sanger from receiving any further posthumous accolades…that is, except from those in our midst who still believe as she once did.
This profile first appeared as an article titled “Contraception As Weapon in the Arsenal of Class Struggle: The Masked Radicalism of Margaret Sanger,” written by Victor Spooner, January 2005.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.