Posted on 07/31/2007 6:19:53 AM PDT by az4vlad
And you were right!
That WND thing kinda shocked me. I mean, whaaaat? :p
It just goes to show that lots of people don’t feel complete unless they’re scared witless about something or other, especially if that something isn’t obvious to “normal” folks.
Great post. Thanks for the work.
save for later ref.
Reply to ping of interest
1 to 100 I understand. What does the number on the right signify?
The BOSTON HERALD???
The legendary headline reporting the dubious poll of Bush beating Dukakis aside, the Herald is nothing but left-wing trash, a cheap, mafia-friendly, corrupt knock off the Daily News. I lived in Boston. If the Boston Globe wasn’t among the worst newspapers in America, the Herald would be infmaous itself for DailyKOS-style trash.
Who assembled this list? The Republican-party outreach wing of Murdoch’s, News Inc.?
Thanks for the list
O'Reilly is not a conservative. He's a populist. So sometimes he sides with conservative causes and to his credit, he doesn't take BS answers from the left. That's what makes folks think he's conservative. Anyone in media who doesn't always read the latest DNC talking points as fact is regarded as a conservative.
But he clearly failed Econ 101 (actually, he must surely have failed middle school econ). He constantly gets sucked into silly conspiracy ideas about things like high prices that are just stupid--he's a moon is made of green cheese type guy in economics. So he constantly misses the boat as a conservative on economic issues. I don't think it's malicious. He just doesn't know what he's talking about and doesn't realize that he's ignorant on these topics. But that describes 3/4ths of Americans. So he has a good audience for his economic schtick.
And, it's too bad he jumped to conclusions about FR. With 100,000 members posting, if you are looking for inappropriate posts, it's not too hard to find them. But overwhelmingly, the discourse here is measured and appropriate.
But he was great after 911 when he jumped United Way and NLG about funding terrorist organizations with US Government money. NLG and United Way are two of the left's darlings and a huge source of free money from the rubes for left-wing causes--untouchable by all except Bill. The left will never forgive him for that.
It's pretty clear from his positions that he was not talking about drug-legalizing, marry-your-dog-if-you-want style libertarianism. He was talking about Madisonian style libertarianism--keep government small and under constant checks from other branches, devolve as much power to states and localities as possible style libertarianism.
The real issue is that people are very imprecise using the "l" word. What I call "social libertarians" would affect a constitutional revolution--removing from States the power they had under the original constitutional scheme to regulate morality (any argument they did not have that power under the scheme is just silly and I won't get into that argument even if 9th amendment fanatics respond).
More traditional libertarians focus on rescuing the Constitutional scheme of limited government run mostly from the State level from it's current disarry. I count myself amongst that group of libertarians, even though I am a social conservative. But because of the dope-smoking baggage the term has acquired from a small group of loud adherents, I don't use it to describe myself very often.
The extreme social libertarians have very little in common with conservatives--conservatism is based on an understanding of the fallen nature of man. Conservatives know that humans need to be told that some things are bad and they will be punished or they will do a lot of really bad stuff and the cultural center will not hold. Period. OTOH, social libertarianism is based on a view of human nature that is as unrealistic as the communist/Rousseauian view--that is, that we are perfectable if only the systems around us were better and more utopian (different utopias, same naive view of human nature). Both social libertarianism and communism are based on perfectly understandable urges about how we wish humans were. But both will always fail because that's not how humans work.
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