Posted on 05/16/2009 9:07:01 AM PDT by EternalVigilance
If the modern conservative movement has a patron saint, it’s Oscar Mayer.
I recently attended a conference to address media bias. Present were representatives of several DC-based conservative groups.
Some were hesitant about a counterattack on the mainstream media. Why bite the hand that bashes you?
How can we expect them to work with us, if we begin by assailing them, they plaintively inquired? For a minute, I thought I’d wandered into the recovery room for male pups who’ve been clear-cut.
Conservatives working with the liberal media? Swell idea! It would be like the Chief Rabbi of Berlin working with Goebbels back in the day.
While impersonating journalists, mediatoids continually agitate and indoctrinate for collectivism, the deconstruction of the family and a prostrate foreign policy.
They portray conservatives as bigots, warmongering Neanderthals, religious fanatics and heartless proponents of Social Darwinism. A Zionist would get more of a break at a Hamas rally than conservatives do from the mainstream media.
While we’re at it, maybe we should try working with George Soros, Janeane Garofalo and Barney Frank too.
With honorable exception, the D.C. conservative leadership has a pathological need for respectability and a corresponding aversion to sounding radical. The good opinion of their enemies means more to them than the convictions of those they claim to represent.
How many conservative luminaries are willing to publicly confess that which they know to be true: that Barack Obama is a socialist who’s dedicated to destroying freedom in this country; that the media are anti-American twits; that Islam is the religion of terrorism; that homosexuality is a mental disorder and that a belief in God is incompatible with the Democratic Party?
The right has repaired to the fainting couch after a severe attack of the vapors.
Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL), ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, who’s usually a lion when standing for conservative principles, became a small, cheese-eating creature when interviewed by Mark Halperin on MSNBC recently.
Referring to Obama’s forthcoming Supreme Court nomination, Halperin asked Sessions: “Could you vote for an openly gay justice?”
Correct answer: No. Next question.
Sessions: “Well… it depends on their personal ethics and standards, and their legal skill and ability. I don’t think a person who acknowledges that they have gay tendencies is disqualified (from) the job. We’ll have to see.” Squeak.
Where do ethical standards come from if not Judeo-Christian morality? What are the personal ethics and standards of someone addicted to buggery who seeks to subvert the moral order?
But, like many in the movement’s leadership, Sessions dreads being called a homophobe. I wonder if the Alabamian could give us an example or two of homosexuals whose personal ethics and standards would qualify them to rule on the Constitution. As a preacher friend of mine says: The same Bible that tells me murder and theft are wrong also condemns sodomy.
Those conservatives who’ve had the greatest impact on the republic in the 20th century – Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan – were also the most direct and unapologetic.
Goldwater’s 1964 campaign was a failure in every way save one: He had the guts to express the views that made him a pariah at the time, but which established a political beachhead for anti-communism, the free market and limited government.
Recall the establishment’s horror at that memorable line in Goldwater’s acceptance speech: “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice no virtue.” I can imagine Beltway conservatives restating that as: “Defending freedom is nice – as long as extremism is avoided – and justice is okay too, in moderation.”
Does anyone remember what, if anything, Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney and Henry Cabot Lodge stood for? Goldwaterism meant something (even if the Senator did get squishy in his dotage). If not for Goldwater in 1964, there would have been no Reagan in 1980.
Ronald Reagan gave the most radical articulation of conservative values in the entire ’64 campaign, with his “A Time for Choosing” speech.
During the boom years of the early Johnson administration, when the Great Society seemed so sensible, forward-looking and compassionate, and the nation worshipped at the shrine of “our martyred president,” the Gipper had the audacity to warn: “We’ll preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we’ll sentence them to take the last step into a thousand years of darkness.”
Reagan’s tough-talk catapulted him into the governorship of California two years later and the presidency 16 years hence. The weenie conservatives all want to be Ronald Reagan. But haven't the vaguest idea of how to act like him.
The modern conservative movement was built on radicalism – the courage to call a communist a communist, a socialist a socialist and John F. Kennedy a bumbling idiot who followed in the statist footsteps of another silver-spoon socialist, Franklin Dumbano Roosevelt.
Patriots are confrontational by nature.
In the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers damned George III in words that left no doubt of their contempt for the British monarch. (“The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states.”) Aw, come on! Isn’t that harsh?
How did they expect King George to work with them if they began by attacking him? Answer: They’d tried working with him. It didn’t work.
We’ve spent 45 years trying to work with the media, which is more shamelessly biased today than it was four decades ago. During the past campaign, members of the fourth estate became Obama’s Monica Lewinsky, metaphysical knee-pads and all.
In the 1930s, a once-prominent member of the British Parliament was warned by cooler heads to moderate his views regarding Germany’s new government. (After 1.1 million British dead in the Great War, nobody wanted to hear about a rising menace on the continent.) For his fiery rhetoric, he suffered years of political exile.
Other than history buffs, is the name Stanley Baldwin familiar to anyone? Neville Chamberlain’s name is synonymous with appeasement.
Winston Spencer Churchill stands for courage and a gritty determination to preserve Western Civilization in the face of a new barbarism which at times seemed unstoppable.
Many contemporary conservative leaders are more Chamberlainian than Churchillesque.
They’re comfortable with their DC offices and their staffs. They want to be talking heads on Sunday shows. They don’t want to be thought of as radical or unreasonable, especially by the media whose attention they crave. Losing like ladies and gentleman comes naturally to them.
As a general principle, wisdom and fortitude are found in conservative leaders in direct proportion to their distance from D.C. Thus St. Louis-based Phyllis Schlafly and Don Wildmon, down in Tupelo, Mississippi, are among the toughest voices on the right, and the most effective.
You would have thought our present affliction would incite a determination to tell the unvarnished truth – to describe reality in the stark terms befitting a nation hurtling toward the abyss.
There’s a very committed and very clever collectivist Caligula in the Oval Office, who’s dedicated to the destruction of the old America, so a brave, new empathy-driven, income-redistributionist republic can arise from the ashes.
Besides giving Washington a stranglehold on business, starting with the banks and auto industry, he intends to destroy the hard-earned assets of the middle class through taxes and inflation, the better to make us dependent on the state. With national health care, he seeks to give bureaucrats life-and-death power over the American people, all in the name of compassion.
He intends to so entrench the power of his party as to make future elections meaningless – by conferring citizenship on hordes of illegal aliens, financing a partisan army out of the treasury, allowing labor leaders to bludgeon workers into their ranks via the so-called card-check system (increasing labor money, from forced dues, flowing into Democratic coffers) and cutting off the legs of his opponents (that would be us).
We saw the first stage in the Department of Homeland Security’s smear equating pro-lifers, gun owners and tax-protestors with terrorists.
Stage II will include destroying talk-radio, via local content boards (Son of the Fairness Doctrine), which will be used to deny license-renewal to stations with conservative programming.
Stage III will criminalize speech (guess whose?) in the name of fighting hate crimes.
Meanwhile, the party of socialism, sodomy and surrender has never had more of a death-grip on the House and Senate. Congress is close to becoming as independent and deliberative as North Korea’s Supreme People’s Assembly
In the face of the foregoing, some conservative notables still pull their punches to guard their reputations. They can imagine no greater catastrophe befalling humanity than their not being invited on the Sunday news shows or asked to write op-eds for The Washington Post.
They’ve convinced themselves that hesitancy is credibility, that we can’t lose our heads by throwing around words like “socialists,” “anti-American” and “traitor,” however applicable they may be.
If caution worked, John McCain would be president. He refused to attack the messiah’s connections to a rabid racist (Wright), an unrepentant ex-terrorist (Ayers) and a Nazi (Farrakhan).
The result was a man who’d served in government for almost a quarter-century losing to the farthest left, most inexperienced, presidential candidate in history.
Then there’s Alan Keyes. Last week, the former U.N. ambassador and erstwhile presidential candidate was arrested on the grounds of Notre Dame University for protesting Obama’s May 17 commencement speech at the ostensibly Catholic university.
“I will step foot on the Notre Dame campus to lift up the standard that protects the life of innocent children of this and every generation,” the ex-ambassador explained.
“I will do it all day and every day from now until the Master comes if need be, though it means I shall be housed every day in the prison house of lies and injustice that Obama and Jenkins (Notre Dame’s president) and their minions now mean to construct for those who will never be still and silent in the face of their mockery of God and justice, their celebration of evil.”
What’s this? Is Keyes accusing the President of the United States of lying, mocking God and justice and celebrating evil? He is – and God bless him for it.
Alan may have a penchant for quixotic campaigns. But when it comes to candor and clarity, he’s the ayatollah of tell-it-like-it-is. Keyes isn’t merely saying the president is wrong and misguided but one who mocks God and justice and celebrates evil – in other words, is evil himself.
The left had no trouble calling Bush evil (at worst, he was misguided). Why is it so hard for us to tell the truth about Obama and the media?
What good does it do to get arrested? What good does moral clarity do? What good will it do to tell the American people that the media are liars and propagandists who’ve turned journalistic ethics into a sick joke?
They may be small steps toward waking the American people from their trance and helping them to understand that this administration and its media Orcs are monsters who, if allowed to proceed unchecked, will destroy our economy, security and rights as Americans.
As they’re hauled off to reeducation centers, the Miss Manners conservatives – polite and reasonable to the end – can take comfort in the fact that they kept their cool.
Don Feder is a former Boston Herald writer who is now a political/communications consultant. He also maintains his own website, DonFeder.com.
Sowing seeds of discontent and further fracturing the GOP may help your third party effort and personal ambitions, but it does absolutely nothing to solidify my fellow conservatives in OUR desire to take back the party of Lincoln and Reagan, from the current group of liberals pushing their moderate agenda.
The GOP has been severely damaged by the Presidency of GW Bush and its gonna take Republicans some time to face reality and find leaders worthy of support.
You've chosen to run away from the politics and principles of Reagan and instead, you've continued to embrace a losing strategy led by a loser of the first order.
Notre Dame's Kabuki Dance with Obama and the Culture of Death
big bump
I get a little annoyed at people that label him as "nuts" and he is correct on everything I've ever heard him say. No man is perfect, but I would take him as POTUS any day over what we have now. His style is what seems to turn people off. His style is a leadership style instead of the "Rodney King" "Can't we all just get along", style. That scares people that don't want to overturn the apple cart.
The apple cart overturned decades ago when prayer was removed from the public institutions, abortion was allowed, now sodomy is commonplace, and America decided to be stuck on stupid.
Now, America is fighting over which party can give the most bread and circus's. The Republican Party was started to free the slaves and today it's allowing the systematic murder of babies, the marriage of what God calls an "abomination", The failure to recognize the "Religion of Peace" will chop your children's heads off, and I could go on and on, but I hope you get the picture of what "Fascist lite" looks like. Most of what Obama has done in the first 120 days or so has been illegal. Where are the Republicans? Where is their lawsuits? Where are the threats of impeachment? They don't say anything because they were part of the problem the last year or so of Bush's term. One good indication of how pathetic we are is the reaction to Pelosi's latest crap. As Rush has said on his program, other Speakers have resigned for less, and she is still bobbing and weaving instead of packing her bags. I'm betting no one will push for here removal because she is the first woman Speaker. How would that look to the PC crowd to remove the first woman Speaker? We don't even have the guts to remove this crab with no character, and she is 2nd in line to the Presidency.
The further we go down this road to serfdom, the more radical the solution is going to sound. In fact it may take total revolution to even get back a image of the Constitution.
Your desire? I don't want to hear about your "desire." Tell me YOUR PLAN to do so. Because Mitt Romney has one, and it is almost entirely in play. The party of Lincoln and Reagan is almost entirely the party of Romney now.
And I'm not going to help you herd good-hearted, well-intentioned conservative patriots into the lying socialist camp.
Your party is bereft of true leadership. All you have to offer is criticism for those who are actually leading.
I've also admired the eloquent Alan Keyes for some time and have increasingly come to consider him a modern-day Thomas Paine or Sam Adams.
Feder and Keyes have consistently and courageously spoken out for principle while the Republican party rushes over the cliff.
Your screen name says it all, freedom is fragile:
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat our their substance.
How do you "beat back the secularists" when your party never even fights the secularists, and in most cases, is led by people who are secularists?
Thank you very much Madame Dufarge!
LOL Since when? Not in my book. And you know where I stand on Romney, or you should. Frankly, your rhetoric is becoming boring idiocy.
Reagan worked his butt off to retake the GOP from the moderates in the 1970`s. WE conservatives are still working to return the GOP to the party of Reagan. No doubt about it, it can be done.
You, on the other hand, have chosen to run off and spin your wheels with some fringe party effort. So be it. That is your right.
As of today, the GOP is the only political party apparatus on the right that can begin to seriously challenge and compete with the Democrats. If there is a better alternative to the GOP for 2010 or 2012, I'm all ears. So far, that is not the case.
Good chance the Party of Reagan will rise again.
If you want to remain on the sidelines throwing spitballs, all I can say is, have at it. LOL
Agreed, but destroying President Bush has served no good purpose either, yet many continue to do so.
Note the author simply could not resist getting in a little dig:
The left had no trouble calling Bush evil (at worst, he was misguided).
I don't see what pupose this served in the article.
After what so-called republicans did to President Bush, I wouldn't help them across the street.
Yes definately, it’s almost like there is a “spirit” against us! (which we can easily be caught up in as well).
Funny, considering the fact that WE showed up to help conservative REPUBLICAN and fellow FReeper Rosanna Pulido in the IL-5 congressional special election to fill Rahm Emanuel's vacant seat, and REPUBLICANS were almost entirely AWOL.
Talk is cheap.
True. We have to work hard every day to make sure we’re not.
What bugged me most about the second arrest was that the cops interrupted the Rosary when they were halfway through the final prayer. Common Catholic decency would have paused until “That we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ. Amen.” before starting the legal warning.
Like it or not, in Bush’s second term the President and those Congressional Republicans who chose to follow his big government domestic policies, have severely damaged the GOP and undermined the conservative movement. Not to mention, giving a scumbag socialist like Obama and the Dems a stronger political hand to play. Hopefully conservatives and Republicans won’t be spending another 30-40 years in the wilderness waiting for the right leadership to step up and get us back on a winning strategy.
You would know best.
Backing Rosanna Pulido was fine, but I find it hypocritical considering your disdain for everything Republican. IIRC, Pulido did slightly better against her opponent than Keyes did against Obama in 2004 Senate race. At least our fellow FReeper has some cojones.
Backing Rosanna Pulido was fine,
Nice to have your approval, I guess.
but I find it hypocritical considering your disdain for everything Republican.
No, hypocrisy consists of pretending to be something you're not. That would describe most of the leaders of the Republican Party, not me. My support for Rosanna was in perfect accord with everything I've said about where we are and where we must go if we're going to save this free republic.
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