In Defense of the GOP Establishment [Understanding the limitations of what they have to work with]

American Thinker ^ | 02/03/2016 | James Arlandson

[hometoroost]

There’s a difference between slowly grinding away and caving at every opportunity and allowing it to grow in order to keep your “job.”

[VictoryGal]

Yeah? How well did “Establishment” candidates Romney and McCain do?

Conservatives are sick and tired of having to vote for Dims in GOP clothing. If the car is heading for the cliff, you don’t want a new driver to go in the same direction, you want someone with the sense to turn the car around.

[Sans-Culotte]

6. The Establishment believes that incrementalism is the only way to retransform America.

That is probably true, and it is practiced perfectly by the 'rats. The rats will take what they can get and keep chipping away

Unfortunately, the GOPe does not practice this sort of incrementalism. Their idea of incrementalism at best is to stall the 'rats in the implementation of their agenda. It's the way the Cold War was fought before Reagan when most believed the Soviets were winning the Cold War and the best we could do was stall or contain them.

All we have seen under the GOPe is that our rights are gradually eroded away, rather than taken in one fell swoop.

[Kanzan]

The first comment, from FeralCat, sums it up:
Well, I don’t know about you, but my parents were never lying, selfish, back stabbing bastards and they didn’t hate me and give all my stuff to kids down the street.

[MNJohnnie]

No the “Wstablishement” believes that “good government” is the whole scale selling out of the voters interests to big pocket campaign donors. The only thing the fights in DC are about is which set of donor pigs get which sets at the tax payer money trough.

[factoryrat]

One word: oligarchy.

Elections are bought, not won.

The “election” process is bread and circus to appease the masses, and keep them from revolting.

You don’t even get to “buy in” to a presidential election unless you can cough up a billion dollars to finance your “campaign”.

If you don’t have that kind of money at your disposal, you have to convince “donors” (financial backers) that if they bet on you to win, that they’ll get a return on their investment.

[Nifster]

oh puuuuleeeze

what a load of crap

[NorthMountain]

Yeah? How well did “Establishment” candidates Romney and McCain do?

They lost. And "establishment" congressional leaders McConnell, Boehner, and Ryan surrendered.

[philled]

That is awesome! FeralCat speaks for me!

[reed13k]

Medicare part B...Repulican President and Congress

Center/Right my ass

[Yosemitest]

What a FARCE !
The ESTABLISHMENT REPUBLICANS" ARE DemocRATS IN DISQUISE !
They FUND everything the DemocRATS WANT !

George Will is a DemocRAT who got SO OFFENDED by the DemocRATS, that he couldn't tolerate being associated with all those "CRAZIES" .
Now for a deeper understanding of just WHO George Will IS:

The word "neocons" is ONLY used by LIBERALS, trying to insult Conservatives.
The is no such thing as a "NEW" Conservative.
Conservatives ARE Conservative, plain and simple.

But read this"
Liberals, Conservatives, and Neocons - - - Learn the Difference!
March 12, 2014

Almost everybody is confused about the word "neoconservative" and its shortened form, "neocon."
I find that liberals/Democrats seem to use it as a sort of disrespectful form of "conservative,"
and probably have no idea the the words have distinct meanings.
On the other hand, I know of some conservatives who define it as "new conservatives,"
meaning people who were formerly something else, but have converted to conservatism.
Both are wrong.
As near as I can tell, "neo-" doesn't apply to any other word that way -
formerly not X, but having become X.
No, "neo-" almost always refers to an ideology that is different from the root word in a significant way.
Neoconfederates are not people who want to secede and become a separate country.
They want the ideals of the Confederacy to be applied to modern politics, more or less, but not all of them.
Neoliberal is a more vague term,
but it specifically applies to people who may have SOME of the attributes of liberals,
but who contradict liberalism in their advocacy of free trade and privatization
and other ideas usually thought of as conservative.
And, finally, neoconservatives are mostly those moderate cold war LIBERALS who defected to the Republican party when the Democrats got totally flaky with McGovern and his ilk.
Their ultimate origin, however, is not the Democratic party but the Trotskyite movement.



Jack Kerwick elaborates.

Read this:
Most "Conservatives" Are Secretly Neoconservatives
12 March, 2014, by Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.

A colleague of mine has drawn my attention to a Washington Post blog post - "Why Most Conservatives Are Secretly Liberals" - by a Professor John Sides, a political scientist at Georgetown University.

Sides agrees with fellow political scientists Christopher Ellis and James Stimson, co-authors of Ideology in America.
Ellis and Stimson CONTEND that
America is, at bottom, a "center-left nation,"
for while "30 percent" of self-described "liberals" are consistent in endorsing "liberal" policy prescriptions,
the same sort of consistency can be ascribed to only "15 percent" of "conservatives."
And another "30 percent" of "conservatives" actually advance "liberal" positions.

In short, Americans may TALK the talk of "conservatism," but they WALK the walk of "liberalism."
That is, they favor Big Government.

Sides, Ellis, and Stimson, it seems clear to me, are "liberals."
It doesn't require much reading between the lines to discern this.
That they associate "liberals," and "liberals" ALONE, with such virtues as "consistency" and such lofty ideals as "a cleaner environment" and "a stronger safety net" is enough to bear this out.
Yet in peddling the ridiculous, patently absurd notion that
"conservatives" see the media as PROMOTING "conservatism,"
the verdict regarding their "liberalism" is seen for the NO-BRAINER that it is.

There is, though, another CLUE that unveils Sides', Ellis', and Stimson's ideological PREJUDICES:
They equate the term "liberalism" with a robust affirmation of Big Government.
They treat "liberalism" synonymously with its modern, "Welfare-Statist" incarnation.
There is no mention here of the fact that, originally, "liberalism" referred to
a vision that attached supreme value to individual liberty,
a vision in which government played, and had to play, a minimal role in the lives of its citizens.
And there is no mention of the fact that, if "liberalism" is now "an ugly word,"
it is because the very same socialists who made "socialism" an ugly word hijacked "liberalism" when it enjoyed a favorable reception
and visited upon it the same fate that they secured for "socialism."

In other words, if Sides himself wanted to be bluntly honest, he’d have to admit that "liberals" are secretly socialists.

Still, though their premises are bogus, Sides and his colleagues draw the correct conclusion that
most "conservatives" are NOTHING OF THE KIND.
The truth of the matter is that
the vast majority of contemporary "conservatives"; are neoconservatives.

Now, "neoconservatism" is a term that hasn't the best reputation.
It has ALWAYS BEEN CONTROVERSIAL,
and most of its proponents have DISAVOWED IT to the point of, preposterously, condemning it as an "anti-Semitic" SLUR.
But George W. Bush and his party inflicted potentially irrevocable damage upon the label.
"Conservatism" is a more marketable label.

Nevertheless, the reality is that neoconservatism is indeed a distinct school of political thought.
Beyond this, it is fundamentally different in kind from classical conservatism.
Irving Kristol, the so-called "Godfather" of neoconservatism, an appellation that he readily endorsed, ADMITS this in noting both
that neoconservatism exists
and that "conservative" "can be misleading" when used to describe it.

Neoconservatism, you see, is THE INVENTION OF LEFTISTS like Kristol himself.
When the Democratic Party began veering too far to the Left in the 1960s, Kristol and more moderate leftists began turning toward the Republican Party.
So as TO DISTINGUISH THEMSELVES FROM traditional conservatives, they coined the term "neoconservatism."

Neoconservatives, Kristol asserts, are "not at all hostile to the idea of a welfare state" -
even if they reject the "vast and energetic bureaucracies" created by the Great Society.
Neoconservatives ENDORSE "social security, unemployment insurance," and "some kind of family assistance plan," among other measures.
But what's most interesting, particularly at a time when ObamaCare has DIVIDED the country, is that Kristol reminds us that
neoconservatives SUPPORT "some form of national health insurance."

In all truthfulness, however, neither a degree in political science nor an IQ above four is required to know that
neoconservatism has always championed Big Government
for it is its foreign policy vision more than anything else that distinguishes it from its competitors.
For neoconservatives, America is "exceptional" in being, as Kristol puts it, "a creedal nation,"
the only nation in all of human history to have been founded upon an "ideology" of equality, of "natural rights."
The U.S.A., then, has a responsibility to promote this ideology throughout the world.

And it is by way of a potentially boundless military - i.e. Big Government - that this "ideological patriotism" is to be executed.

Had the foregoing political scientists been looking in the right places, they would BE FORCED TO CONCLUDE that most "conservatives" are secretly neoconservatives.

So, you see that those WHO THEY CALL "neoconservatives", are really nothing more than the old moderate side of the DemocRATS.
It's just THAT SIMPLE .

[Amendment10]

Understanding the limitations ???

The frigging, RINO-controlled House has read Congresss constitutional Article I, Section 8-limited powers at the beginnings of the last three legislative sessions, but then turns around and ignores those limited powers, wrongly funding Planned Parenthood for example.

[Truthsearcher]

When I ever I hear the word “America is a Center-Right country” I know I’m dealing with a establishment type who have not thought this thing through.

[Olog-hai]

Wrong subtitle. Should have been “Projectile Vomit Alert”. Propaganda piece for the Uniparty.

[Olog-hai]

Furthermore, what “limitations” do Obama or any Democrat face that restrains them? especially when the GOP establishment helps them gleefully all the way??

[Olog-hai]

Or that they did think it through, but only for the purpose of propagandizing.

[Olog-hai]

If they have to be defended by propaganda pieces such as this one, they are not “caving” (as if they stood for something virtuous originally) but collaborating.

[Olog-hai]

If it’s a disguise, it’s a really transparent one.

This is on the level of Newsweak’s “We Are All Socialists Now”.

[lentulusgracchus]

What happens when government is divided? It grinds even more slowly and finely.

Yeah, sure. Except when Obama sends a budget over.

This article is such a crock. The "all adults are the Establishment" trope is worth a horse-laugh before sending back to the kitchen.