Tag: Conservatives

Ten Paces Turn and Fire

There is a duel being fought in the media between Our Dear Leader and the uber rich Koch Brothers……for now it is a war of words….but things could spiral into a full fledged political war…….

Amid a morning flurry of tweets, President Trump took aim at two powerful figures on the right: brothers David and Charles Koch. “The globalist Koch Brothers, who have become a total joke in real Republican circles, are against Strong Borders and Powerful Trade,” the president tweeted. “I never sought their support because I don’t need their money or bad ideas,” he continued, adding, “Their network is highly overrated.” His comments, however, come after the Kochs lobbed an attack of their own at a weekend forum in Colorado. Coverage:

  • Kochs’ criticism: At a Koch network gathering in Colorado Springs, Charles Koch criticized Trump’s tariffs and protectionist trade policies and suggested he’s open to supporting Democratic candidates who are more in line with the Kochs’ free-trade and libertarian views, reports the National Review. “I don’t care what initials are in front or after somebody’s name,” he told the group.
  • Turning point? A video during the forum showed businesses supposedly shuttered because of retaliatory tariffs, notes Politico, which says “the open hostilities at this weekend’s conference came as something of a surprise.” At Vanity Fair, Tina Nguyen sounds a familiar note: “The Kochs’ hostility toward Trump isn’t new, though their rhetoric seems to mark a turning point.”
  • Another shot: The president of the Charles Koch Foundation was even more cutting over the weekend: “The divisiveness of this White House is causing long-term damage,” said Brian Hooks, per CNN. “When in order to win on an issue someone else has to lose, it makes it very difficult to unite people and solve the problems in this country. You see that on trade: In order to get to a good place on trade, convince the American people that trade is bad.”
  • Telltale race: The Koch network also has defied the White House in the Senate race in North Dakota pitting vulnerable Democratic incumbent Heidi Heitkamp against GOP challenger Kevin Cramer, reports the Washington Post. Trump has personally campaigned for Cramer, but the Kochs say they can’t support him because he’s not fiscally conservative enough, citing, for example, his support of Trump’s trillion-dollar spending package, per the Hill.
  • Familiar face: The Kochs’ criticism of the White House and their reticence to back the entire GOP ballot caused former Trump adviser Steve Bannon to lash out. “What they have to do is shut up and get with the program, OK?” Bannon told Politico. “And here’s the program: Ground game to support Trump’s presidency and program, [and] victory on Nov. 6.” Trump’s tweets, however, suggest he doesn’t want their help now.
  • The choice: In an analysis at the Atlantic, Reihan Salam susses all this out and frames it in general terms with this question: “Will the GOP be the party of Donald Trump or the party of Charles Koch?” The Kochs helped shape the GOP agenda during the Obama years, but the party’s populist turn under Trump has them worried, he writes. However, this new split with the GOP may ultimately backfire for the brothers, he warns.

Under normal circumstances I would be delighted to see the GOP in disarray…..but this president is destroying a once proud political party piece by piece and the elected reps from this party are enabling the party’s demise.

Advertisements

Liberals…….

Liberals!  You know who they are according to most so-called conservs….they are anyone who does not meet what they consider a conserv ideology.

I would try to have an academic debate on this situation but that would be a waste of time and would end up with the so-called conserv saying “whatever” or their favorite retort “moving on”.

If there is half a brain out there then they will realize that we are witnessing the demise of democracy….but then few will see it for it is happening all around them slowly with a barrage of slogans……it is as if the world has lost all confidence in democracy…..

Democracy across the world is under siege. This according to the latest Freedom House report documenting that for 2017, “democracy faced its most serous crisis in decades” as seventy-one countries experienced declines in freedom or fair government, including the United States, and only thirty-five an improvement. This was the twelfth consecutive year of decline in democracy world-wide.

The question is why? Why has confidence in democracy retreated? Freedom House does not provide an answer, but there is a reason. It is democracy’s marriage to neo-liberal capitalism has fostered the conditions leading to its own undoing, similar to the way Karl Marx once described in the Communist Manifesto the “gravedigger thesis” (What the Bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave diggers”) where capitalism would produce the conditions that would undermine its own existence.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/06/28/neo-liberalism-and-the-retreat-of-democracy/

Back in the early days of this republic a young Frenchman came to observe the founding of a new nation…..his name was Tocqueville and his book “Democracy In America” is required reading for a political scientist…..could this Frenchman save the US from itself?

The modern world differs from antiquity and the Middle Ages, a disjuncture Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835, 1840) proposes to explain and illustrate. In the past, societies were organized on the assumption that men were naturally unequal. However, the Christian idea of human equality provided the impetus for a “democratic revolution,” or a gradual reordering of the world based on the equality principle. Democracy in America shows what a difference equality makes by constantly contrasting modern, democratic forms of politics, work, family life, and the arts and sciences with their old, aristocratic counterparts.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/what-would-tocqueville-do/

This country needs all the assistance it can get….if it can be saved from itself…..I mean there are still those old farts that see a socialist behind every Democrat…..as always these people are afraid of something they cannot identify.

I Knew It All Along

74 years ago today the allies attacked what had been called “Fortress Europe” that began the death of Nazi Germany……we should never stop thanking the “greatest Generation”….

I have been analyzing politics for many years (yep I am an old fart) and all that time I have said that modern day Repubs are not conservative….but rather something else all together…

For instance they, GOP, espouses their acceptance of a small government and yet do nothing to make it so when in position to do so…..take this expansion of the military under Trump….he has undercut some of the institutions in Washington but I am nor sure that it was planned that way.

Morality…..the GOP has claimed to speak for the so-called “moral majority” and yet have turned a blind eye to many “moral” transgressions if it meant that they could win an election.  Most recently their claim to the moral high ground has evaporated…..

Champion of a free trade world…..and as Trump turns that concept on its ear the GOP is silent on the very idea of free trade….as long as they stand silent they can NO longer claim the mantle of a free trade party.

The GOP has been slowly but slowly putting the fix in on our elections……the GOP has been using our Constitution’s flaws to rig the elections……

Donald Trump wasn’t elected because Democrats lost a policy fight in 2016. What Democrats did was lose a procedural fight that has been going on since the early 1990s, when Republicans began waging a relentless, brutal, and completely one-sided war, systematically using their lawmaking power to disadvantage their adversaries in elections and political mobilization.

Gerrymandering, the Citizens United atrocity that declared money is speech, blocking US supreme court nominations and obstructing legislation are some of the Republican party’s tactics. Depraved, racist voter ID laws that obviously target people who are likely to vote Democratic, and the cruel way that many states prevent current or former felons from voting, are others.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/mar/31/republicans-rigged-democracy-democrats-fight-back

I have been saying that there is nothing conservative about the GOP…..they played a Repub on TV with their outrage at government spending most of which they authorized.  Their idea of small government is NO social safety net……no medicare and god forbid that damn social security.

I would like to offer my thanks to Trump for without him they would still be trying to pass off as a conservative political party……

So if it barks like a dog, walks like a dog then it cannot be a duck.

Is The “Libertarian Moment” Gone?

About 10 years ago with the election of Rand Paul conservatives were celebrating for they saw a Libertarian mindset taking hold in society….and so it was for a few years and then the election of 2016 and that of Donald trump has crapped on any Libertarian forward movement to a halt.

Are true conservative(Libertarian) policies dead in the water?

Senator Rand Paul is a man out of time. It was only a few years ago that the editors of Reason magazine held him up as the personification of what they imagined to be a “libertarian moment,” a term that enjoyed some momentary cachet in the pages of The New York Times, The Atlantic, Politico (where I offered a skeptical assessment), and elsewhere. But rather than embodying the future of the Republican Party, Paul embodies its past, the postwar conservative era when Ronald Reagan could proclaim that “the very heart and soul of conservatism is libertarianism,” when National Review founder William F. Buckley Jr. could publish a conspectus of his later work under the subtitle “Reflections of a Libertarian Journalist,” and young blue-blazered Republicans of the Alex P. Keaton variety wore out their copies of Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/04/defused/556934/

Will conservatism return or is it dead?

 

Can “True” Conservatives Survive?

In this eras of Trump real conservatives, if you listen to Bannon they are RINOs, are trying desperately to hang onto their beliefs and their base…..but they are losing their grip the minions in Congress are making it difficult for a conservative to embrace the GOP.

The GOP for a couple of decades could depend on the blue collar worker for support but that support is sliding…..

Our news feeds this year have been saturated with dispatches from Donald Trump’s America. Media outlets deployed journalists to regions besieged by rapid globalization, technological advances, and demographic change, where they attempted to explain the anger that inspired voters to embrace a figure like Trump. Their written pieces created a kind of niche journalism, presenting stories of what our nation failed to address with its transitioning economy. A number of these articles were accurate and empathetic portrayals of struggling communities, but too many of them patronized their subjects and reeked of condescension.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/how-the-gop-can-hang-on-to-the-working-class/

Then there are the Christian conservatives some are solidly embracing Trumpism which is giving the GOP some concern…….(key word in that sentence is “some”)…….but will they continue to support the GOP?

Republican nominee Roy Moore lost the vote in Alabama on Tuesday. To many, that defeat was comforting: Moore’s troubling background included lawlessness, extremism, and allegations of child molestation. He may not have lost by much—but with a tenfold increase in write-ins and a drop-off of 800,000 voters, it appears that Moore was too much for principled conservatives in Alabama.

Indeed, after crunching the numbers, economist Lyman Stone suggested that Moore had the lowest white evangelical support of any Alabama Republican in the 21st century:

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-republican-party-doesnt-own-christian-conservatives/

To be honest I do not see the GOP turning their backs on Trumpism right now….they are getting what they have desired for 30 years…a tax cut for the wealthy and the promise of attacks on Social Security and Medicare to start….Congress is thumping their chest with pride now….

Now will that support remain next year?  Damn good question.  I would say that it will depend on the events that are forming as I type.

Will the US continue to be a conservative state and maker no mistake matters not who is elected we are a conservative state….but a good question if you know what is meant by a conservative state……let me offer you some help…..

Over the last several years, amidst the swirls of overt corruption, immigrant “hordes,” rising “national security” concerns, police militarization, bloated empire, and the so-called deepening of the “deep state,” conservatives and libertarians of all stripes have pondered the meaning of the modern state. Most recently, Paul Moreno has brilliantly considered the rise of The Bureaucratic Kings, Alex Salter has wisely questioned the relationship of anarchy (the Bohemian, Nockian variety) to conservatism, and, though I have yet to read what the always thoughtful Jason Kuznicki of Cato recommends, there is also James C. Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. Believe me, I am intrigued.  Each of these authors and recommenders, of course, owes an immense debt to the pioneering work of Robert Higgs’s magnum opus, Crisis and Leviathan (1987), and Higgs, in turn, had followed in the footsteps of such 20th century greats as Christopher Dawson, Robert Nisbet, Friedrich Hayek, and Joseph Schumpeter.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/birzer/the-origins-of-the-modern-state-a-conservative-view/

A lot to take in but if you consider yourself a conservative then I think you need to read and understand…..

Peace out

Why Conservatives Hate War

I know you think because the someone is associated with the GOP makes them a conservative…..not so.

Most of what people think are conservatives are actually neocons or war mongers in the first degree.

Many conservatives feel the way I do….they are opposed to war especially the wars we are fighting now….open ended war that does little to provide any security to the homeland except in slogan only.

I guess the clods in Congress nowadays would call these conservatives RINOs…..because they love them some slogan that they can use at the next Trump rally of dunces.

The American Conservative had a recent article that covered why conservatives dislike war…..(a good article, BTW)

One of the odder aspects of present-day politics is the assumption that if you are antiwar you are on the left, and if you are conservative you are “pro-war.” Like labelling conservative states red and liberal states blue, this is an inversion of historical practice.

The opposition to America’s entry into both World Wars was largely led by conservatives. Senator Robert A. Taft, the standard-bearer of postwar conservatism, opposed war unless the United States itself was attacked. Even Bismarck, after he had fought and won the three wars he needed to unify Germany, was staunchly antiwar. He once described preventive war, like the one America is being pressured to wage on Iran, as “committing suicide for fear of being killed.”

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-conservatives-hate-war/

I am finding as the days go by that I have a lot in common with real conservatives and not those mental midgets RINOs that support Trump and that toad Bannon.

Why Do They Hate So?

For decades now the Right has had a hard on for higher education.  They take every opportunity to degrade anyone with an advanced degree as some sort of elitist.

The burning question is why do conservatives hate higher education?  I have my thoughts but I am usual a bit harsh…..but someone has to have a good idea where higher education became such a negative force in our society.

Conservatives don’t like professors. When conservative Republicans were asked to gauge their feelings about college professors, over half gave a “cold” response, while only 24% were “warm”. I experience that disdain in the comments that conservatives make to my columns, where the word “professor” itself is a taunt, a curse.

Conservatives don’t like the institutions where professors work. A recent Pew poll found that only 29% of conservative Republicans thought that colleges and universities have a positive impact on our country.

Republican politicians encourage these views. Betsy DeVos, the new Secretary of Education, was explicit in her condemnation of professors as she was being confirmed: “The faculty, from adjunct professors to deans, tell you what to do, what to say, and more ominously, what to think. They say that if you voted for Donald Trump, you’re a threat to the university community.”

Source: Why Conservatives Don’t Like Higher Ed – LA Progressive

At what point will this continue?  There are many incidents in history where the first people to be deposed by an authoritarian regime are the educated and community leaders.

Hope do these people hope to gain by demonizing the educated?