Probably some fringe group - you certainly wouldn’t see it on the Sacramento Republicans’ website. Not now anyway, because they took it down.
Or maybe they were just joking like the California Republicans who printed fliers with this.
“When I opened that up and saw it, I said, ‘Why did they do this? It doesn’t even reflect our principles and values,’ ” said Warren, who served as a Republican delegate to the national convention in September and is a regional vice chairwoman for the California Republican Party. “I know a lot of the ladies in that club and they’re fantastic. They’re volunteers. They really care — some of them go to my church.”
I don’t regret my support for the president after 9/11.
In such a crisis, a president of any party deserves the benefit of the doubt. I do regret deeply and indelibly my subsequent backing of the Iraq war. It was a terrible mistake. Again, it was an honest judgment based on the evidence then provided me. But it was an intellectually lazy position and far too passionately held. I have tried to atone since: on the war, on spending (which I was whining about in 2001), on torture, on the constitution, on Christianism.
Another prominent conservative sees the light. Christopher Buckley endorsed Obama last week and endured the inevitable firestorm.
Since my Obama endorsement, Kathleen and I have become BFFs and now trade incoming hate-mails. No one has yet suggested my dear old Mum should have aborted me, but it’s pretty darned angry out there in Right Wing Land. One editor at National Review—a friend of 30 years—emailed me that he thought my opinions “cretinous.” One thoughtful correspondent, who feels that I have “betrayed”—the b-word has been much used in all this—my father and the conservative movement generally, said he plans to devote the rest of his life to getting people to cancel their subscriptions to National Review. But there was one bright spot: To those who wrote me to demand, “Cancel my subscription,” I was able to quote the title of my father’s last book, a delicious compendium of his NR “Notes and Asides”: Cancel Your Own Goddam Subscription.
Like many, Buckley now wonders how the very pinnacle of conservative power turned out to be so un-conservative.
While I regret this development, I am not in mourning, for I no longer have any clear idea what, exactly, the modern conservative movement stands for. Eight years of “conservative” government has brought us a doubled national debt, ruinous expansion of entitlement programs, bridges to nowhere, poster boy Jack Abramoff and an ill-premised, ill-waged war conducted by politicians of breathtaking arrogance. As a sideshow, it brought us a truly obscene attempt at federal intervention in the Terry Schiavo case.
So, to paraphrase a real conservative, Ronald Reagan: I haven’t left the Republican Party. It left me.
If I were a prominent conservative, I’d be wondering how to start over; who to allow into the tent; how to prevent the same thing from happening again.
All great Utopian movements seem to describe an arc in which a noble, hopeful dream soars up into glory until, corrupted by power, they descend into ashes and mud. Maybe their flight would sustain longer if their aims were more conservative?
“I just have to rely on the good judgment of the voters not to buy into these negative attack ads. Sooner or later, people are going to figure out if all you run is negative attack ads you don’t have much of a vision for the future or you’re not ready to articulate it.”
– John McCain, 2000
It’s a strange kind of world when I come over all nostalgic for Thatcher.
The comparisons come flooding in to my mind. Why don’t American presidents - or candidates - ever face the public like this? America has lowered the bar for political competence so far that if a candidate can get through a debate without falling on her face we can declare her ready to run the country.
One day America will have a woman president, but I hope it is a competent one - even it is one that still makes me angry 25 years later.
According to Johnathon Haidt at The Edge, our morality springs from five universal principles that are present in every society:
Preventing harm
Promoting fairness
Being loyal to your group
Respecting authority
Desire for purity
To illustrate these principles, the Mousetrap describes a hypothetical experiment where participants are asked how much they would need to be paid to perform each of these morally questionable acts:
Harm/care
* Stick a pin into your palm.
* Stick a pin into the palm of a child you don’t know.
Fairness/reciprocity
* Accept a plasma screen television that a friend of yours wants to give you. You know that your friend got the television a year ago when the company that made it sent it, by mistake and at no charge, to your friend.
* Accept a plasma screen television that a friend of yours wants to give you. You know that your friend bought the TV a year ago from a thief who had stolen it from a wealthy family.
Ingroup/loyalty
* Say something slightly bad about your nation (which you don’t believe to be true) while calling in, anonymously, to a talk-radio show in your nation.
* Say something slightly bad about your nation (which you don’t believe to be true) while calling in, anonymously, to a talk-radio show in a foreign nation.
Authority/respect
* Slap a friend in the face (with his/her permission) as part of a comedy skit.
* Slap your father in the face (with his permission) as part of a comedy skit.
Purity/sanctity
* Attend a performance art piece in which the actors act like idiots for 30 min, including failing to solve simple problems and falling down repeatedly on stage.
* Attend a performance art piece in which the actors act like animals for 30 min, including crawling around naked and urinating on stage.
In his Ted lecture, Haidt argues that while everyone bases their morality on all of these principles, liberals place more emphasis on the first two elements, whereas conservative emphasize the the latter three.
His presentation is compelling, but something is missing. Like George Lakoff’s Moral Politics four years ago, Haidt seems to be trying too hard to make American politics fit neatly into simplistic categories.
Lakoff tried to come up with a single over-arching argument for why the strong-government theocons have common cause with the drown-the-government-in-a-bathtub ultra-capitalists and the paleocon realists and the neocon idealists and the america-first isolationists and the small-goverment libertarians. Haidt seems to be making the same mistake. A mistake will that will become clear if the Republicans lose badly in this election.
The republican coalition is an alliance of convenience that has served them well (and the rest of us badly) for nearly 30 years but I strongly doubt that the alliance will hold and future moral psychologists will have to explain why the party of Palin and and Robertson and Dobson has no place for people lower on the vertical axis of the Political Compass.
Hold that - I expect it will be true even if McCain/Palin wins.
Congratulations on being chosen as John McCain’s running mate. It’s an honor, if a dubious one. As you know, conservatives have reservations about McCain. To your credit, they have few such concerns about you.
You’ve given new life to a party whose brand was bankrupt. You’ve energized a campaign that was embarrassing its own partisans. Across America, crowds flock to see you—not that old man who barely wheezed his way through the primaries. If John McCain wins, he will owe you, as the guy in the undisclosed location says, “Big time.”
Wonder why Middle America finds you irresistible? Maybe they’re big Tina Fey fans. More likely, you remind them of the conservative values they feared lost: faith, family, independence. This impression owes more to who you are than what you’ve done. But at least you keep Obama from cornering the market on hope. Conservatives have faith in you. Don’t fail them as George W. Bush has.
That’s funny, because most of the conservatives I know think that John McCain will rescue us from the party of Sarah Palin and George W Bush,
You surely see that the Bush policies have come to a dead end. If the millions poised to vote for you wanted four more years, the president’s approval rating wouldn’t be 25 percent. This isn’t because Republicans dislike Bush personally or disagree with his positions on energy and taxes. It’s because they know that his main legacy—the Iraq War—is a disaster.
Thankfully, they don’t think you’re like him. They see in you someone like themselves—a patriot and a mother. The Middle Americans waiting hours to hear you speak don’t want the United States to be defeated, and they don’t want Iraq to be a haven for al-Qaeda—something it never was before the invasion. They are pleased that the surge has made it more possible to leave because they don’t want to send their boys back for a third or fourth tour. They want America to come home—not because she’s weak but because she’s wise. They hope that you are, too.
These people are very, very scary.
[I tried to find the bit where it says it's a parody but...]
This conservative agrees with the notion that Palin is not qualified to be vice-president but thinks, for the sake of the party, she has to stay on the ticket
Conor Friedersdorf has joined the small but hardy band of conservatives (now holding steady at two) who are calling for Palin to be removed or to resign from the ticket. Conor will get no argument from me when he says that she is not qualified, but I think he misjudges things when he thinks that there would not be a significant revolt. I could see this leading to a very healthy outcome of conservative alienation from the GOP so intense that it might lead to some significant changes either in the priorities of the party or in the emergence of an alternative movement on the right. More likely, though, things would revert to what they were before Palin was picked as suddenly energized evangelicals and activists lose interest and remember all the reasons why they dislike McCain.
FTR, his twoconservatives is only accurate if you buy into the notion that people who don’t fall into the party line are, by definition, not conservatives.
He is concerned though, not about the presidential ticket, but about the down-ticket casualties.
Personally, I do not find this prospect all that disturbing at the presidential level, but it could be a problem if the GOP minority in the House loses many more seats in a wipeout election.
He quotes Conor as asking
Can conservatism survive as an intellectually viable political movement if its adherents privilege the electoral chances of the GOP above averting the installation of an unkown and by all outward appearances woefully unqualified person in the White House?
but
I reply: Conservatism is an intellectually viable political movement? Has something changed recently? I am only partly joking. My point would be that the same conservative movement that has welcomed Palin as a conquering hero cannot now throw her out into the cold on the grounds of some supposed intellectual rigor and the defense of venerable tradition.
But above all, he is concerned how the Palin fans would take the perceived betrayal.
It is always a revelation to conservatives who find themselves on the other side of an issue just how much a majority of their fellows defines conservatism as lockstep agreement with whatever the GOP line happens to be. Denunciation, if not necessarily death threats, is the usual response. The GOP is against nation-building? So are they. The GOP is in favor of nation-building? They couldn’t be happier, and anyone who is against it probably hates America. More important, even if they don’t change their beliefs as dramatically as this they are usually quite willing to support the pols who do.
Welcome to the Republican party of the 21st century. Maybe McCain will be able to reign them in? Maybe he’ll get help from the Rovelings who are running his campaign?
