Category Archives: Conservatism

Decentralizing and Deregulating Republican Politics

Conservatism, Elections, Media, Politics, Regulation, Republicans

Even a hint of the dreaded GOP establishment creeping back into their midst has some in the Republican campaigns screaming for an exorcist.

Via Breitbart:

Several 2016 GOP presidential campaigns are now revolting, not just against the Republican National Committee (RNC) controlling the debate process, but against controversial GOP establishment lawyer Ben Ginsberg’s efforts to insert himself into the process.
Aides to four top campaigns—those of billionaire Donald Trump, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich—have all confirmed they will not sign onto a letter organized by Ginsberg after the GOP presidential campaigns all broke from the RNC on Sunday night.

For some candidates it’s all for show: Kasich is establishment. Ditto Christie. Others are for real. But it’s all good. Any challenge to the existing political order is good. The Republican campaigns have begun divesting the Republican National Committee (RNC) of its overweening powers. Why should a central command apparatus control the political process? When it comes to libertarian candidates, we know how the RNC has behaved. The campaigns are also firing a media organ that, together with party apparatchiks, has generally been a bad-faith broker between the public, on the one hand, and any Republican, libertarian or constitutionally minded political candidate.

At this point, in this magnificent upheaval in American party politics, Fox News fans should take a moment to consider why it is that most of the network’s anchors were almost as livid as the liberal media over the ongoing revolt among the ranks of the candidates. The reason is that Fox News is mainstream media. Fox even set the tone of the debates, with a performance almost as odious as that of CNBC. Come to think of it, only little Andy Cooper of CNN did his journalistic due diligence as debate moderator, this year.

Conservatives for Abolishing the Fact of Evil

Conservatism, Ethics, Media, Morality, Pseudoscience, Psychiatry, Reason

“Conservatives For Abolishing The Fact Of Evil” is the current column, now on The Unz Review, America’s smartest webzine. An excerpt:

The public personas who pass as conservatives are NOT system builders. We know them as conservatives not by their well thought-out, philosophically consistent thinking; but because they’ve staked out certain positions on The Issues, over time.

“Gun violence” is the term used by conservatives with this messy habit of mind. A careful thinker would allude to “goon violence.”

“For guns are not the root cause of man’s evil actions. Neither are the multiplying categories of manufactured illness in the psychiatric Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Evil is integral to the human condition, always has been, always will be. Evil can’t be wished away, treated away, medicated away or legislated away. It is here to stay.”

In cahoots with their left-liberal partners in crime, conservative jurists, journalists, politicians and pundits now routinely debase this moral vocabulary. “Gun violence,” they all jabber, is caused by mental illness.

Their cure for goon violence: Bring in the big therapeutic guns to do the diagnosing. With state imprimatur, the witch doctors will lay the “scientific” cornerstone for walling-in society’s oddballs.

Democrats concur: If someone does something awfully wicked, he must have an illness as real as cancer or Alzheimer’s.

Still, progressives are pioneers in abolishing the fact of evil and replacing it with a diagnosis amenable to state intervention. Did not Joseph Stalin replace the wisdom of the ages with a scientific system that deployed the therapeutic idiom to murder and imprison dissenters? Yes he did.

But while they dare not cop to it openly, a secondary goal exclusive to progressives is to destroy the very idea of a self-reliant citizenry. …

… Read the rest on The Unz Review.

UPDATED: It takes A Special Kind Of Stupid To Lose Moral High-Ground To Planned Parenthood

Conservatism, Federalism, Law, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, libertarianism, Morality, Republicans, Uncategorized

Progressives are evil, immoral; as clueless as the pope in their arrogant ignorance of the American political system and the role of government in the American federal scheme.

But one has to be a special kind of stupid to lose the moral high ground to the 500,000 dollars-a-year babe (Cecile Richards) and her congressional harpies, who plump for public funding for Planned Parenthood.

THAT Republicans certainly are. (I say this as a libertarian who doesn’t see how, in a free world, one can agitate for the arrest of a woman for what she does with her property: her body and all that’s in it. I do, however, see a clear and logical way to argue the outlaw of late-term abortion. The reasoning I’ll share in a new book.)

Progressives are gloating: “The GOP still has nothing to show for its anti-Planned Parenthood campaign.”

UPDATE: What I mean by outlawing” late-term abortion is arguing convincingly—well, almost convincingly, since it’s pretty hard—against the practice of late-term abortion based on libertarian reasoning. Libertarian law turns on private property rights and the non-aggression axiom. You cannot initiate aggression against a non-aggressor. To aggress against a woman for what she does to her body, however much you abhor the practice, flies in the face of libertarianism.

So the challenge is arguing for that aggression in the case of a late-term child. It’s almost impossible logically, but I think it can be done. Stay tuned. In the meantime, I’m interested in hearing from religious libertarians how they’d argue for outlawing abortion. Ron Paul is anti-abortion. Not sure it works in libertarian law. But please share. Don’t bother specifying that abortion should not be funded by the state. We all agree. In fact, this is the central silliness of the Repubs; they can’t explain to silly bimbos that to defund abortion is not to ban abortion.

ET TU, Glenn Beck?

Conservatism, Elections, Glenn Beck, Media, Race, Republicans

Glenn Beck is insufferably sanctimonious and impossible to listen to as a broadcaster. Since the Glenn guy is not working with much, to put it charitably, he has been unable to discern the reasons for the support Donald Trump has garnered among GOPers. This backing lies in Trump’s following being able to viscerally, if not intellectually, sense the following:

To understand why his campaign has legs, it is necessary to grasp the difference between The Donald and The Career Politician. Why so? Because although his supporters can ill-articulate these differences, they live them and feel them viscerally. Their reaction to Mr. Trump is informed by a sense of Trump the private citizen, the businessman, the anti-politician. As such, they grasp that Trump’s reality, incentives and motives sharply diverge from those of the professional politician. His reasons for doing what he’s doing are different.

Differently put: A successful politician and a successful businessman represent two solitudes, never the twain shall meet—except when the capitalist must curry favor with the politician so as to further his business interests, a reality brought about by corrupt politics. Trump’s donations to both parties fit a pattern forced by the regulatory state, whereby, in order to keep doing business, business is compelled to buy-off politicians.

MORE IN MY “Trump Should Triangulate.”

“Radio host Glenn Beck doubled down in his game of race-card Blackjack against Trump supporters,” reports WND:

“Beck took to Facebook Tuesday night and reiterated his stance against the GOP front-runner’s base: it is composed of fake tea party members who dislike President Obama because he is black. …”

WND cites Trump supporters in their own defense:

“I have been a Tea Party member for years and I support Trump. I despise the ‘Republicans’ who lie to us just to get elected then work with Obama. You say that you just don’t understand why people support Trump. You say ‘he is just a TV star’. Ronald Reagan was ‘just a TV star’ and he was the best President ever,” wrote Rick Henry. “I have watched you since you first started babbling about being a conservative … and you still just continue to babble foolish things.”

“Americans are tired of being told they suck and they are stupid. They are tired of being put behind non-Americans in our own country. Donald is saying he will fix that. You are assuming the American people are stupid. If you want Ted Cruz as the nominee you need to get Ted Cruz to open his mouth and speak the truth to the American people,” added Deb Medley-Kammerer.

Slick Republican strategist Rick Wilson, by the way, is a regular on CNN and is more disgusting than cretin S.E. Cupp, if not nearly as dumb as her. “Wilson recently accused Breitbart’s editor-in-chief Alex Marlow of covering the billionaire real estate mogul for website traffic. He also asked Ann Coulter on Twitter if Trump pays her ‘more for anal.’ The tweet was quickly deleted.”

MORE @ WND.