Category Archives: Republicans

Updated: Republicans’ Incoherent Mea Culpa

Conservatism, Elections 2008, Foreign Policy, IMMIGRATION, Neoconservatism, Republicans

An incoherent P.J. O’Rourke dithers on about why Republicans have betrayed conservatism. On the most important national questions-cum-calamities—perpetual immigration and war—he seems to think more of each was the way to go. That is if I understand the man’s bafflegab (perhaps I don’t).

If anything, led by deracinated neoconservatives, Republicans’ move to the left on immigration has been their downfall. And if O’Rourke’s own support for an ill-begotten war doesn’t yet excite disgust deep down, what hope is there for the rest? As I said, “GOP; RIP.” Here’s O’Rourke, if you can stomach him:

“Our attitude toward immigration has been repulsive. Are we not pro-life? Are not immigrants alive? Unfortunately, no, a lot of them aren’t after attempting to cross our borders. Conservative immigration policies are as stupid as conservative attitudes are gross. Fence the border and give a huge boost to the Mexican ladder industry. Put the National Guard on the Rio Grande and know that U.S. troops are standing between you and yard care. George W. Bush, at his most beneficent, said if illegal immigrants wanted citizenship they would have to do three things: Pay taxes, learn English, and work in a meaningful job. Bush doesn’t meet two out of three of those qualifications. And where would you rather eat? At a Vietnamese restaurant? Or in the Ayn Rand Café? Hey, waiter, are the burgers any good? Atlas shrugged. (We would, however, be able to have a smoke at the latter establishment.)
To go from slime to the sublime, there are the lofty issues about which we never bothered to form enough principles to go out and break them. What is the coherent modern conservative foreign policy?
We may think of this as a post 9/11 problem, but it’s been with us all along. What was Reagan thinking, landing Marines in Lebanon to prop up the government of a country that didn’t have one? In 1984, I visited the site where the Marines were murdered. It was a beachfront bivouac overlooked on three sides by hills full of hostile Shiite militia. You’d urge your daughter to date Rosie O’Donnell before you’d put troops ashore in such a place.
Since the early 1980s I’ve been present at the conception (to use the polite term) of many of our foreign policy initiatives. Iran-contra was about as smart as using the U.S. Postal Service to get weapons to anti-Communists. And I notice Danny Ortega is back in power anyway. I had a look into the eyes of the future rulers of Afghanistan at a sura in Peshawar as the Soviets were withdrawing from Kabul. I would rather have had a beer with Leonid Brezhnev.
Fall of the Berlin wall? Being there was fun. Nations that flaked off of the Soviet Union in southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus? Being there was not so fun.
The aftermath of the Gulf war still makes me sick. Fine to save the fat, greedy Kuwaitis and the arrogant, grasping house of Saud, but to hell with the Shiites and Kurds of Iraq until they get some oil.
Then, half a generation later, when we returned with our armies, we expected to be greeted as liberators. And, damn it, we were. I was in Baghdad in April 2003. People were glad to see us, until they noticed that we’d forgotten to bring along any personnel or provisions to feed or doctor the survivors of shock and awe or to get their electricity and water running again. After that they got huffy and began stuffing dynamite down their pants before consulting with the occupying forces.
Is there a moral dimension to foreign policy in our political philosophy? Or do we just exist to help the world’s rich people make and keep their money? (And a fine job we’ve been doing of that lately.)”

Update (Nov. 11): John Zmirak of Taki’s Magazine concurs about the “senile” P.J.:

P.J. O’Rourke is now officially senile. Pour a stiff glass of bourbon before wading into this farrago of parrot-sh*t. The problem with conservatism, for P.J. as for Frumbag, is conservatives. They should learn to put up with forced desegregation and worthless public schools, gay marriage, abortion, colonization by hostile, nationalistic foreigners, and the use of the U.S. military to fight other country’s wars. In return they might, just might get… drumroll please: fiscal responsibility. Yeah, we’ve never spent a dime on all that federal equality micromanagement and foreign conquest, or all those uninsured unskilled laborers. That’s funded by pennies from heaven.

The same pious homilies are echoed by most of conservatism’s custodians—just enough “insight” to make themselves appear as though they’ve retained something of their faculties and have embarked on a quixotic quest to confront their excesses and errors; but not quite enough to show Republicans up for the rudderless sorts they are (for the most).

As always, Republicans are great at dimming and dumbing down debate.

Updated: GOP, RIP

Conservatism, Elections 2008, IMMIGRATION, Iraq, Republicans

MCCAIN: He was the wrong man; a progressive, as opposed to a conservative. He followed an equally wrong, wretched administration (Iraq), from which he deviated only slightly—and then to the left (global warming).

The GOP: It is no longer conservative, but neoconservative. “Strategists” hostile to principles, the Karl Rovians, have sought to “attract” intractably hostile minorities to the party by relinquishing philosophical coherence. While trying hard to appeal to minorities, who seldom vote Republican, GOPers worked overtime to marginalize the Republican base—issues most important to conservatives were mocked out of meaning and never mentioned. Immigration, for one. (Watch the chilling testimony of an architect of the central plan to overthrow America.)

As minorities move into a majority position, thanks in no part to Republican immigration policies, the GOP will become redundant.

Update: WHO’S RACIST? Here are the exist polls by race (and sex).

Related: “Why Weep For Joy?”

GOP Sticks With Karl (Marx)

Barack Obama, Communism, Democrats, Elections 2008, Republicans, Socialism, Taxation

“To get a Democrat to admit to practicing socialism is a lot like frisking a wet seal.

To get Republicans to confess to their role in socializing America is an equally slippery affair.

The latter have been grandstanding about the plan of the wily pitch-man Obama to plunder taxpayers (the minority) so as to pay tax consumers (the majority). For the edification of GOP grandstanders, America has a tax system that energetically distributes income.

The progressive income tax is a good example of Karl Marx’s maxim, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” It is socialism by any other name.

Obama is an adherent of this socialism; as is McCain. And so is George Bush, who, as a campaign ploy, had promised to reform America’s steep tax system, but decided to stick with Karl.

Indeed, America, the cradle of capitalism, clings to Karl. Russia, the cradle of communism, has abandoned him in favor of a flat—and very low—tax on income. …”

Read the complete column, “GOP Sticks With Karl (Marx)“, on WND.com

Updated: Who’s Stupid? Not Sarah

Conservatism, Elections 2008, Federalism, IMMIGRATION, Intelligence, Israel, John McCain, Just War, Media, Republicans, Sarah Palin, War

The following is an excerpt from my new WND column, “Who’s Stupid? Not Sarah.” It is the first in a series of three (unless the news cycle changes the plan):

“Governor Sarah Palin’s alleged lack of cerebral alacrity is probably less in doubt after the first Vice-Presidential Debate. Prior to that, a bipartisan consensus had been developing among the ideologically converging political class and their parrot pundits that she was indeed an idiot.

The biggest hitter was conservative columnist Kathleen Parker, who demanded that Governor Palin bow out of the race. “Only Palin can save McCain, the Party, and the country she loves. Do it for your country, please,” pleaded Parker histrionically.

How like a woman to implicate causes not in evidence for the country’s undoing.

Where was Sarah Palin when the Bush/Bernanke bulldozer was running up debts and deficits financed by promiscuous printing and borrowing? Whodunit? Who so debased the country’s coin? …

Sarah Palin … has an alibi. When these characters were gassing-up the economy with hot air, she was in Alaska getting her house in order. This does nothing to excuse Sarah’s subsequent sell-out, but it doesn’t put her at the original crime scene.

Elementary, my dear Ms. Parker: Palin quitting will not save your Party or the country.

…. At the very least, the developing consensus as to Palin’s aptitude, I venture, is premature. …”

Read the complete column, “Who’s Stupid? Not Sarah.”

Update: A reader sent this YouTube clip along with the comment, “Explain this about your precious Sara! [sic].”

He apparently had not understood my column, wherein I condemned Palin for turning her back on a laudable cause she and Tod once supported: peaceful secession, which is as American as apple pie. I’ll repeat what I wrote:

Palin slammed a cause she had, at one time, saluted: that of the Alaskan Independence Party. It advocates what was once a fundament of the American founding: peaceful secession. As leading economic historian Tom DiLorenzo has documented in rich detail, the Union was a voluntary one. If the states had believed it was a “one-way Venus flytrap,” they would never have ratified the Constitution.

“Sarah Palin: Palling Around With Secessionists” convinces me that by joining McCain, Palin has forfeited a previously held, laudable libertarian principle.

I urge the reader to read “Quebec May be the Guard of Our Ultimate Freedom” and “Raise a Toast to Western Separatism and Canada’s Good Health.” Since Sarah seemed to have once supported peaceful secession, I am all the more convinced that she was a patriot, and has sold her soul by adopting McMussolini’s creed.