Showing posts with label Conservatives. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Conservatives. Show all posts

Monday, March 03, 2008

Beatifying Bill Buckley

It is no disrespect to the memory of a remarkable man to marvel at the efforts of disciples he left behind to elevate him to conservative sainthood.

The latest gush is from William Kristol in today's New York Times, asserting Buckley "helped many of us realize there were far richer intellectual traditions available than 20th-century liberalism even dreamed of" and crediting him with the rise of Reagan followed by "victory in the cold war, a revitalized economy and a renewed nation."

Last week, David Brooks was almost at a loss for words, but not quite. "I don’t know," he wrote, "if I can communicate the grandeur of his life or how overwhelming it was to be admitted into it. Buckley was not only a giant celebrity, he lived in a manner of the haut monde. To enter Buckley’s world was to enter the world of yachts, limousines, finger bowls at dinner, celebrities like David Niven and tales of skiing at Gstaad...He took me sailing, invited me to concerts and included me at dinners with the great and the good."

In the Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan celebrated Buckley as a "complete American original, a national treasure, a man whose energy was a kind of optimism, and whose attitude toward life, even when things seemed to others bleak, was summed up in something he said to a friend: "'Despair is a mortal sin.'"

Among conservatives, only Andrew Sullivan spoke a truth rare among all the superlatives by asking, "(A)m I the only person who found Buckley close to unreadable a lot of the time? I never read his fiction, but his nonfiction was packed the endless sentences, ridiculously long words, and meaning that sometimes took several reads to excavate. I don't know how many times I finished a Buckley column with the thought: what on earth was he trying to say?"

For benighted liberals like me, there was an even more basic problem. For all the conservative blather about our latte-drinking elitism, Buckley was the most elitist figure of his generation, growing up in inherited luxury with a monstrous sense of entitlement and disdain for those who did not share it.

As he dazzled the likes of Kristol, Brooks and Noonan, the rest of us saw only brilliant rationalizations for the politics of selfishness and "Dieu and Mon Droit." Not quite "Let them eat cake," but not too far removed from it.

But speaking ill of the dead may be churlish and ungracious. Let Noonan have the last word about "the defender of great creeds and great belief": "Good night, sweet prince, and flights of angels take thee to thy rest."

Friday, January 04, 2008

Second Commandment and Amendment

To go all the way to the nomination, Mike Huckabee will have to reconcile his party's tension between those who worship God and those who put more faith in guns, a distinction largely lost on liberal Democrats.

Until Iowa Evangelicals embraced him, Huckabee was suspect among Values Voters, who had doubts about what he terms Second Commandment Christianity, which extends more compassion to illegal immigrants and the undeserving poor than other Republican candidates are willing to do.

“I believe,” Huckabee has said, “that life begins at conception, but I don't believe it ends at birth. I believe we have a responsibility to feed the hungry, to provide a good education, a safe neighborhood, health care.”

On the other hand, after criticizing Bush on Iraq, he had to go hunting in Iowa to reassure devotees of the Second Amendment who lean toward Giuliani's macho, John McCain's militant patriotism and Mitt Romney's imitations thereof.

All this has raised doubts about whether he is a "true conservative" across the spectrum from Rush Limbaugh primitives to the National Review intellectual wing of his party.

"Huckabee," Limbaugh contends, "is using his devout Christianity to mask some other things that are distinctively not conservative. He is against free trade. He's really doesn't believe in free market."

NR editor Rich Lowry agrees with the assessment that "Huckabee could be a disaster," likely to "lose conservatives on taxes, spending and immigration and alienate moderates and Democrats on social issues."

From here to Super Tuesday, Huckabee will have to blend the competing strains of his party to lock up the nomination. If he can do that, what they see as his shortcomings could turn out to be pluses with independent voters.

Thursday, November 01, 2007

Pornography for Progressives

Spoiler alert for any rabid right-wingers who may have wandered in here: What follows could be bad for your blood pressure.

Amid all of today's babble and bluster, it's like a short stay at a sanity spa to listen to former New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who might have been President, talking to Paul Krugman, the Princeton professor/New York Times columnist, about politics past and present. They were brought together by the British paper, the Guardian, to discuss Krugman's new book, "The Conscience of a Liberal."

Along the way, they touched on Aristotle, Keynes, Lincoln, health care, Iraq and the 2008 elections. For those who want to remember what public discourse could be, a small sample:

Cuomo: You said we're going to have a lot of rich people who inherited wealth and power...Then you're going to have a lot of miserably poor people who want to kill the rich people because of jealousy and so you need to have that buffer between the two of them that aspires to a better life by figuring out ways to get themselves more property and more wages, and...the first real middle class for a democracy was ours, the first real middle class that worked.

Krugman: (I)n the 18th century, you could say America was the first truly middle class society and then we lost it for a while there, during industrialization. Then we got it back because we had the political movement that made getting it back its goal, and now we've lost it largely again because we had a political movement that made getting rid of it its goal.

You can read or see/hear the rest of it here.

Monday, July 16, 2007

Republican President? Liar Luntz Has a Plan

Talk about die-hards: The GOP’s piss-on–the-public pollster/pundit Frank Lunz unveils his strategy to keep the White House in ’08. It gets a tad twisty, of course, so follow closely:

Play the “fed up with Washington” card: “Democrats blew into Washington in 2006 as a breath of fresh air in response to Republican scandal, Republican budget mismanagement and a Republican war. But in recent weeks, that freshness has turned stale.”

Sell the voters hope: Luntz says focus groups have been saying, "Don't tell us what George W. Bush did wrong. Tell us what you will do right. Don't talk about the past. Tell us about the future."

Be authentic, even if you have to fake it: Don’t try to “recapture a mood that has long since gone by...the Republican candidate should seek to lead like Reagan, not be Reagan.”

Win Ohio: Give them “a culturally conservative message fused with government accountability and economic opportunity specifically tailored to voters in the industrial heartland.”

Luntz, whose specialty is inverting the truth (“global warming” to “climate change”), is bamboozling himself now into forgetting that he has been discredited to the point that PBS last month, after hiring him as an analyst for a Democratic debate, had to pull back under fire.

A long-time liar for Rudy Giuliani, Luntz has no official place in this campaign. But he no doubt is in a closet somewhere, churning out truthful lies to make America’s Mayor look Reaganesque but not like Reagan, devising a culturally conservative message for his cross-dressing candidate and floating pipe-dream plans for how the Republicans can hold on to the White House with even bigger lies than Bush and Cheney could invent.

Saturday, June 23, 2007

Bush-League Supreme Court

Of the damage this presidency has done to American society, the worst and longest-lasting is just becoming visible.

As the Supreme Court ends its 2006-2007 term, signs of a tectonic shift in the legal landscape show an ultra-conservative majority in place to curtail individual rights to privacy and protections from discrimination.

In the most striking decision so far, the Court in April upheld by 5-4 a federal law banning a type of abortion in the middle-to-late second trimester.

In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg pointed out that the majority opinion "cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away a right declared again and again by this court.”

In the New Yorker this week, Jeffrey Toobin notes that, with the coming of Roberts and Alito, the Court is now poised to fulfill the long-hoped-for conservative agenda: “Expand executive power. End racial preferences intended to assist African-Americans. Speed executions. Welcome religion into the public sphere. And, above all, reverse Roe v. Wade, and allow states to ban abortion.”

It took two Bushes to accomplish this. As a new biography of Clarence Thomas reminds us, in 1991 the first President Bush claimed to have chosen Thomas, who had only one year of experience as a judge, without regard to race to follow the distinguished first African American on the Court, Thurgood Marshall.

After the confirmation hearings, which he had complained were an attempted “high-tech lynching,” Thomas’ presence on the Court turned out to be a boon for the Bushes as his vote created the 5-4 majority that halted the Florida recount in 2000 and awarded the presidency to George W.

Attempting to duplicate his father’s feat of replacing a demographic giant with a dwarf, W in 2005 nominated his White House counsel and former personal attorney, Harriet Miers, for the seat vacated by Sandra Day O’Connor. Conservative outcry led to the withdrawal of the nominee described by Bill Maher as “Bush’s cleaning lady.”

Today the hard-right majority is still tenuous, depending on the swing vote of Justice Anthony Kennedy. But with a year and a half left of the Bush term, human mortality could change that before a new President is sworn in. Either way, whoever takes the oath in 2009 will have a lot to say about American values from then on.

Monday, June 18, 2007

Can Romney Get It Right?

Even as he gains some traction in the polls, Mitt Romney keeps coming up as the “empty suitor” of Republican Conservatives.

In the last debate, Romney said he would consider pardoning Scooter Libby despite the fact that, in his campaign, he has been bragging about being the only governor in Massachusetts history to deny every request for a pardon or commutation, 272 in all.

But this week, he was censured by hard-liners at National Review when Kate O’Beirne blogged that Romney “should earn demerits” for turning down an Iraq war veteran, convicted at age 13 of shooting another boy with a BB gun (without breaking the skin), who needed a pardon to be eligible for the police force.

For someone willing to pucker up to Conservatives on every issue, Romney seems to be spending a lot of time standing on his tippy toes and not getting kissed that much. Will Fred Thompson come in and sweep them off their feet?