I’ll have a Republican Split, please
I don’t know much about Joe Scarborough, but I do know I like what he says in this Salon.com interview. A snippet:
We were always attacking Bill Clinton’s spending levels. Dick Armey called him a Marxist, called Hillary Clinton a Marxist. As I point out in speeches these days, government spending grew by 3.4 percent annually under Bill Clinton the Marxist. Spending has grown by 10.5 percent under George Bush the fiscal conservative. I always say: Give me that choice, I’ll take the Marxist at 3.4 percent any day of the week.
Captain Obvious, we salute you, and we hope to hell this is just the start of the re-awakening of the American right. In the current issue of the American Conservative (”What is right? What is left? Does it matter?”) most of the contributors point out much the same thing: that traipsing around the world invading other countries in the name of the Enlightenment is not a conservative thing to do. Neither is concentrating power in the executive branch, and neither is federally-mandated educational standards.
The crux of the issue is something the Bush Administration (note the capitalization - it makes it more sinister) has done extremely well till now, which is somehow bringing together the religious wing and the libertarian wing of the Republican Party. But whereas Bush has kept the religious wing placated by occasionally screaming “GAY MARRIAGE!!!” and then using his only veto in six years to nix spending on lifesaving medical research, the libertarian wing has been repeatedly trashed with all manner of spending increases, trade deficits, and civil rights violations.
Now, the inevitable rift is finally exposing itself, and it could be that the tide has turned. There’s blood in the water. Watch for more prominent (and real) conservatives to start poking their heads up and saying, “Hey! Wire tapping without a warrant? Isn’t that against the law?”
MD wrote:
The words conservative and liberal have lost their intended meaning and are merely team names now, much like the Yankees or Red Sox. Only it’s more fun rooting for the baseball teams, though much of the time the conservative-liberal battle “fought” on talk radio is just like sports radio - a bastion for blowhards if there ever was.
Posted on 23-Aug-06 at 12:30 pm | Permalink
Jake Allen wrote:
So . . . Bush is not a conservative. We conservatives knew that when we voted for him.
Choices were Al Gore and John F. Kerry. Republicans are moving Left, and the Left are already Left. What’s a free-market guy to do?
Madness!
Posted on 23-Aug-06 at 2:00 pm | Permalink
daniel silliman wrote:
I don’t know much about JS either, but do remember hearing him on Rush once, back in the day when I had a strong enough stomache to listen to Rush, and thinking that he was probably the sanest guy to ever appear on the show.
Posted on 23-Aug-06 at 3:35 pm | Permalink
Will wrote:
“and then using his only veto in six years to nix spending on lifesaving medical research”
I’m nitpicking from this post which I otherwise generally completely agree with, but bioethics, particularly stem cell research, is kind of a pet project of mine. If it’s lifesaving, where’s the evidence to support it? If there’s so much potential, why isn’t the private sector shelling out in boatloads to do it on its own? Answer: There is no evidence, and in fact thus far, all the research done from embryonic pluripotent stem cells shows that they can do little in an adult host except cause cancer. They have thus far failed so remarkably that there has yet to be an ESC treatment to make it to clinical trials. In the meantime, “merely” multipotent stem cells are already actually curing diseases and even exhibit pluripotent capabilities, being able to form cells that they supposedly have differentiated away from forming.
Lifesaving? Hardly. So far, all ESCs have done is kill off a few rats. I’m not generally one to go off on “the liberal media” or anything like that, but anyone calling emryonic stem cell research “lifesaving” is exhibiting ignorant, irresponsible reporting.
Also, yeah. Bush: totally not a conservative.
Posted on 23-Aug-06 at 4:04 pm | Permalink
pjk wrote:
I was waiting for someone to bite on this one. all you say is correct, and I agree with it, but the general consensus is that the veto was for moral, not scientific, reasons. (sorry I couldn’t find a quote off the top of my browser, maybe someone can help me out.)
I might agree with the veto on the grounds that this technology doesn’t work and, especially, that the government has no business sticking its nose in there even if it does.
But I don’t believe that was the reason given.
as for “the liberal media…” well, there are many secrets they don’t want you to find out…
Posted on 23-Aug-06 at 6:07 pm | Permalink
Will wrote:
Indeed. Good thing I’ve got my tinfoil hat that enables me to snatch those secrets from right out of the air.
You’re right about the grounds on why it was vetoed. This is one of my many frustrations with the Administration. As someone who still can’t bring himself to vote for a Democrat, but no longer thinks he can vote for Republicans at the national level, either, this has been one of my huge furstrations. The Administration’s PR is positively horrible. Who cares what your actual motivations are? The social conservatives are going to be happy you’re not funding ESC research regardless of why you say you’re not funding it. The people who don’t have an ethical problem with it already aren’t going to be swayed by your ethics, and are rather more likely to criticize you for them. This same kind of inability to spin anything in their favor borders on ridiculous. This is something I could go off on ad infinitum, so I’ll reign it in with just a final “ugh.”
Posted on 24-Aug-06 at 1:33 am | Permalink
Bob wrote:
(Rather than hijack the political discussion here, I’ve responded to Will on the stem cell issue with a blog post)
I’d love to see a democrat congressperson with a nice sense of irony campaign as a fiscal conservative. Certainly there must be a district or two in which this would be an effective strategy?
At least when the democrats are in power and playing “tax and spend”, they have the integrity to admit that they have to bump up tax revenue to pay for the spending. Neoconservativism seems rooted in the belief that increased spending is acceptable as long as the costs are payed with deficeit spending as opposed to actual money. I’ve argued that this NeoCon tendancy is equivalent to a virus that evolves to be too lethal, it gets to spread like the devil inside the host animal but kills it too quickly to have any long term sucess.
Posted on 24-Aug-06 at 9:12 am | Permalink
D. Greene wrote:
I just wanted to point out that during Clinton’s 8 year reign, a Republican congress controlled spending for 6 of those years. Just saying.
Posted on 24-Aug-06 at 4:04 pm | Permalink