Good or Bad for the Jews

"Good or Bad for the Jews"

Many years ago, and for many years, I would travel to Morocco to visit uncles, cousins, and my paternal grandmother. Some lived in Tangiers;...

Friday, March 18, 2016

Thinking Aloud About Conservatism . . .

Just some thoughts. I am not deliberately seeking to be heretical. These are just thoughts; they are not complete, and I will be thinking about all this much more. A work in progress.

For at least the past 45 years, I have considered myself a conservative, even a libertarian--well, libertarian with an asterisk (I believe in a large and fearsome military establishment). For part of my early life, I was a vaguely centrist, apolitical sort, but one who thought that America and the West were pretty much the best places to live. My great epiphany came while studying at UCLA in the early 1970s. I was appalled by the liberal mindset, even back then, which sought to denigrate America and its history, to ridicule and demean the great achievements of Western Civilization, and to point to some other system as "better." I had lots of doubts about this line of thinking, but just did not have the intellectual confidence to speak up and offer a counterargument. That aforementioned epiphany took place at the student bookstore where I happened to pick up an issue of William F. Buckley's The National Review and one of Norman Podhoretz's Commentary. I don't remember what exactly I read that night in those magazines, but, whatever it was, it made me realize it was OK to oppose the stifling liberal/progressive paradigm. I went on a reading binge of conservative thinkers from Europe and America, and basically ran a parallel education course for myself along with the leftist stuff unloaded on me daily in class.

As part of that autodidactic process, I read a very illuminating book, not by a conservative. It's one now hard to find in bookstores (available, however, on Amazon), but worth seeking, Social Sciences as Sorcery, by a leftist Polish-British author, the late Stanislav Andreski. Whatever his own personal political predilections, he so thoroughly demolished the faux intellectual pretentiousness and absurd writing style of so much modern social science that it subsequently proved tough for me to take seriously many of my classes in sociology, political-science, anthropology, and even history. Immensely liberating. Read it. Even more important, have your kids in university read it.

Sorry for the long wind-up. Here's the pitch: I find more than a little boring and even irritating the ongoing and intense debate over whether somebody or another is a "true" conservative. Much of it reminds me of the debates one saw in communist-socialist movements as different factions argued over which held truer to St. Karl's vision. These debates often turned bloody as various factions of the left, e.g., Stalinists, Trotskyites, Anarchists, Fascists, turned on and murdered each other.

Conservatives now appear doing some of the same--no murdering, however, at least not yet. I tire of the virulent tweets, the purple-prose articles, the angry televised debates, and the vile insults to-and-fro in arguments over the conservative credentials of, say, Trump vs Cruz vs Rubio vs whomever. It does little in terms of practical politics but to benefit the progressives busily destroying our country day-by-day, institution-by-institution.

In my view, a person can support an opposing candidate, have a different view than mine, and not be vile and despicable. Old fashioned, I know. I can't keep up with the times.

In recent years, we saw a remarkable phenomenon in the US, which initially gave me hope that we had reached a point in our modern history where we fought back against progressive encroachment. I refer to the Tea Party movement; it seemed a genuinely revolutionary grassroots movement that boldly challenged the ruling progressive orthodoxy. It had no established hierarchy, no well-developed infrastructure, and certainly no agreed upon leaders. It was a movement, unlike most on the left, that came from the heart and soul of the people. This movement was ridiculed and feared by the media and the other Democratic Party run institutions in the country, and, even, alas, by the old guard Republican Party itself. On this last point, note the treatment meted out to Sarah Palin and others who seemed too close to this new grassroots conservatism; the Republican Party elite, the official arbiters of what could and could not pass as conservatism, pretended to be embarrassed by the movement but, in fact, felt threatened by it. It was popular conservatism built around resentment for the arrogant ruling elite regardless of party; the endless demands made on ordinary people by that elite; and the ever-growing interference in all aspects of life by government run by, you guessed it, that same elite. I am not normally enamored of "populism" as a political philosophy or movement as it all too often ends up as a totalitarian ruin, e.g., the French Revolution, the Third Reich, Peronist Argentina. This movement, however, drew inspiration from one of the few successful political revolutions on the planet, the American Revolution, and had as its objective taking government away from the mandarins, and then--surprise!--having the state leave us alone! It could have been called the Greta Garbo movement. The Tea Party had some remarkable successes, and for a time it appeared that it would transform the Republican Party into a true conservative party that stood for individual rights and a smaller, less-intrusive government.

So what happened? How and what did the politicians put into positions of power by the Tea Party do?

Not too well. In fact, not much changed in DC. The corruption of power, well, corrupted. The Republican Party instead of getting transformed by the Tea Party victors in its ranks, transformed them into Republicans or made sure that they could get nothing meaningful done. Obamacare? Survived. A host of clearly illegal Presidential orders? Remained. Crippling budget deficit? Grew. Use of government agencies as pawns of the progressive movement? Continued. The gutting of the military? Worsened. Our delusional foreign policy? Even more delusional. The flood of illegal aliens? Unabated. And on, and on, and on.

I see the whole debate about "who is truly a conservative" as another of those "paralysis by analysis" exercises. We have, for example, the establishment GOP and the supposed conservative movers and shakers gnashing their teeth and rending their garments over whether Donald Trump is a conservative. We even have prominent conservatives telling us they would rather see Hillary "Benghazi" Clinton in the White House than Trump; somehow that would preserve the purity of the conservative cause. What four more years of progressive lunacy emanating from the White House would do to the country . . . ah, well, harrumph, a topic for another day, I guess . . .

Folks, get over it. Nobody politically viable is a "pure" conservative. Reagan, the best president of my lifetime, certainly wasn't. Would it have been better to leave Carter in office for another four years while we hunted up a pure conservative? The Soviets would have appreciated that.

The situation, frankly, now proves so dire that I gladly would take a chance on a nationalist populist as president. The trick will be for a vigilant public to ensure that this new president holds to his promises to defend the borders, restore the military, preserve the second amendment and the rest of the Bill of Rights, have a nationally beneficial immigration policy, instill some fiscal responsibility in government, and basically leave the rest of us the hell alone. As I have said before, the
goal should be a government in which 95%-98% of the time it makes no difference to the average American citizen who is president. The US President should matter more to foreigners than to Americans.
Dreams . . .

46 comments:

  1. Diplo - one of the finest blog posts I have seen on this or any other blog.

    You nailed it.

    Fantastic.

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  2. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

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  3. Well I'll just say "what Cuffleyburgers said."

    But I will add one additional comment:

    I too was a moderate centrist, especially during part of my FS career and most especially while assigned to DC. Adopting the protective coloration of the forest I was living in, I guess.

    But I never could reconcile myself fully to the idea that government could interfere so much in my personal life, especially gun control. It seemed so pointless, as their proposed legislation clearly would not accomplish the ends they promised.

    My own reaction to the issue brought me to the realization that the left-wing big government types were more concerned about control than guns -- guns were just a means to an end for them. And from that realization I began to see how this same motivation attached to other policy proposals, such as global warming, education funding and healthcare to name a few that capture such great bandwidth these days.

    Like you, I saw the Tea Party as a welcome reaction to the Washington power structure. And I have been terribly disappointed that so-called conservatives get elected and then co-opted by the establishment inside the beltway. The Republican leadership on the Hill has been a terrible disappointment.

    Some day we (or our children) will look back on this era as a pivotal moment in time. I hope we (or they) will be able to say we made a gigantic course correction then, because if that is not the case we will shake our head ruefully and say this was the time when America lost its way and the dream our forefathers gave birth to in 1776 was finally snuffed out.

    Thank you again for your good analysis.

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  4. Dear Diplomad, fellow blog readers, and fellow former FSOs, just wanted to pass on a link to a really excellent talk from this February by Pete Hoekstra on US foreign policy. Hoekstra of course was on the House Intelligence committee from 2003 on for more than a decade, as chairman for most of that time.

    http://www.c-span.org/video/?404902-1/radical-islam-us-foreign-policy

    He says among other things that foreign policy is very hard and requires consistent policies over a long time. He says that we must develop a bipartisan consensus on an intelligent foreign policy that will be sustained across administrations (as it used to be), but is not optimistic.

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  5. Thank you, Dip. I'll be sending this post to friends.
    As if written from my heart, if only I could write half as well.

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  6. This comment has been removed by the author.

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  7. A few points here...

    First, on the TEA Party, we were naively too optimistic in underestimating just how bare knuckles and dirty the DC elites of both parties would play. Every trick from co-option of candidates and infrastructure to marginalization, to propaganda and mud slinging (consider the different media treatments of TEA Party vs Occupy movements), to outright using the power of government to blunt TEA Part momentum (see IRS scandal). As change happened slowly, or more often, didn't happen at all, people got discouraged. The TEA Party should have been a useful pressure vent that would have improved the whole, instead the pressure was stopped up giving rise tot he "Burn it all down" crowd, which merged with the languishing blue collar middle class to provide Trump his base of support.

    On the argument about conservative purity, this has come about because the GOP elites want to cloak themselves as conservatives even when they support larger government, open boarders/amnesty, and deficits. They want this cloak to make themselves seem more electable and to avoid having a label put on them that would make them more identifiable and challengable. If you can't put a label on somebody as GOPe, then they can claim to be conservative and that 'you should be going to attack those nasty GOPe people who are obviously other people.' You don't need total purity to conservationism, but you need to be able to identify for the opponents are, even when they want to wear a chameleon skin of conservationism.

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  8. Som of this is the "No True Scotsman" fallacy. The Tea Party succumbed to a phenomenon that I have witnessed in local politics. In my small city, a group of us organized an opposition to a city council cabal that was spending too much money and naming buildings after themselves. We elected two reformers but the effort stalled for a couple of years. Then, with a big effort, we elected two more "reform candidates" we had recruited. The two new council embers were in office only a year or two when they made new friends and turned on the people who worked to elect them. The reform movement collapsed.

    The only solution is to return government to as small a fraction of our lives as possible. Then, even though Mark Twain could say, "No man's life, liberty or property is safe when Congress was in session," it was a joke.

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    1. The same thing happened with the Gingrich Revolution in the 1990s and with the people recently elected as Republicans—people selected to carry the Conservative Banner—as soon as they get into power, too many of them suddenly realize they can get incredible benefits and an incredibly good pension, as well as be "an important part of" the power structure, if they play well with the power structure and get re-elected. Pensions vest quickly, benefits and expense accounts are heady toys, the ability to reward friends, and the "friendship" of powerful people and power itself are extraordinarily seductive.

      "Public service" has become a vast treasure trove—if you play the game politically correctly.

      Minta Marie Morze

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  9. Unfortunately with Trump's ego there will be nothing to make him keep any of his promises. With the press's help Trump can turn any way he wants since the press doesn't like his current promises.

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    1. This, of course, is the risk we all fear.

      However, the benefit of overturning the Establishment cabal of Democrat/Republican hegemony seems worth the risk, to me.

      Should Trump turn out to be "just another of them..." the Nation will survive, and his stay at 1600 will be short-lived.

      Graam

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    2. That's on reason why I worry about the hostility on the part of responsible GOP types. Sessions has joined and I hear Gingrich might be chief of staff. Trump needs people who know how the mechanism works. I would like to see a Trump/Cruz ticket with Cruz given the job of dismantling the administrative state which is strangling us all.

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    3. I think Trump's ego is the best protection we have from him. The one thing we can say for sure about him is that he loves to Win. Winning is popularity. He needs to Win for the people who elected him. If he doesn't Win he will feel absolutely horrible, and might even resign the Presidency.

      When he fixed Wollman Rink in six months when it took the government six years and counting to bodge it up, he found the best people, put them in charge and made it work.

      I think that's a Trump Presidency in a nutshell ...

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    4. Sorry, but the track records of celebrity governors in California and Minnesota don't give me any hope. from.poker online indonesia

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  10. Sorry, but the track records of celebrity governors in California and Minnesota don't give me any hope. I fear that a Pres. DJT will make our dire situation even worse than a Pres HRC - not that I'd vote for her under any circumstances. I could really use a working crystal ball.

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    1. You are right about the California and Minnesota experiences. I, however, am willing to take a chance on Trump as he is a much more seasoned executive, has experience around bureaucracies, and understands power. Might he be a disaster? Perhaps. Will Hillary or Bernie be disastrous. No doubt.

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    2. Have looked to see how often Trump has interacted with the law? His limits are what the law doesn't stop. As President his limits will be few.

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    3. "Seasoned executive"? Maybe, but not someone who has run a public company. Trump Holdings is private and its board probably has a higher percentage of lapdogs than Congress. I think Trump understands and appreciate (and wants) unchecked power. The country has had two terms of a narcissistic egomaniac. Two is enough; Trump would be as bad as Obama or worse. (I was hoping Carly Fiorina got more traction with the public, but I'll be happy if Cruz is the R). And I'm thinking/hoping HRC will be indicted so I have no idea who will the D's will run.

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  11. To those who say "Trump isn't a conservative." I answer, neither was Romney, McCain, Bush II, Dole, nor Bush I. As you note, Reagan had his conservative lacunae.

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    1. Every time somebody pins Trump down to what he would do about particular issues, like health care, he invariably replies with some banal piece of conventional wisdom from the Democratic Party's playbook; universal healthcare, for example. The exception is immigration, but he waffles there too. He's going to deport all the illegal aliens, but then let them back in through a big door.

      The other day I read how somebody questioned Trump about who his foreign policy advisor is. His reply was, himself. Shades of Obumbler's saying how he's better at everything than his speechwriters, policy advisors, etc. Trump is, like Obumbler, so ignorant and narcissistic that he can't realize how much he doesn't know.

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  12. I was involved in a local Tea Party effort - and yes, we were quite aware that we would elect candidates who would suddenly discover the seductions of being part of the 'in-group' or who would have mouthed all the right fiscally-responsible, free-market and strict constitutionalist words. Yep, we were aware that we would probably have to go over and over again, until candidates got the point.

    And yes, we were aware that the Establishment GOP were not our friends - indeed, they looked on us at first as a nice handy cash cow for volunteers and donations, and were discomfited to discover that there are a lot of us and we were completely in earnest.

    No, the most appalling and disheartening part to me was the manner in which the Tea Party was slimed by the media and the cheap whores of the entertainment complex. Hardworking, responsible, educated and deeply-concerned citizens, honestly concerned and taking an interest in politics for perhaps the first time in decades -- being painted as mouth-breathing, bigoted, violence-prone freaks. The viciousness of the abuse was absolutely breathtaking - and quite honestly, I hold a grudge against those who perpetuated it. For instance, I despise Anderson Cooper with the fury of a thousand burning sons.

    I shouldn't be in the least surprised that quite a few other Tea Partiers feel the same way, about Cooper and other media enablers who cheerfully joined in the slanders and libels. In Trump they are getting what they deserved. I hope that he is making the usual suspects wet their pants with terror. They piled calumny upon calumny on earnest good citizens ... so now reap what you have sown. You could have dealt fairly, honestly, responsibly and accurately with Tea Partiers - but for reasons of your own, Media Creatures, you chose the low road. Enjoy the trip.

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    1. Celia, I share your anger at the media and entertainment industries and their smearing the Tea Party. I despise them with the fury of a thousand burning suns (not sons; I don't want my sons to burn), plus a few thousand more white dwarf stars.

      However, while I think Trump is preferable to Shrillary Shroooooooooooooooooo, that isn't saying much.

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  13. To set the tone:
    ( fgfbooks.com/Sobran-Joe/Sobran-bio.html )
    Joseph Sobran (1946–2010) was senior editor of National Review for 18 years, a writer, and syndicated columnist.
    === ===
    Democracy has proved that the best way to gain power over people is to assure them that they are ruling themselves. Once they believe that, they make wonderfully submissive slaves.
    === ===

    There is a fundamental error talking about the Republican or Democrat Party. That is referring to voters as if they are part of the "Party". This is like referring to Walmart shoppers as being part of "Walmart".

    You are a member of a party only if you have been/are elected or appointed in that party and are giving at least a few thousand dollars each year in support. You are in that party because you want to direct what government does to set regulations, spend money on your businesses, and to convert your personal position into cash.

    Each party's presentation to the public is about policy: ethics, morals, and grand issues. This is a cover story for the economic interests of the true party. Both parties are flexible coalitions of people who can win votes or who want to buy results from the government.

    Primaries, elections, and voting are used by the parties to:
    * Mollify the public with a feeling of participation and self-rule
    * Raise more money from smaller, ideological contributions
    * Identify those within the parties who have the knack for the
    most sincere sounding lies and for getting votes.

    The Dems have a system of super-delegates and the proportional award of ordinary delegates. This assures that the choice of the party will be nominated. Obama surpassed Hillary for the 2008 nomination because he won over the party, not because he won more ordinary delegates.

    The Pubs have it a bit harder. Pub voters are more fragmented than the Dems and the Pub party has to maintain the fiction that many views are accepted. The strategy this year was to support many candidates who would split the votes in the primaries, allowing Jeb! Bush to win a plurality of the delegates with his deep funding for political operatives and advertisements.
    - - Trump upset this plan, but will face the bureaucracy of the Pub party in rulemaking and arm twising at the convention, likely to give the nomination to a party favorite.

    The Pub party is a marketing division of the Dem dominated Uniparty. It makes noise but accomplishes almost nothing. There are no official plans or projects to win public sentiment and actually take some control.

    * The Dems have numerous protest factions to drive public commentary and dominate the news. Where are the similar groups supported by the Pubs? Why haven't the Pubs bought a network to present the other side of stories?

    * Where are the official and announced plans to run the country differently:
    - No alternative to Obamacare, only the promise of repeal now fading away.
    - Noise but no action on deficits and the budget. Pubs talk about cutting spending, then increase it along with the Dems.
    - What is the "Republican" or "Conservative" policy? The party has chosen not to publish, define, and explain. So, one can be a Pub without supporting any particular agenda.
    - Where are the official educational efforts to explain better policies to support future elections?
    - Where is the official Pub outrage at speech restrictions on college campuses?

    A Uniparty which merely ignored conservative policy would attract the outright anger of right-leaning voters. They would attempt to form an opposition party. The Pubs have served the purpose of attracting those voters to a stand-in party which in reality accomplishes nothing.

    This is slowly being understood and accounts for the angry mood of 40% of the country. Trump is supported by this realization. We can only hope that he won't be a narcissistic dictator and will accomplish some dismantling of the leftist Uniparty machine.

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  14. I don't understand who benefits from the destruction of the American middle class. In my midwestern state, as in its neighbors, manufacturing and agriculture have gone hand-in-hand pretty much from our founding in the 1800s. Jobs left for the nonunion South in the 60s and 70s. In the last 20 years, jobs have left for eastern Europe, Mexico, and Asia while our borders have remained open for foreign products--and foreign workers--of all kinds. What is the economic theory behind this? Having cheap Chinese products in the stores does not make up for the loss of earning power for my neighbors and myself.

    Clearly the countries with which we are running a trade deficit benefit. But why should people like Mitt Romney, the Chamber of Commerce, National Review, etc. be going to the hustings for the sake of amnesty and the ruinous TPP deal? What did we ever do to them?

    I wonder whether things would be different if we still had strong newspapers with strong editorial voices all over the country. Instead we have shrinking, chain-owned papers, one newspaper towns, and news and opinions for the nation generated by NYC and DC.

    So in a nutshell, I'm asking, elites, explain please. What again is the economic theory for which my neighbors and I are being sold down the river?

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    1. I like this approach. It is something that economists forget.

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  15. You Sir, have had impressive sway over my view of foreign policy and the role of the President... unless you stole my idea before I had them?!?!?

    - reader #1482

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    1. "my idea before I had them"....I'm going to steal that.

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  16. One issue is that the Democratic (in the Aristotelian sense) Party has scads of dependent clients who can be turned out into the streets as needed, hence Occupy. The Tea Partiers, by contrast, having ordinary lives, return to those ordinary lives once they think they've got a reformer or two in City Hall. The Conservative movement believes that there should be less government; hence its adherents spend less time on politics.

    Jotham's fable of the trees wanting a king (the bramble won out) in Judges 9:7-15 is very instructive, and too closely reflects our own times as well as the bronze age in which it was first written.

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    1. I swore I wouldn't be the parent who required certain professions of my kids, but my kids are *not* going to become professional protesters.

      - reader #1482

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  17. A large middle class has always been inconvenient to rule. It's a lot easier to run things if you are of the nobility and everyone else is a serf.

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  18. To AnonymousMarch 18, 2016 at 8:24 PM,

    I am not paid by the elite, but I find ecconomics to be interesting

    Here is why free trade is worthwhile despite the dislocation of producers.

    The Essence of the Case for Free Trade
    ( http://cafehayek.com/2016/03/40504.html )

    Immediately, people who buy cheaper imported goods are able to consume those goods plus whatever their unused income will buy. They are better off. The extra value delivered is more than the costs of dislocation suffered by the displaced producers.

    What can the displaced companies and workers do? They can make the extra things which those buyers want, and they can make the things which the foreign companies and workers want to buy. This adjustment takes some time, and makes everyone better off.

    This process does cause distress. A worker gets used to producing something which others find valuable, then loses his job because someone else, foreign or domestic, makes it better or cheaper.

    Only restricting what people could buy would stop this process. But, we are not slaves to the desires of producers. They don't deserve a monopoly on supplying goods and services. The pain of imports (or any competition or innovation) is the pain of consumers choosing what they want to buy in exchange for their work. Free markets and imports are the flip side of consumer freedom.

    Eliminating this freedom locks up the society to produce and consume only those goods which were produced in the past, if it could be done completely.

    Many factors are causing the squeeze on the middle class.
    - Minimum wages shut out new or relocating workers from finding jobs.
    - ObamaCare encourages companies to create many 28 hour/week jobs which don't pay well.
    - Employent regulation, compliance costs, and workplace lawsuits discourage
    . companies from freely hiring and investing.
    - Insanely complex environmental laws raise the costs of doing business and hiring people.
    - Companies can be sued for using "discriminitory" tests, so they rely on expensive
    . degrees or try to hire as few people as possible.
    - Companies can be sued for mistakes in following complex law when they
    . hire older or handicapped workers, so they don't hire as many.

    In short, regulation intends to do good, but results in freezing the labor market. We would be better off with less regulation, possibly more injustice, and greater freedom to offer and take new jobs.

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    1. The Administrative State has wrecked the economic rationale for free trade. It's much the same argument about how open borders and welfare states cannot coexist.

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    2. Maybe you could explain more to support that conclusion.

      I don't see the analogy between open borders/welfare and free trade.

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    3. Open borders and welfare. Before the welfare state with all of its social safety nets, immigrants to the US had to either have enough assets to support themselves for five years or persons (relatives or associates) already in the US had to vouch for them and guarantee that they would support them for that period if necessary until the immigrants became self sufficient. Now, as soon as an immigrant crosses our border, the system is easily gamed and the immigrant begins to live off the rest of us through the social safety nets. See California as a prime example writ ever larger every day.

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    4. Yes, welfare raises the cost of having open borders, encouraging the wrong people and possibly costing more than the long-term benefits.

      I don't see the analogy. What does that have to do with free trade?

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  19. Trade Deficits

    Trump has broadcast the commonly held belief that if "we" buy more stuff from China than China buys directly from us, than "we" are suffering a loss for the difference.

    http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/truth-about-trade-deficits-jobs
    === ===
    [edited] Critics have an overly narrow view of trade. A trade deficit doesn’t mean that dollars flowing abroad just disappear. They quickly return to the United States. If they are not used to buy our goods and services (our exports), they are used to buy American assets — Treasury bills, corporate stock and bonds, real estate, and bank deposits. [Even holding US currency is a form of capital investment to be used later to buy something.]

    America’s trade deficit is always and almost exactly offset by a foreign investment surplus. The net surplus of foreign investment into the U.S. each year keeps long-term interest rates down, prevents the crowding out of private investment by government borrowing, and promotes job creation through direct investment in U.S. factories and businesses.
    === ===

    The dollars I spend on a Chinese tool are not a loss. I get the tool. The dollars return as purchases of other goods, such as wheat or software, or they buy investment goods, giving dollars to the former US owners to spend on other goods.

    Or, those dollars buy goods from France or Turkey, and they show up in the US from many sources. The trade deficit with China remains as a useless fact of accounting.

    I run a constant trade deficit with my local supermarket. I buy stuff from them, and they never buy stuff from me. This is not a loss to me. Only international accounting makes a fuss about this.

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  20. A lot of you folks might benefit from reading Vox Day's blog. The left hates him and vilifies him as a white supremacist and racist, which is kind of funny as he's quite proud of his Mexican and Amerindian blood. Some very interesting views on nationalism, and his last two books are awesome fingers in the eye of the establishment.

    http://voxday.blogspot.ca/

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  21. What I find interesting is all the Republicans who were loving squishy McCain and Romney but are now wrapping themselves in the mantle of conservatism to justify their opposition to Trump. I heard a Trump commercial recently where he hit pretty much all of my main issues (secure borders, strong defense, 2nd amendment, freedom of religion, and a couple of others). If he follows up on those just those items he will be following a more conservative agenda than either of the Bushes.

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    1. I posted this on Instapundit but it correlates to what you are saying:

      Below is a listing posted by a conservative in Las Vegas, Chuck Muth - seems that Trump does embrace a few conservative positions - albeit that the majority of Trump's detractors claim, as they gaze fervently into their unerringly accurate crystal balls, that everything he claims he will do is a lie and once elected, if elected, he will promote a self serving and liberal agenda:

      Is Donald Trump running as conservative? Lets see
      He wants to wipe out ISIS. Check.
      He wants to rebuild our military. Check.
      He wants to repeal ObamaCare. Check.
      Hes for toughening the border and building a wall. Check.
      He wants to take better care of our veterans. Check
      Hes against political correctness. Check.
      He fights with and against the liberal media. Check.
      Hes for reigning in government spending. Check.
      Hes supports tax cuts for the middle class. Check.
      He opposes Common Core. Check.
      Hes pro-Second Amendment. Check.
      He wants to appoint a Scalia-like justice to replace Scalia on the Supreme Court. Check.
      Hes pro-life. Check.
      He speaks out against Christian persecution in the Middle East. Check.
      Hes committed to beating Hillary like a drum in November. Check.

      Ah, but the Trump-hating Cruzers say, you cant believe him.
      Yet were supposed to take to take the word of Ted Cruz, an Ivy League lawyer whos spent his entire adult life in government and politics? Puh-lease.

      Lets at least all agree on this
      The GOP nominee for president this year should be either Trump or Cruz.

      Any convention shenanigans to the contrary should be met with pitchforks and torches - though short of a riot. We should leave that sort of thing to the Black Lives Matter folks.

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  22. Like the word "liberal" was some time ago, the word "conservative" has been ground to dust. It also now void and without meaning.

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  23. Trump is building a new coalition, one that breaks free of the left/right, red/blue stasis. He's getting gobs of Democrat crossover voters.

    He's not about ideology; he's about solving problems. His solutions will be closer to conservative prescriptions because we conservatives expect our ideology to be better grounded and to yield better results.

    Don't confuse electioneering with ideology.

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