Quote of the day

I think it’s still permitted in most conservative circles to say that Sarah Palin is no Margaret Thatcher in the same sense that Dan Quayle was “no Jack Kennedy.” If it’s not? Tough.

Claire Berlinski, author of “There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters,” writing in Britain’s The Guardian:

Visiting Margaret Thatcher is a traditional rite among Republican presidential aspirants—Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson and Mitt Romney all pitched up on her doorstep in 2008. But Sarah Palin, who announced on her Facebook site this week that she hopes to secure a meeting with ‘one of my political heroines, the “Iron Lady”,’ has a more obvious claim to be Thatcher’s heir. She’s an attractive woman from Nowhere Fancy, just as Thatcher was, and snobs deplore her for it, just as they deplored Thatcher. That said, if Palin hopes to style herself as the second coming she has a few things to learn. She might wish to study Thatcher’s disciplined command of arguments, facts and statistics, for instance. . . . Palin has neither said nor written a line so far that would allow anyone reasonably to conclude that her opinions about economic and foreign policy are as cogent and informed as Thatcher’s. No one (not me, anyway) can argue with her conservative instincts, but to compare her ability to express them with Thatcher’s would be ludicrous.

HT: Wall Street Journal Opinion page 6/17/10.

RINOs and DINOs

The Democrat primary winner to run against Indiana Congressman Dan Burton is a young fellow, energetic and … Uh. Well. Did I mention that he won the Democrat primary? I did? Oh, darn!

It seems that he has some history — now, mind you: this guy’s too young to have much of any history —as a Republican! Oh, the horror!

But rather than being welcomed as party-switcher, a Jim Webb Blue Dog Democrat type, he’s being lambasted. “I want a credible candidate,” a blue-haired Democrat woman lamented after her group of blue-haired Democrat women grilled him, post-primary, and found him largely unsympathetic to Democrat party positions.

Well, mam, the time to field an ideologically true Democrat was before this fellow won the primary. Got that? Before. B–E–F–O–R–E. It wouldn’t matter in the end, because Dan Burton presumably will win again. That’s why no credible, pure Democrat bothered running.

I have some Republican history, too, and I’ve long thought that our County had lots of “Republicans” whose positions were dubious for that party identification. And I recall when our GOP could muster against our entrenched late Mayor James Riehle (not a bad Mayor, apart from his choice of City Attorney, police chiefs and a few other thugs-in-government) nobody except a seeming escapee from an asylum. The same may happen with current Mayor Roswarski — by some accounts, it did happen.

I can’t help but feel schadenfreude.

Why Sarah Palin has no political future

Daniel Larison, my kind of conservative, trenchantly reviews why Sarah Palin is a dead end:

* * *

“… Palin admirers have the strangest habit of finding new and demeaning ways to insult the object of their admiration. Here is Lee again:

In attacking Obama, conservatives get the sense that Palin is punching fearlessly up in her weight class and they find her more endearing because of it [bold mine-DL].

In other words, everyone including her admirers acknowledges that Palin is outclassed by Obama in every area of actual policy knowledge and understanding, but her admirers like that she doesn’t let this get in the way of launching her attacks. She may be a lightweight, but at least she punches above her weight! She is completely out of her depth, but she’s scrappy! This is supposed to be a compliment?…”

* * *

I have voted in every Presidential election of my adult life. Were the Republicans to nominate Palin, I would surely cast my vote for a Third Party candidate.

Red Tories | Front Porch Republic

I haven’t decided yet whether I like The American Conservative enough to renew my subscription, but the June issue is excellent, and I’d recommend that you pick it up before the next issue rolls around.

The feature article of the June issue is “Shattered Society,” an essay by Brittish philosopher and politics wonk Phillip Blond, who styles himself a “Red Tory.” The subhead is “Liberalism, Right and Left, has made lonely serfs of us all,” and asks “Does the Red Tory tradition offer a remedy?”

The article is powerful. The responses (e.g., Daniel McCarthy, Nicholas Capalidi) are provocative. Like Daniel Larison at Front Porch Republic, I thought Capaldi’s response was badly misguided. I even though it was condescending psychobabble, probably a calculated hatchet-job commissioned by corporate interests. That’s why I blog while Daniel Larison blogs and can actually get a job writing professionally. He insinutes the same sort of thing but does it more nicely.

May a Republican cross the aisle for a Heimlich Maneuver?

My friend Doug Masson blogs that yesterday proved the Tea Party toothless. I’m not so sure. There was an overabundance of candidates in key open races, so name recognition won the day — and incumbency gives name recognition along with the other perks that inadvertently invariably accompany campaign reform (Coats has some of that name recognition still).

It’s hard for a conservative to disagree with the Tea Party’s “free-market principles, limited government and individual liberty” mantra, but its attitude that every issue is non-negotiable is making it look obstructionist, and may kill it or kill a more pragmatic conservatism. This is my take-away from Kathleen Parker’s column at WaPo today (Parker was, as I recall, one of the first conservatives to point out that Empress Palin has no clothes):

What non-ideologues may see as cooperation, however, is viewed by true believers as weakness. Any attempt at compromise is viewed as surrendering principle. Under the new order, a Good Conservative wouldn’t cross the aisle to perform a Heimlich maneuver.

(Gotta love that last phrase.) Michael Gerson frets that such an attitude threatens genuine innovative conservatives (is that an oxymoron? Must we use yesterday’s nostrums to address today’s problems?) like Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, a red governor of a blue state who may have gotten there partly by being genial rather than harsh.

(Trivia question: can you think of any other breakthrough candidates whose outward niceness hid his inner ideologue? Hint: Are the initials “B.O.” familiar?)

Another attitude that makes conservatism unattractive to the “reality-based community” (a liberal neologism with some valence when many conservatives are unhinged — and the press makes sure we know it) is that tax cuts are the no-fail Miracle Gro of revenue generation so we can go on having our tasty slop from the government trough. Ross Douthat at NYT

suggested recently that “conservative domestic policy would be in better shape if conservative magazines and conservative columnists were more willing to call out Republican politicians (and, to a lesser extent, conservative entertainers)” for advancing bad ideas and bogus arguments,

hoping thereby to elicit things like

Kevin Williamson’s fine piece on supply-side economics from the last National Review, in which he goes after the panglossian misinterpretation of supply-side theory that’s become dogma among too many Republican politicians and activists — namely, that tax cuts generate so much economic growth (and with it, increased government revenue) that they more than pay for themselves. As Williamson notes, the most prominent supply-side theorists themselves don’t believe this ….

What may save conservatism is things like the Florida’s Marco Rubio (okay, Marco is a person, not a thing, and his website reflects the “no Heimlich Maneuver for liberals” attitude as I post this), a Latino in the broad sense, and the Frederick Douglas Foundation, which are giving the GOP a welcome — ahem! — suntan. No longer need blacks or Latinos be simply contrary to declare themselves conservative and, yes, even Republican.

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même. There’s no doubt in my mind that the Catholic Church gets extra scrutiny because it’s not 100% cool with modern prejudices and vices.

The Orthodox Church will get the same treatment as we grow and become better known. Orthodoxen: get used to it.

Yes, I just “compared” today’s sexual revolutionaries — i.e., about 90% now (or so it seems sometimes) — to Nazis, if you’re looking for merde to throw. No, I don’t think sexual revolution is Nazi or Nazi-inspired.

What makes the “environment” worth saving?

Father Andrew Stephen Damick, a bright and well-read young Priest, contrasts conservative and liberal approaches to the “environment” to the Orthodox understanding of “creation” in part 1 of a podcast series titled “This Holy Earth – Ecological Vision In The Cosmic Cathedral.” This is a surprisingly good overview of practical application of an Orthodox mindset, and especially of how the Incarnation changes everything.

Categories added

It must be disorienting wondering what side of the bed I got up on before blogging, so I’ve added “Attitude” categories that so far include “Intrigued,” “Jeremiad” and “Sweetness’n’Light” – sort of like MPAA movie ratings: ‘Don’t like bile? Don’t read this jeremiad!”

Obama the Sneak, DeMint the Babbit

Here’s a small example of why I no longer consciously will call myself a Republican, though I may reflexively still think of myself that way.

The thought that anyone might want to seal off a basin in Colorado to keep it from being stripped for oil and gas development or to create wildlife reserves in New Mexico seems ludicrous to Senator DeMint, nonsense from the “environmentalist left.”

I guess the change of the Republican party into brain-dead boosterism and my concurrent shift into a more “paleo” versions of conservative thought, are some of those pesky mesofacts we humans have trouble absorbing.

Okay: You can stop holding your breath now.

I decided to blog when I saw how different my FaceBook posts were from anyone else’s. It seems the most interesting things in my life – things that aren’t too personal to share, anyway – are ideas I encounter. That’s a problem – people ought to be more important to me than they seem to be when it comes down to how I actually live my life day-to-day, week-to-week. That probably makes me a fairly typical intellectualoid 21st Century American. I’m working on changing that, so don’t expect me to blog as if my life depended on it.

G.K. Chesteron wrote:

Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are least dangerous is the man of ideas. He is acquainted with ideas, and moves among them like a lion-tamer. Ideas are dangerous, but the man to whom they are most dangerous is the man of no ideas. The man of no ideas will find the first idea fly to his head like wine to the head of a teetotaler.

I’m perhaps the teetotaler, but I hope you’ll like at least some of the ideas that intoxicate me.

As I begin this conceit, I anticipate that I will have mostly links with a few comments. In politics, the links are apt to be from the New York Times or the Washington Post editorial pages – not because I’m under illusions that these liberal institutions are right about things, but because as NPR beats heck of of Rush or Beck, these serious papers put to shame most others simply as newspapers and as troves of interesting editorial thinkers – and my favorite, the Front Porch Republic blog. The comboxes at FPR can be pretty lame at times, but the contributors are top-notch guys (and a few gals) who are in the tank for neither major party.

In religion, Father Stephen Freeman’s Glory to God blog produces more gems-per-post than any other I’ve yet found. Subscribe yourself and eliminate the biased middle-man. Of course, he’s Eastern Orthodox, as am I; so if you’re not Orthodox, I venture you’ll find his thinking unusual – a different sort of Christianity than is normally seen in North America.

I’m not sure I’ve followed all the rules for a canonical blog. I picked a title, a subtitle, a theme, and posted an “about.” Then I posted this. So the look of the blog is itself a work in progress.