Conservative Amazons

Muslims in Sudan are demanding the death of a British school teacher for letting her students name a teddy bear Muhammed. This is clearly irrational and inexcusable behavior that Bill O’Reilly, Michelle Malkin, and other influential conservative editorialists are harshly condemning. The MSM believes that the conservative media is blowing this out of proportion — and that may be true — but it’s necessary. Here’s why:

The post-9/11 “thou-shalt-not-criticize-Muslims” crowd refuses to speak ill of the extreme wing of the religion or the moderate Muslims who do not speak out against the extremists. It’s important that we do both to ensure our security and sovereignty. By drawing attention to the thousands of extreme Muslims, the conservative media is raising awareness of this threat. The War Against the West has been violently waged for the past six years, and befriending or defending terrorists will only worsen the situation. The media needs to milk stories like these in order to raise awareness about Islamo-Fascism and to inform Americans who blindly follow the MSM.

It blows my mind that Rudy is still leading the national polls. 3 marriages, infidelity, and liberal social views give him a huge disadvantage in Republican circles to begin with. Even with the Bernie Kerik story and the recent revelation about Rudy’s abuse of taxpayer money, the polls have barely budged. Rudy clearly has a lot of additional baggage hidden in the closet that we don’t know about — I just hope that Republican primary voters are able to come to their senses before the convention. If Rudy is our nominee and the press or the Democrats unleash additional Rudy baggage next fall, that’s not good. I am obviously not a huge Rudy fan, but if Rudy were to get the nomination, I would rather this inevitable Rudy gossip to stay in the closet until after he beats Hillary Clinton.

Kathleen Parker writes a great column on people who avoid procreation in pursuit of a carbon neutral, earth-saving lifestyle.   One of my favorite bits:

If we’re not saving the planet for our kids, for whom are we saving it? After we’re all sterilized and aborted, who’s going to appreciate the fact that global warming is, by golly, under control? Who’s going to live to tell the tale?

Tell me: When was the last time you read a good book by a polar bear?

I think it’s great that these folks don’t want to reproduce.  In fact, I encourage all of their friends to do the same.  Meanwhile, my conservative Republican parents had five children.  I’ll let you do the math.

As expected, the Rudy-Romney squabble kicked off the debate. Romney held his own as Rudy unfairly attacked him about illegal immigrants who worked at his house — though Romney did not hire them directly. Rudy was flustered and essentially conceded the argument.

 Huckabee continued his string of impressive debate performances, giving articulate and direct answers to most questions.

 Thompson’s attack ad was the biggest surprise of the night. Honestly, I don’t think Thompson or his campaign quite realized what they were doing. I certainly do not think they expected it to be so controversial.

…Foreign Policy gives us a list of the most eligible world leaders.  Apparently, Hugo Chavez is quite the romantic.  Who would have thought?

The CNN/Youtube debate falls on day 5 of the nonstop Rudy/Romney attacks. Rudy held a surrogate-press conference on Romney’s home turf this morning, just hours before Rudy’s Hampton’s escapades (paid for by taxpayers’ dollars) were revealed.

Tonight should be interesting.

Huckabee lost me as soon as he started pulling out the class warfare arsenal and calling the Club for Growth  the “Club for Greed.”  Which, in addition to being a serious mischaracterization of C4G, is really just a terrible insult.  If you really want to tackle the Club for Growth, you’d better be a little more creative than that.

Here we Dick Morris ardently defending Huckabee’s record as a fiscal conservative (to which I say: then why is he so willing to pound the “rich-people-and-corporations-are-evil” drum). But what really caught my eye was the way he tried to paint the race as a three-way contest between Giuliani, Romney and Huckabee.

When voters who have decided not to back Rudy Giuliani because of his social positions consider the contest between Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee, they will have no difficulty choosing between a real social conservative and an ersatz one.

Romney, who began as a pro-lifer and switched in order to win in Massachusetts, and then flipped back again, cannot compete with a lifelong pro-lifer, Huckabee.

The choice is not between Romney and Huckabee, it’s between Romney and Huckabee and my man Fred Thompson.  Not only does Thompson have a perfect pro-life voting record, he’s also a fiscal conservative in the model of (dare I say it?) Ronald Reagan.  Unlike Huckabee, Romney or Giuliani, Thompson has actually released a fiscal policy plan that includes a variety of tax cuts and tax reforms that would benefit every American.

So it’s really no wonder that Morris would prefer to act as though Fred Thompson doesn’t exist.  He’s the only good choice in a field of half-hearted Republicans who enjoy quoting Reagan without understanding that there are unifying principles behind those talking points.

Finally, this paragraph really rubbed me the wrong way:

But Huckabee’s strength is not just his orthodoxy on gay marriage, abortion, gun control and the usual litany. It is his opening of the religious right to a host of new issues. He speaks firmly for the right to life, but then notes that our responsibility for children does not end with childbirth. His answer to the rise of medical costs is novel and exciting. “Eighty percent of all medical spending,” he says, “is for chronic diseases.” So he urges an all-out attack on teen smoking and overeating and a push for exercise not as the policies of a big-government liberal but as the requisites of a fiscal conservative anxious to save tax money.

Written like a man who doesn’t really believe in conservatism to start with.  Mike Huckabee is one of those surely good-hearted people with an unfortunate tendency to conjure rights from thin air.  Or, more often, to mistake privileges for rights. For example, illegal immigrants have a right to federal college money too.

Also, the idea that we’re going to start cracking down on smoking, overeating and lethargy is frightening in its implications (and not just because overeating and lethargy are my vices of choice).  When we reach a point where government (and through taxation, your fellow citizens) is responsible for health care, why should they not take action to discourage unhealthy lifestyles?  But part of living in a free society is that people can choose to be either healthy or unhealthy.  They can choose to have bad habits and vices, because their fellow citizens aren’t forced to shoulder the burden of their choices.  But when my tax money starts paying for your health care, you can be damn sure I’ll do whatever it takes to get you on that treadmill.

Highly unlikely, despite some wishful thinking from Nick Gillespie and Matt Welch of Reason magazine.  In the Washington Post’s Outlook section, Gillespie and Welch cite the growing ranks of self-identified libertarians and the improbable netroots success of Ron Paul as proof that the libertarian movement is (or will soon be) a political force to be reckoned with:

When a fierce Republican foe of the wars on drugs and terrorism is able, without really trying, to pull in a record haul of campaign cash on a day dedicated to an attempted regicide, it’s clear that a new and potentially transformative force is growing in American politics.

I’m not sure I’d call liberty-mindedness a new force in American politics, and I’m not sure that I’d attribute Paul’s success to a growth in libertarianism so much as to the ability of the internet to pull together wackos and dissidents from all the corners of this great nation (or corners of parents’ basements, as the case may be).  Moving right along:

 But [Paul's] philosophy of principled libertarianism is anything but negative:  It’s predicated on the fundamental notion that a smaller government allows individuals the freedom to pursue happiness as they see fit.

Given such a live-and-let-live ethos, it’s no surprise that at a time when people run screaming from such labels as “liberal” and “conservative,” you can hardly turn around in Washington, Hollywood or even Berkeley without running into another self-described libertarian.

[...]

In April 2006, the Pew Research Center published a study suggesting that 9 percent of Americans — more than enough to swing every presidential election since 1988 — espouse a “libertarian” ideology that opposes “government regulation in both the economic and the social spheres.”

I’m willing to bet that if you put that 9 percent sample in a room together and told them to come up with some brand spankin’ new legislation, they’d be no more able to reach a consensus than our current Congress.

Any movement with a chance of success has to be able to pull together some pretty disparate political factions and interests, so within any such movement you’ll have dissent.

But the libertarian self-description encompasses too broad a range of priorities to become the kind of election-swinging power that Gillespie and Welch hope for.  Being a true libertarian is hard philosophical work, because it means saying no to all kinds of fun government interference.  Most self-described libertarians aren’t willing to be government Puritans: they still want some intervention, just not everywhere.  And if you get too many people saying “well, I don’t like bigger government, but we need it to do X,” the entire movement falls apart.  There just isn’t enough unifying principle.  And while some groups may overlap, they all differ on who they’re willing to throw under the bus in order to preserve what they believe is the most important kind of freedom.

Under the libertarian descriptor, you’ve got your free-marketeer libertarians, who believe that economic freedom is essential to all other freedoms.  You’ve got your anti-religion libertarians, who believe that the “Religious Right” is the greatest threat to freedom, with all their moralizing and church-going (I’m looking at you, Christopher Hitchens).  You’ve got your isolationists, who think that Iran will play nice with us if we just play nice with Iran.  You’ve got your “I’m-a-lefty-in-disguise” libertarians, who think that freedom from low-wage work is just as important as freedom of speech.  Then you’ve got your pot-smoking, “but George Washington grew hemp” crowd, your tech-savvy “save the interwebs and stop being so uptight about copyright” crowd, and your “9/11 was an inside job, planned by the CIA” crowd, all of whom at one point or another may claim the libertarian label.

You simply cannot make a cohesive movement out of this orgy of strange bedfellows.

First, the free-marketeers may side with the Christian conservative in order to promote a low-tax, free trade, deregulation agenda that both believe is in the nation’s best interest.  Then the anti-religious right libertarians start yowling about government in our bedrooms and out-of-control morality, and get mad at the free-marketeers for their unholy alliance, while the isolationist crew gets mad that we’re spending so much on the military.  The liberals-in-disguise group starts making noise about the fact that the free-market absolutists are giving corporations more power to exploit workers.  The techie faction gets annoyed with the free-market faction for blocking regulation to ensure “Net Neutrality” and accuses them of being in the pocket of big business, and starts siding with the closeted liberals.  Meanwhile, the marijuana legalization crowd, bored with the whole drama, goes out back to light-up, and the 9/11 Truth people confront presidential candidates in airports to hound them about the Council on Foreign Relations.

Different groups will emphasize different kinds of freedom more, and the divisions that arise keep libertarians from being an effective third party, or even an effective swing vote.

Random Ron Paul thought: Doesn’t he look like a cross between Dopey (of Snow White fame) and Ian McKellen?

Not only was Thompson the first man out of the gate with a comprehensive plan to deal with Social Security, he’s just released a tax reform plan that gets a gold star from the Club for Growth.

According to Club for Growth President Pat Toomey:

His plan is based on the fundamental fact that lower rates and simpler rules across the board promote economic freedom and enhance economic growth. This is the kind of plan economic conservatives can rally around.

Meanwhile, the conventional wisdom still says that Thompson is lazy and unintellectual, which I’m beginning to think is media code for “Southern,” as neither accusation is grounded in reality.

After an long, boring weekend spent at my computer writing a paper, or behind the cash register at work, I don’t want to do anything more difficult than a load of laundry. Also, I’m getting a monitor tan. So, I leave you with this important campaign news:

Chuck Norris: Political King-maker?  Given his choice of candidate, I sure hope not