Excerpts from my new VDARE.com column:
Karl Rove, “The Architect” of George W. Bush’s campaigns and domestic policy, has been one of the central figures of this puzzling century. No single adviser has been more closely linked to a President since Henry Kissinger served Richard Nixon. For most of the last decade, Rove defined the official Republican line, stomping alternative conservative viewpoints into obscurity. And it all ended in catastrophe.
So, is Rove’s autobiography, Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight, the first memoir from a true Bush insider, enlightening about what went wrong?
Answer: yes—but mostly in an unintended way. ...
Rove devotes a moderate amount of space to describing his feelings, which are mostly hurt. People have said a lot of unkind things about Karl Rove over the years, and—he wants you to know—they’ve left him feeling sorry for himself. ...
Thus, we are informed that Rove has been hurt:
* by his unstable mother (who never got around to telling him that her husband wasn’t his biological father);
* by pit bull prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald (who investigated him for years in the rather exiguous Valerie Plame case);
* by Democrats; and
* by the Main Stream Media.
Among the MSM’s many transgressions, it accused Rove’s beloved adoptive father of being gay. Rove pushes back against this notion by telling us more than I, personally, cared to know about his mom and dad’s sex life.
Perhaps the best anecdote in the book concerns Rove’s first (and last) marriage counseling session with his first wife (p. 53):
(There’s no hint in Rove’s manuscript, which presumably was finished several months ago, of his December 29, 2009 divorce from his second wife.)
Rove’s feelings appear to have been hurt most frequently of all by George W. Bush.
There’s something a little creepy about Rove’s glowing memory of the first time he laid eyes on W. on November 21, 1973 (p. 39):
In Courage and Consequence, Rove vociferously eulogizes the greatness of George W. Bush. And yet Rove slips in dozens of small examples of Bush being hurtful, such as nicknaming Rove “Turd Blossom”.
A recurrent drumbeat in the book is Bush’s peevishness when tired (and he seems to tire quickly). Rove’s memoir has a bit of the flavor of a battered wife who ostentatiously defends her husband, partly out of affection and partly to draw sympathy to herself.
Karl Rove, “The Architect” of George W. Bush’s campaigns and domestic policy, has been one of the central figures of this puzzling century. No single adviser has been more closely linked to a President since Henry Kissinger served Richard Nixon. For most of the last decade, Rove defined the official Republican line, stomping alternative conservative viewpoints into obscurity. And it all ended in catastrophe.
So, is Rove’s autobiography, Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight, the first memoir from a true Bush insider, enlightening about what went wrong?
Answer: yes—but mostly in an unintended way. ...
Rove devotes a moderate amount of space to describing his feelings, which are mostly hurt. People have said a lot of unkind things about Karl Rove over the years, and—he wants you to know—they’ve left him feeling sorry for himself. ...
Thus, we are informed that Rove has been hurt:
* by his unstable mother (who never got around to telling him that her husband wasn’t his biological father);
* by pit bull prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald (who investigated him for years in the rather exiguous Valerie Plame case);
* by Democrats; and
* by the Main Stream Media.
Among the MSM’s many transgressions, it accused Rove’s beloved adoptive father of being gay. Rove pushes back against this notion by telling us more than I, personally, cared to know about his mom and dad’s sex life.
Perhaps the best anecdote in the book concerns Rove’s first (and last) marriage counseling session with his first wife (p. 53):
“The assistant rector of Palmer Episcopal Church turned blandly to Val to ask if she would like to say anything. She said, ‘Yes.’ She then looked at me and blurted out, ‘I don’t love you. I’ve never loved you. I never will love you. And I don’t see any purpose in this.’ With that, she walked out. The room seemed frozen in silence. Then the assistant rector exhaled deeply, looked at me, and said, ‘Well, that about says it all,’ and closed the portfolio holding his pad and pen.”
(There’s no hint in Rove’s manuscript, which presumably was finished several months ago, of his December 29, 2009 divorce from his second wife.)
Rove’s feelings appear to have been hurt most frequently of all by George W. Bush.
There’s something a little creepy about Rove’s glowing memory of the first time he laid eyes on W. on November 21, 1973 (p. 39):
“George W. Bush walked through the front door, exuding more charm and charisma than is allowed by law. He had on his Air National Guard flight jacket, jeans, and boots. I introduced myself and we chatted about nothing for a few minutes.”
In Courage and Consequence, Rove vociferously eulogizes the greatness of George W. Bush. And yet Rove slips in dozens of small examples of Bush being hurtful, such as nicknaming Rove “Turd Blossom”.
A recurrent drumbeat in the book is Bush’s peevishness when tired (and he seems to tire quickly). Rove’s memoir has a bit of the flavor of a battered wife who ostentatiously defends her husband, partly out of affection and partly to draw sympathy to herself.
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Rove's advice was that in order for the GOP to win in '04, '06 and beyond it must support big government, mass immigration, and amnesty. He pushed No Child Left Behind, the prescription drug benefit, and the 2006 and 2007 amnesty drives.
ReplyDeleteAll making you wonder: what the hell's the point of a "small government" party winning if the end result is...big government?
It angers me that I once bought into that canker.
ReplyDeleteEnjoyed the Kissinger piece , he really is a very good writer.
ReplyDeleteThe idea that Karl Rove made up Bush's mind for him is convenient, but I believe wrong. Rove may have been the detail man but Bush believed in all these policies and set them in motion.
ReplyDeleteBush was successful and powerful in the short term, at least, because far from being any kind of strong conservative what he believed in was only just on the right wing side of the establishment consensus. He is very much the Northeastern establishment moderate Republican that his father was.
what a drama queen.
ReplyDeletewould not be surprised at all if he's got certain tendencies...
You poor man. You actually read the whole book?
ReplyDeleteWe hear lots of talk of "bipartisanism," as if it's some sort of magic formula. Well, the worst acheivements of the Bush II administration - 9/11, the mortgage meltdown, immigration "amnesty," NCLB, the prescription drug benefit, the Iraq war, were all more or less supported by the Democrats.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, Bush I and II and most of their helpers were fools who immensely damaged the Republican party. It is only now, thanks to the incompetence of the Obama democrats, that the GOP'ers seem to be discovering their roots. If the Democrats had a lick of sense, the republicans would still be buried.
Great review. Fun to read how excited Rove was by the sight of Boy George in "jeans and boots" ...
ReplyDelete"Or maybe this lack of reflection is simply representative of the general absence of perspective in this book (and, for that matter, in Rove’s career). Rove is a hard-working fellow who gets a lot done. But his for all his repute as the Boy Genius and Bush’s Brain, you have to keep in mind that those are relative terms. He’s either a shallow thinker, or someone who has so internalized the reigning taboos that he has little of interest to add.
ReplyDeleteJudging from his voluminous autobiography, Rove obsessed over winning the next 24-hour news cycle—not in trying to understand much of long-term significance."
I'm reading War and Peace now and Tolstoy expressed similar sentiments while talking about Napoleon, of all people:
"Not only does a good army commander not need any special qualities, on the contrary he needs the absence of the highest and best human attributes--love, poetry, tenderness, and philosophic inquiring doubt. He should be limited, firmly convinced that what he is doing is very important (otherwise he will not have sufficient patience), and only then will he be a brave leader. God forbid that he should be humane, should love, or pity, or think of what is just and unjust. It is understandable that a theory of their 'genius' was invented for them long ago because they have power!"
My goodness. Will somebody please let Karl out of the closet?
ReplyDeleteHe is very much the Northeastern establishment moderate Republican that his father was.
ReplyDeleteIt's true that the acorn doesn't fall far from the tree.
I started to write a 5000-word reply to that comment, but let me just point out a few good things that Dubya accomplished:
1) Dubya was honestly pro-life [unlike his father, who admitted in retirement that he was lying about it the whole time, and who urged the GOP to abandon the unborn].
2) Early results seem to indicate that Dubya took his Supreme Court appointments seriously [unlike his father, who put the bolshevik sodomite David Souter on the court, at the urging of that God-damned ***, Warren Rudman].
3) Dubya believed in tax-cuts [unlike his father, who called them "Voodoo Economics"].
As far as Dubya's blind-spot on HBD - he inherits that from his Mom, whose pet project as First Lady was called "Reading is Fundamental", or "RIF".
And as far as backing off his initial commitment to wage a "crusade" against Islam [when informed that the word "crusade" was offensive to Muslims] and as far as his romp in the grass with that monster Abdullah are all concerned - that stuff he got from his Daddy and Brent Scowcroft and Jim Baker.
And neither Dubya nor his father ever showed any visceral inclination to use the power of the bully pulpit to take on the Leftists in the arena of ideas, marketing, or propaganda.
PS: A little off topic, but our new Muslim president seems determined to undermine Dubya's diplomatic opening to the nation of India, which, in retrospect, was probably the most important foreign policy achievement of the Dubya administration.
I can't believe the GOP's infatuation with this guy. Heck of a job on the 2006-2008 congressional elections, Mr. Architect. His nickname in DC's Boystown was the Doughboy.
ReplyDeleteI always felt there was some weird, homo-erotic subtext going on between Rove and Bush (more on Rove's side).
ReplyDeleteBesides, the two times I could see being called "Turd Blossom" would be at a post-rugby match drinkup (laughing) or before a fistfight ensued (not laughing).
He is very much the Northeastern establishment moderate Republican that his father was.
ReplyDeleteNortheastern establishment Republican he may very well be, but the moderate part is complete bullshit. Northeastern establishment Republicans are just liberals who want to drive a little more slowly down the road to socialist nirvana. There's nothing moderate about what they want or how Bush governed.
The sad, depressing yet hilarious thing is to listen to liberals complain about how far to the right Bush was. "Really," I ask, "what did Bush do that was actually conservative?"
Virtually every major act of his administration was left liberal: NCLB, the giganto-transportation bill, the prescription drug benefit, the amnesty/immigration non-enforcement, the debasement of lending standards, the elimination before 9/11 of racial profiling. Even the War in Iraq was an effort in nation building of the kind that Bush (and conservatives) claimed to despise prior to his election.
Event to the extent that the reasons for the war, or the manner in which he fought it, were "conservative," it had no real implications for domestic policy and had nothing to do with the financial implosion. To the extent that "conservative" policies, such as deregulation, caused the mess we're in, they were big business/neofeudalist policies, not conservative in any real sense.
It would really depress liberals to no small degree if you got them to realize that the president they so despise got us in the mess we're in because he was a liberal, not a conservative.
So tell us, Mr. Sailer: was Rove's bio worth reading?
Wow. "I dont love you.Ive never loved you.I never will love you." Roissy,call your office! The rumors of Rove being gay are apparently more than just rumor!
ReplyDeleteAgreed with Thrasymachus, but the possibility (not guaranteed) of the Tea Party folks driving and taking over from the bottom up the Republican Party for far smaller government ... or failing that "White Socialism" both of which are the obvious plays in light of demographic and other trends, is encouraging.
ReplyDeleteBush-Rove may well be the last gasp of such things, assuming Romney/Huckabee are defeated by some new figure.
OT: Obama's happiness deficit
ReplyDeleteI always wondered - If passing an amnesty was supposed to be the key to winning the Hispanic vote, how come the GOP didn't lock it up back in 1986 when they passed the first big amnesty? Instead the Republican share of the Hispanic vote went down in the aftermath of that amnesty.
ReplyDeleteIt's almost as if amnesty is completely unconnected to Hispanic voting patterns.
Thrasymachus said...
ReplyDeleteThe idea that Karl Rove made up Bush's mind for him is convenient, but I believe wrong. Rove may have been the detail man but Bush believed in all these policies and set them in motion.
What a strange world you live in. I don't know why you think Cheney ever consulted Rove or Bush before he made his decisions.
He is very much the Northeastern establishment moderate Republican that his father was.
I suspect Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz would like to be thought of as "Northeastern establishment moderate Republicans" kind of like Obama would like to be thought of as our first post-racial president.
Captain Jack Aubrey said...
ReplyDeletewhat the hell's the point of a "small government" party winning if the end result is...big government?
Because the GOP does a better job of making enemies around the world, thus we get to fight more wars. To most "conservative" voters, that's a feature, not a bug.
From your VDare essay (excerpt of Rove's NYT interview):
ReplyDeleteIf we had led with immigration reform at the beginning of the second term we could have had bipartisan cooperation with a Republican majority in the House and the Senate and done something important for the country that was tilted more toward what the Republicans wanted but couldn’t have passed without Democratic votes instead of Social Security which Democrats wouldn’t participate in until they had a taste of victory. Immigration reform would have given everybody a bipartisan victory and would have cleared the ground for entitlement reform.
So Rove retrospectively believes that the Dems would have gone along with entitlement reform if the Republicans would help them fill the place up with more Democrat voters? That's an extraordinary leap, and even if we win we lose, unless somebody's figured out a way to keep immigrants from getting old and sick too.
For this kind of thinking, Rove gets a White House sinecure and book deal. Meanwhile, Steve Sailer gets to be the Last White Guy in LA, driving around in a used Honda.
Oh, and we should remember just what this "entitlement reform" constituted: no less than the government diversion of billions of dollars in payroll taxes to the feeding trough on Wall Street, a feast of private profit-taking and socialization of loss that would have DWARFED the Housing Bubble.
These people are either evil beyond all measure, or stupid beyond all measure.
i guess i don't see how karl rove was a failure. he helped keep GW bush in office for 8 years.
ReplyDeletethis would seem to be the same as saying david axelrod is a failure, especially if (shudder) obama does an 8 year stint.
So it hadn’t occurred to them, either, that their guest worker plan would turn America into an overpopulated Blade Runner dystopia.
ReplyDeleteAs if they cared! Just as long as they keep living in their gated communities, elites don't care for the fate of mere mortals.
Sheer incompetence.
More like sheer evil.
By promising amnesty, Bush and Rove invited in more illegal aliens. And they helped pump up the Housing Bubble by implying to buyers of mortgage-backed securities that there would be ever more immigration driving up demand for homes.
That was part of the plan. Rove and Bush were probably useful idiots for the neocons and other interest groups, but they were also partly aware of what they were doing to the country.
Steve, this is some of your best work yet. This is a thoroughly detailed destruction of one man's views that influenced a President to make some terrible decisions that ultimately gravely harmed our nation. I, like Sid, am angry that I missed some of these things. Then again, when your choice is between turd sandwich and giant douche (thanks South Park) in 2004, what are you supposed to do?
ReplyDeleteI had almost forgotten about the reduced profiling at airports and the planning meetings on 9/11. I guess the reason why the media doesn't crucify Bush and Rove for it is because it would fly into the face of their own narratives. Pathetic.
Again - outstanding work and a must forward.
He seems to fancy himself as embodying "courage", in reality having a grandiose and distorted self-image. "Chutzpah" would be a better description and should be in the title instead.
ReplyDeleteSteve thanks for the excellent article. Although one aspect I've never read about in your writings is the idea of a North American Union in which the U.S., Canada, and Mexico merge into a single nation. Clinton, Bush, and Obama have openly made references to it. The economic integration has been accomplished through NAFTA and GATT. The NAFTA superhighway is in the process of being built. Now we are seeing the process of political integration with erasure of the border. Having 20-30 million illegals in the U.S. is a sure fire way of severely weakening U.S. sovereignty. My question is is Rove simply lying about wanting to increase the electoral prospects of the GOP, or is this just subterfuge for the ultimate goal of a North American Union? As you demonstrate in your article this guy is a liar who will right revisionist history to suit his needs.
ReplyDelete"i guess i don't see how karl rove was a failure. he helped keep GW bush in office for 8 years."
ReplyDeleteCompare the condition of the GOP at 2000 and 2008. Rove failed at what he set out to do.
Great review Steve. That fact that Rove appears regularly on Fox and in the WSJ shows the mainstream right has not learned from the failures of the Bush presidency.
Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove, Ken Starr. Why do they all look alike?
ReplyDeleteOwnership Society was just plain crazy.
ReplyDeleteAs for 9/11, we got to know better with the benefit of hindsight. After all, prior to 9/11, the worst terrorist attack on US soil was by Tim McVeigh. I can understand why Bush and others thought we should not alienate or harass Muslims before 9/11. Most of them are not terrorists.
After 9/11, it was another story. Though most Muslims were still not terrorists, we learned even a few could a lot of damage.
As for trying to win the Hispanic vote, I think it was then and still is a worthy goal. The thing is it has to be done without pandering to La Raza and to illegal aliens. We should appeal to patriotism and desire for assimilation among many legal Hispanics. We should take it as a given that Hispanics will always be more Democratic than GOP, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to win over as much as possible--WITHOUT pandering to LA RAZA.
The question is will GOP gain more white votes if it turns anti-immigration? I'm not sure this is true. Anti-immigration whites are not gonna trust Democrats on this issue anyway and are already with the GOP. If GOP becomes openly anti-immigrationist, it will retain the white base but I don't see too many moderate or liberal whites--whose think 'racism' is the greatest sin--turning to the GOP. If anything, many independents might turn Democratic because the media will hound anyone who supports 'racist' GOP policy.
i guess i don't see how karl rove was a failure. he helped keep GW bush in office for 8 years.
ReplyDeleteA successful bank robber is still a bank robber, thus the burden of proof is on Rove, not us: does he measure his success by his ability to keep his client in office, or by how well he served his country?
If the latter, then he obviously failed; if the former then he can explain to us why he doesn't think it matters how well his country fared under the president whom he advised. Good luck with that, Mr. Rove.
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete"Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove, Ken Starr. Why do they all look alike?"
ReplyDeleteTheir big heads probably testify to some intelligence, their big guts to them not being swipples.
Good work, Steve. How about taking on "Colonel" Edward Mandell House next?
ReplyDeleteAnd though I know better than to make the personal political, I have to say I've always been viscerally repelled by Karl Rove's appearance- he's the balding, pudgy, pasty, bespectacled evil white man straight out of Michael Moore central casting. The fact that his memoir proves he's not even particularly smart, only possessed of a low, mean animal cunning just seals the matter.
ReplyDeleteI have to say I've always been viscerally repelled by Karl Rove's appearance- he's the balding, pudgy, pasty, bespectacled evil white man straight out of Michael Moore central casting.
ReplyDeletePudgy, pasty, bespectacled - sounds like you just described Michael Moore. And I'm pretty sure that's not Mikes real hair.
But yes, they're an ugly bunch.
I've been saying for years that 43 was an internationalist liberal with Texas twang (an affectation that has strangely eluded his siblings, who are also transplants from the land of squishy northeastern Republicanism).
ReplyDeleteI think it's debatable that he's genuinely pro-life. His wife (a big influence on him) is explicitly pro-choice. And look at that half-hearted compromise he made on embryonic stem cell research (forget the leftist spin; It wasn't a pro-life decision).
No, he's an invade-the-world-for- the-sake-of-liberalism liberal, a/k/a, a neo-con. So is Rove, FWIW.
Oh, of course, I forgot to add: ugly (bald, pudgy, pasty).
ReplyDeleteThanks greenrivervalleyman and anonymous. You've now fully completed Steve's demolition of Rove's politics, philosophy and tactics.
Pudgy, pasty, bespectacled - sounds like you just described Michael Moore.
ReplyDeleteBeat me to it.
I seem to recall that Freud had a name for this...
"Anonymous said...
ReplyDeletewhat a drama queen.
would not be surprised at all if he's got certain tendencies..."
Here we see Rove defending Bush against his nemesis, John Kerry:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_McI_KJIXOq0/SpmkZ3vdeYI/AAAAAAAAF2o/js_i5vW6TP8/s400/NoWayOut3.jpg
Rove is certainly not a deep thinker. For the most part, deep thinkers don't go into politics. They certainly don't become campaign advisors.
ReplyDeleteAnd yet, FOX News, the in-house propaganda arm of the Republican National Committee, treats this guy like he's the oracle of Delphi. Sean Hannity has Rove on his show all the time, at least all the times I've been able to stomach watching that idiot Hannity. And that Walmart-tool, Huckabee, even has his own show.
These people are largely to blame for Obama being President.
Ray Sawhill:
ReplyDeleteDon't be hatin' on Boy George!
Jerry Falwell was another fatass.
ReplyDeleteThe sad, depressing yet hilarious thing is to listen to liberals complain about how far to the right Bush was. "Really," I ask, "what did Bush do that was actually conservative?"
ReplyDeleteVirtually every major act of his administration was left liberal.
Liberals did have good reasons to fear Bush though. One was Supreme Court appointments. He chose two solid conzos, and liberals feared that if a conservative won in 2008, affirmative action and abortion could be overturned.
And though we now know better with the benefit of hindsight, many did fear that Bush and Rove might pull off a stunner in winning Hispanics to the GOP side. Hispanics tend to be culturally more conservative than whites, and if their economic fortunes kept rising--as they did until the housing bust--and if Bush were to pass 'immigration reform', Hispanics might have voted 50% or more for GOP in 2008. But there was the economic meltdown, unforseen by anyone through most of the 2000s.
It didn't matter that Bush was 'liberal' on many issues. Democrats feared that the GOP was using liberal programs and policies to steal Democratic constituents. This is why Democrats HATED Nixon. Not because Tricky Dick was such an arch-conservative but because he stole liberal ideas to win over the white working class. And, conservatives hated Clinton for the same reason. Clinton from 1994 was actually a fairly 'conservative' president, but Goppers were pissed that Clinton was running away with their ideas--balanced budget, strong police force, free trade, deregulation, welfare reform, etc.
Party politics isn't only about ideology. It's about power. Democrats simply don't want to lose to GOP even when GOP is pushing liberal ideas, and vice versa.
There was also the thing about the Iraq War. We know how it turned out, but back in 2003, many liberals opposed the war not because they feared a disaster but a success. If Iraq War had turned out to be a great success, Bush would have gone down as one of the greats. GOP popularity would have skyrocketed. Back in 2003, most liberals were convinced of a great success since most people--reporters, pundits, scholars, experts--all said it would be a cakewalk. They feared the rise of Bush as another Reagan.
Just as GOP prays that Obama fails so that GOP can rise again, Dems hoped that Bush would fail--even if his policies were fairly liberal--so that they could rise again.
Also, there was the cultural factor. Even if Bush himself was a mild conservative leaning towards liberalism, culturally he represented the power of the Christian South. The CULTURAL mood of Bush era politics was NASCAR, Bible-thumping, God and Country, Creationism and Intelligent Design, and Gungho-Militarism, the sort of thing that gives white liberals, especially Jews, the creeps.
Yeah, Dubya really 'took his Supreme Court nominations seriously'.
ReplyDeleteSo seriously that he took Harry Reid's advice and nominated Harriet Miers. Brilliant.
Hispanics tend to be culturally more conservative than whites
ReplyDeleteWhy do people keep saying this? It is patently untrue, and a seconds glance at the data shows that.
Look at crime rates, education, marriage, out-of-wedlock births, and a host of other datapoints. Hispanics are culturally more liberal than even white liberals, let alone whites in general.
"greenrivervalleyman said...
ReplyDeleteBTW, after reading Steve's article I happened to run across this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nicknames_used_by_George_W._Bush
Landslide - Tony Blair (uncharacteristically generous?)
Pootie-Poot - Vladimir Putin (characteristically puerile)
[The] Rock - Barack Obama (refreshingly un-PC!)
Hogan - John McCain (kinnda mean!)
Ellis - Chuck Schumer (burgeoning palecon[sciousness]?)"
Kennedy did something similar - coin diminutive nicknames for his underlings, like "Dickie" for Richard and the like - not quite as offensive as the vulgar patrician Bush's insulting frat-boy nick-names.
Still, it's a common patrician tactic, and a loathesome one. You invent nicknames for a pet or a child. You call a man by his given name or a nickname he has chosen for himself. Even as long ago as the Old Testament, people realized that naming things could convey power. By making up nick-names for you, the rich and powerful, ever so slightly, stake their claim of ownership over you.
"Reactionary said...
ReplyDeleteOh, and we should remember just what this "entitlement reform" constituted: no less than the government diversion of billions of dollars in payroll taxes to the feeding trough on Wall Street, a feast of private profit-taking and socialization of loss that would have DWARFED the Housing Bubble."
Quite so, lest we forget. For the Republican party, Social Security Reform merely means subsidizing Wall Street with OUR money. I'm sick and tired of IRAs, let alone whatever new retirement scheme they come up with. If it's my money, then it's my money, and I damned well want to do with it what I want to do with it, and when I want to. By it's rules governing IRAs, the government has made clear that it is NOT your money.
Quite so, lest we forget. For the Republican party, Social Security Reform merely means subsidizing Wall Street with OUR money. I'm sick and tired of IRAs, let alone whatever new retirement scheme they come up with. If it's my money, then it's my money, and I damned well want to do with it what I want to do with it, and when I want to. By it's rules governing IRAs, the government has made clear that it is NOT your money.
ReplyDeleteYou know, it would be kinda neat if instead of forcing citizens to purchase shares in C-Corporations through Wall Street middlemen, the citizens could purchase the stock directly from the C-Corporations - bypassing the middlemen altogether - in a direct purchase of the stock.
Of course, it would also be nice if the tax code didn't discriminate against all other business structures [S Corp, LLC, Partnership, Sole Proprietorship, etc] - in favor of the C-Corporation - but I suppose that's just a little too much to fantasize about...
Black Death wrote:
ReplyDelete"Well, the worst acheivements of the Bush II administration - 9/11, the mortgage meltdown, immigration "amnesty," NCLB, the prescription drug benefit, the Iraq war, were all more or less supported by the Democrats."
YES.
Now take this train of thought to its logical conclusion - BOTH parties are the same, paid for by the same lobbies, and on big geopolitical issues they march together.
What they do make a big show on disagreeing is on wedge issues - things like displaying 10 commandments in govt buildings, gays marriage, you know the ones.
FISA, Patriot Act, War in Iraq, abolishment of your rights - those the two parties have no difference of opinion.
You're defining conservatism as socially sound, stable, and responsible behavior, but that's not necessarily 'cultural' conservatism.
ReplyDeleteYes. Yes, it is. You don't know what you are talking about here. Your notion of "cultural conservatism" seems to involve NASCAR, pickup trucks, and shooting guns. Scap your goofy definition and the problem disappears.
People who are into NASCAR and hunting may or may not practice "socially sound, stable, and responsible behavior". You're creating a strawman here.
If we follow your line of argument, Jews are the most conservative people in America.
You're being slippery with words again. You should have said "culturally conservative". In which case it's obvious that they are.
which is why I say "Do as the Jew; disobey what Jews say."
It's not exactlly a revelation that Jewish cultural conservatism manifests itself as intense hostility towards everyone elses cultural conservatism. The fact that their behavior is totally hypocritical is old news around here.
if you question most Hispanics on issues such as religion, patriotism, law and order, policy against criminals, God, gun rights, abortion, and so forth, they are far more conservative than many whites
If you question them they'll say "No hable ingles.
As for what you imagine their positions to be on gun rights, abortion, etc - we don't need to speculate. We can look at how they vote. And they vote for politicians who are rabidly pro-abortion, anti-gun, and so on. They are patently NOT more conservative than many whites.
Everything you say about Hispanics can be said about blacks. In theory at least they're somewhat "socially conservative". But they never, ever, vote for socially conservative politicians.
Polls have shown that white liberal Democrats are not as supportive of big government as are Hispanic Republicans.
To be culturally conservative is to defend the dominant cultural traditions. Those people who feel the culture to be theirs will defend it. Those people who feel the culture to be someone else's will not. If you note that when I speak of the dominant culture I'm not speaking of the last 50 years or so of Jewish-dominated culture but of the last 2300 years or so of the Western tradition, you'll understand why Jews and Asians aren't, in the United States or in Europe, culturally conservative, even if they, depressingly often, know our own culture better than we do.
ReplyDelete'Southern, dogfighting, sister-humping whites' - get real; really - may not always practice their own professed religious values - who does? - but they still understand the culture to be theirs.
Generally speaking, minorities will never be culturally conservative, because it's not their culture. "Hispanics" will be to the extent that they prefer to think of themselves as European and Christian rather than Amerindian.
"Anti-immigration whites are not gonna trust Democrats on this issue anyway and are already with the GOP."
ReplyDeleteWRONG! Polls were showing between 60-70% of the US population was against amnesty in 2007, and that is the only reason it was defeated. It's a populist issue, and the only people in favor of it are fully indoctrinated NeoLiberals, pandering NeoCons, and illegal aliens that would benefit from such legislation.
Your comments on GOP outreach to the non La Raza factions of Mestizos are the most ridiculous talking rehash of delusional Republicans.