Friday Afternoon Roundup - Politicians and Principles

A CONSERVATISM OF PRINCIPLES

Robert Spencer has written an article, "Why I am not a conservative" after his CPAC mistreatment. I appreciate his feelings, but I think it's a mistake to define conservatism in terms of personalities.

Conservatism cannot be defined by Romney or Norquist, or for that matter by any politician.

Floridians have seen Marco Rubio pivot on immigration and Rick Scott on ObamaCare. The crusading politician of yesterday easily becomes the sellout of tomorrow.

I have been sometimes criticized for "attacking" Republicans who are the saviors of the moment. I don't do that. What I do is hold them to conservative principles, rather than jumping on the momentary bandwagon.

I have written positive things about Chris Christie and negative things about him, long before Republicans had begun bashing him. I have done that for most politicians, because I believe that politicians are politicians. No politician trumps principle. Only people as a group can.

Conservatism isn't the latest dodge of the moment. It's not amnesty, gay marriage, anti-war or any of the other gems that show up on some conservative sites every day. It's not the latest clever plan to win. It's why we should win. 

Conservatism is not defined by CPAC. It's defined by you. You either see yourself as a conservative or you don't. And I would encourage Robert Spencer to reject CPAC's pandering to Islamists on conservative terms.

When Progressives and Internationalists hijack what being Conservative means, they are attacking an idea by trying to displace it and replace it with something else. And they cannot be allowed to get away with it.

I support Robert Spencer on a number of grounds, and one of them is that the Internationalists should not be able to hijack Conservatism to promote Islamism.

I think Allen West, whose credentials on Islamism are solid, said it best at CPAC.  "There’s no shortage of people telling us what Conservatism cannot accomplish. What we can’t do, how we cannot connect, how we must change our values to fit the times.

Well Ladies and Gentlemen, I want to tell you that that truly is a bunch of malarkey. Last time I checked a bended knee is not and nor shall it ever be a conservative tradition."





LIBERALISM'S WORK IS FINALLY DONE

Soda-Obessed Mayor of Illiterate City to Convene Climate Change Summit in World’s Rape Capital

“What Happens If We Have a Lesbian Queen in a Same-Sex Marriage?” House of Lords Asks

Muslim Baron Kills Man While Driving and Texting, Blames Jewish Conspiracy for 16 Day Jail Term

The International Pan Islamic Communist Party of Proletarian Islam combines Islam, Communism and Pan-Africanism

“White Privilege Conference” Proposes Government Guaranteed Jobs and Reparations

Gore Al Jazeera Sale Idea Came From Consultant Who Brought ChiCom Propaganda Channel to America

United States Government Now an Actual Subsidiary of Teachers Unions





HUSSEIN OF JERUSALEM

Barack Obama met with several controversial anti-Israel Arab groups ahead of his visit to the Jewish state on March 20.

The groups included MPAC and ADC, both of whom put forward proposals in support of Hamas.

Obama reportedly said, "he wanted to see what kind of concessions the Israelis are willing to make and push them in that direction, that’s why he wants to give the speech to the Israeli people,”

But Obama warned that the speech to the Israeli public might not have what the Arab participants in the meeting were looking for. “But he implored us to give them a pass on this one,” the source said.

Obama also expressed his frustrations with the lack of progress on the negotiations.

‘The only people more frustrated than me,’ Obama said, were the ‘Palestinians living in West Bank and Gaza – it’s a legitimate frustration,’” the source quoted Obama as saying.

And that "big speech", he wants a pass from Muslims on, will not be given in the Knesset, Israel's parliament, but in a conference center.

 In 2008, Bush visited Israel and addressed the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Clinton addressed the Knesset in 1994. Even Carter did it in 1979.

Obama addressed the British Parliament on his visit. He also found the time to address the Parliament of Ghana,  the Indian Parliament and the Australian Parliament…

So why is Obama dumping the Knesset for a giant auditorium?

Obama’s Cairo speech was given at Cairo University. Carter had addressed the Egyptian Parliament. Obama could have done it too, but giving a speech away from parliament showed disapproval of the Egyptian government and a ploy to suggest to the opposition that he would support their revolution.

Instead Obama is bringing in student “representatives” from Israeli universities, a group that skews to the left. Tellingly, Ariel University, one of the country’s more conservative institutions, has been barred from sending a representative.

Related:  How Small is Israel? So Small You Can Run it in 9 Days





POOR ED

Replacing the nearly 60-year-old Schultz will be the 34-year-old Chris Hayes. Hayes is everything that Schultz isn’t. Hayes is a New Yorker. Schultz has spent much of his life in red states. Hayes looks like one of the left’s perpetual college students. Schultz looks like he’s sleeping off a weekend bender.

Hayes, like Ezra Klein, another contender for the job, perfectly matches MSNBC’s young urban liberal demo. Schultz was meant to appeal to a more rural working class sensibility, that the last election told Obama Inc and its media affiliates that they don’t have to care about anymore.

 MSNBC Dumps Ed Schultz for Younger Man





AND MARRIAGE FOR ALL...

Aside from all the usual speeches, CPAC predictably became Ground Zero in the Meghan McCainization of the Conservative movement.

Aside from the Amnesty pitches, we are now being subjected to another round of dishonest arguments on gay marriage.

Republicans made a fundamental tactical error by accepting civil unions as an alternative solution because it legitimized a false construct. And now we're taking the next step. There are lectures on marriage as a "conservatizing" institution.

Very well. Let's say that it isn't. Isn't polygamous marriage also a "conservating" institution? It certainly has much more claim on that title than two men marrying in a Unitarian church does. If we're going to expand the definition of marriage beyond the natural borders of the family to alternative variations, why stop at gay marriage?

There is no rational answer to that and there can be no rational answer to it. Only attacks and excuses.

Marriage is not a universal institution. To universalize its specificity is to make it meaningless. If marriage is not based around the natural family, then it isn't based around anything at all. In Shiite Islam, prostitution was legalized by calling it temporary marriage. If temporary marriage is also a conservating institution, then we can follow Iran's lead and legalizing prostitution, as some libertarians would like to do, and make Las Vegas a very conservative place.

Senator Rob Portman's son announced he's gay and the senator announced that "I believe all of our sons and daughters ought to have the same opportunity to experience the joy and stability of marriage.”

And that is a reminder why we make decisions based on laws and values, not based on, "What happens if your daughter gets raped and wants an abortion" questions. People lose their objectivity when it starts being personal. Big Fur Hat at IownTheWorld points out that politicians are supposed to represent their voters, not their families, but we live in the imperial era of the ego.

Senator Portman's son will never experience the joy and stability of marriage because of a decision that he made and because of the senator's support for that decision. And that is the larger issue here. Tearing down social institutions in the name of tolerance and hedonism does not bring stability or even make people happier. America is a much less happy country since the 70s. All that love, tolerance and acceptable has not brought stability. It hasn't even brought joy.

Finally Twitchy, a site with the color scheme of a Mexican Tiki bar that looks like Twitter threw up, launched a vicious attack on Cliff Kincaid of AIM for his article attacking the idea of the gay conservative. 

I disagree with Cliff Kincaid, but the Twitchy piece reminds me of why I always disliked the site and never linked to it. It manages to embody the thoughtless stupidity and venom of the left in the culture wars. Twitchy kills the thinking process in any debate and skips straight to the shouting. It's an attempt to create an artificial Twitter mob by collecting Tweets on a single page.

I can't see a difference between a leftist attack on Kincaid and Twitchy's attack on Kincaid, except that Twitchy adds "conservative" in between the condemnations of Kincaid as an intolerant bigot. The Twitchy attack should serve as a wake up call that when the lines begin to blur on issues like gay marriage, then the Meghan McCain conservatives become indistinguishable from the left in their tactics.

Bryan Fischer asks what happened to Twitchy? The same thing that happened to Hot Air. Why it happened would be the interesting question.

Cliff Kincaid is right and he's wrong. There can be gay conservatives, just as there are adulterous conservatives, and we've seen plenty of those. The problem is that the left projects personal behavior onto identity politics. And there is a major difference between being gay and conservative and insisting that  homosexual identity is legitimately conservative.

That difference is where we run into problems with Mark Sanford. No one is perfect. And while our leaders should embody virtues, it's unrealistic to expect the same of the rank and file activist. An adulterous conservative is a problem for his family. A conservative who insists that adultery is a conservative value, is a problem for the conservative movement.

That isn't an issue at the moment, but as personal behavior becomes identity politics, the lines blur. And then you have to accept adultery to accept the adulterer. You have to give up your own values to become tolerant. And that is a formula for the death of conservatism.

There can be gay conservatives, but not a conservatism that accepts homosexuality as the equivalent of heterosexuality.

Repeat the process enough times and you wind up with a movement that stands for some kind of fiscal conservatism, but is on the left in every other regard. And if we're going to go that route, then wasn't Meghan McCain right and shouldn't Huntsman have been our 2012 nominee?




THE CHOICE POLICE

Inspired by the dramatic improvements in New Yorkers' health and well-being after he banned smoking and junk food, as well as large sodas, salt, trans fats, Styrofoam food containers, and loud earbuds, Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced that the NYPD is organizing a Food Felonies Unit (FFU) to further combat the proliferation of food crimes.

Nicknamed "Double-F-U," the newly-formed unit is expected to be involved largely with restaurant menu supervision in its crime-prevention function, while also conducting sting operations on food service providers who break local ordinances.

"They've already retrained several canine units to detect trans-fats in foods, which will save on lab costs," said O'Brien. "But they'll still have to use old-fashioned officer-led searches because the dogs can't smell the difference between 16oz. bottles and the illegal sizes."

...still satire from the People's Cube, but life will probably imitate it soon enough.




WHAT IS RELIGIOUS FREEDOM ANYWAY?

Kentucky’s state legislature has overwhelmingly passed religious freedom legislation acknowledging that citizens have the right to live according to the precepts of their faith.

The Fourteenth Amendment is the guarantor of civil rights at the state level, but a “gay rights” group in Louisville, in urging Governor Steve Beshear to veto the legislation, is claiming that religious freedom is not a civil right.

“If this bill is adopted people can hide behind religious freedoms and discriminate in anyway they feel. They could say based on my religion I don’t think I should serve people based on interracial marriage. I don’t believe I should serve people because they are of a different religion,” he says. “People can hide behind it in anyway, and it just makes it more difficult for the human rights agencies to pursue equality in our state.”

...from Lia Graas' Catholic Bandita

There are a number of interrelated questions here, but the most obvious one that we're coming up against in the gay rights debate is whether religious freedom trumps the various civil rights desegregation efforts that work to enforce non-discrimination laws. And we are now getting into the area, with the mandate, of whether the government can force you to violate your religion.

We are moving beyond religious practice and into freedom of conscience territory.




THE PEOPLE OF BENGHAZI

Again this is a clear effort to drive Christians out of Benghazi.

What is even more troubling is that seen from this angle, the Benghazi September 11 attack was part of a larger effort to drive non-Muslims out of Benghazi.

Obama justified his Libyan War by claiming that he was defending the people of Benghazi. Did he mean all the people of Benghazi… or just the Muslims?

Ethnic Cleansing of Christians from Benghazi Continues




AND THINK OF SOCIALISM...

In 1946, after even much of the American left had broken with the Soviet Union, Walter Duranty used The Nation’s pages to describe Stalin’s latest purge as “a general cleaning out of the cobwebs and mess which accumulate in any house when its occupants are so deeply preoccupied with something else that they have no time to keep it in order.”

In 1936, as the Great Purge was underway and the Moscow Trials were getting started, the leftist magazine had declared that “[t]here can be no doubt that dictatorship in Russia is dying and that a new democracy is slowly being born.”

When the Soviet Union began to gobble up Eastern Europe a second time, Kirchwey said that America should accept the fall of Europe into darkness. “Peace and prosperity will be more than secure in America if we accept the process of revolution in Europe and the East instead of subsidizing resistance to it.”

 "The Nation" of Traitors




The Atheist Conservative blog differs from me on libertarianism, but agrees with me on Rand Paul's anti-war pitch.

Not just to end the Afghan war (which should have been ended eleven or so years ago), but to end war as such. Absurd. And Rand Paul thinks that if America does not go to war, there will be no (international) wars.  That belief is naive to an extreme.

And Paul’s statement that America’s going to war in Afghanistan “authorized a worldwide war” is totally false. Islam is at war with the rest of the world doctrinally. The attack by al-Qaeda on America on 9/11/2001 was an act of aggressive, not defensive war, and it was in pursuit of religous ends.

ATTACK CHOPPER PARENTING

Bloomberg framed the soda ban as a moral obligation.

“I’m trying to do what’s right,” he said. “I’m trying to defend my children, and you, and do what’s right.”

Bloomberg’s two daughters, Georgina and Emma, are 30 and 34, respectively. Emma has been married since she was 26. If they can’t stop drinking soda on their own, perhaps their father should butt out

Bloomberg Claims He Only Banned Soda to Protect his 30-Year-Old Daughters

Addendum from Steve Chavez

PICTURE THIS: I'm walking down a New York street with a 24oz cup. Two cops, who are across the street, blow their whistles, stop traffic, and run across the street screaming, "Stop that man... Big Gulp! Stop that man with the Big Gulp!' New York residents, still jumpy, tackle me down. The cops, with one foot on my neck, and the other cop with his knee on my back, grab my arms to handcuff me. I scream in pain and squirm. "Hogtie him!" Three cops cars show up and they throw me into one of them.

As the cops gather TESTIMONY FROM WITNESSES, as well as an investigator taking pictures of my Big Gulp, another detective, with gloves, empties a 16oz bottle of water into it. "BUST HIM CAPTAIN! OVER 16!" They come to me and say, "Sir you are arrested for unlawful possession of cup larger than 16 ounces." He reads me my Miranda Rights but I could barely hear him over several people on the same street screaming "Buy your COKE here. White crystal COKE here! Obama approved coke here!" Another screams, "CRACK here. Dime bags here!" "Meth here!" "Ounces of fresh Hawaiian CHOOM here. Obama gives it a ten!" "Legal scrips here. Pain-killers, UPPERS AND DOWNERS here!"

 OTHERWISE SANE LEFTIST UNEXPECTEDLY HATES ISRAEL, OWN DNA

Gabrielle Silverman (“my treesitter name is millipede”) sat in court for Monday morning’s hearing. She was the first treesitter forcibly extracted from the branches last Tuesday.



 WHEN THE PEACE FAILS...

UN Peacekeepers Flee Syria, Seek Sancturary in Israel




WE'RE OFF TO LIVE UNDER THE WIZARD

Dorothy arrives in a town in OZeroand with the odd name of Detroit because her house was swept up in the tornado of the subprime mortgage collapse, and deposited unceremoniously on the Wicked Witch of the Gay/Lesbian Fiscal Magicians Alliance, Barmy Cranks. Grateful Munchkins remove his ruby slippers and present them to Dorothy. The sparkling slippers have no magical powers; they are just nice-looking fashion accessories.

Dorothy is not sure she wants to remain in OZeroland, and asks the Munchkins how she can get home. She is told by the Munchkin spokesman, Karney the Geek, that she will need to ask the Wizard in the capitol, Emerald City. "Just follow the Paper Money Trail...I mean Paper Money Road," says Carney the Geek as he adjusts his ill-fitting glasses on his nose, "and you can't miss it."

The Wizard is an elective office. He has been voted Wizard repeatedly by his electorate of Munchkins, the chief residents of Emerald City. The Munchkins vote for him early and often every Election Day, because otherwise they will be rounded up by the Winkies to be carried off by the flying monkeys and dropped into the Tidewater and washed out to sea. The Munchkins know where their bread is buttered – what little bread and butter are covered by their ration cards – so they vote for the Wizard and hold mass Wizard Appreciation Days to show their undying loyalty. Many Munchkins have actually died of that loyalty, but there is a "gentlemunchkin's agreement" to never discuss such things. It's not good for morale.  

Edward Cline at Rule of Reason reimagines a reimagined Oz





FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE BLOGGERS

Blazing Cat Fur is in Canada where saying that rotten organizations "need to be purged, or burnt to the ground" nets you a visit from the men in blue.

"We received a knock at our door a little after 8 a.m.," said Lemaire. "Two detectives from Toronto Police Services identified themselves and asked if they could come in to discuss a matter."

Enter Det.-Consts. Irene Liska and Sergiy Lobanets, from 32 Division.

They presented "a photocopy of my post about the TDSB teaching children that the Black Panthers were a harmless social justice organization link" and specifically the "OISE and the TDSB need to be purged, or burnt to the ground" stinger.

It was almost laughable. He thought everybody would understand it was meant figuratively and obviously not literally.

"It was nothing but a rhetorical flourish. It's the language of blogging," said Lemaire.