Blatant Reality

A Boston Globe article today claims that such a phenomenon could exist.

“Barack Obama is no conservative,” Bacevich starts his article. “Yet if he wins the Democratic nomination, come November principled conservatives may well find themselves voting for the senator from Illinois. Given the alternatives — and the state of the conservative movement — they could do worse.

 

“The essential point is this: conservatives intent on voting in November for a candidate who shares their views might as well plan on spending Election Day at home,” Bacevich continues. “The Republican Party of Bush, Cheney, and McCain no longer accommodates such a candidate.

 

“So why consider Obama? For one reason only: because this liberal Democrat has promised to end the U.S. combat role in Iraq. Contained within that promise, if fulfilled, lies some modest prospect of a conservative revival.

 

“For conservatives, Obama represents a sliver of hope. McCain represents none at all. The choice turns out to be an easy one,” Bacevich concludes.

What? I can’t see how a conservative would be willing to trade in every other issue just to get us out of Iraq. Sure McCain is going to try to tax us on the Global Warming phenomenon but Obama would be worse. In fact, for a conservative, Obama is worse in everything.

McCain may not be a “true conservative” but he certainly isn’t the most liberal senator of 2007. Come on conservatives, we aren’t going to be happy with whatever the election results are but at least McCain has the potential to do something right once in a while.

John Hawkins from Right Wing News wrote an article that listed off the reasons for why he is a conservative. It’s a pretty awesome article and basically outlines why I am a conservative also. Here are some of the highlights:

* I don’t get upset that the federal government “doesn’t care about me.” In fact, I’d be pleased if it forgets that I exist.

 

(…)

 

* Having a government that is too involved in our lives is far more of a threat than a government that isn’t involved enough.

 

* My priorities are God, family, and country, in that order.

 

* Our tax rate is too high as it is and if it’s not producing enough revenue for Washington, D.C. then they should start trying to live within their means instead of asking us to pony up more money.

 

* Life begins at the moment of conception and we have an obligation to speak up for the children that are being exterminated via abortion since they can’t speak up for themselves.

 

(…)

 

* I believe in equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes.

If you’re a conservative or on the fence about what you are, it has a lot of very good reasons why a person is a conservative.

Glenn McCall was the first African American chairman to lead the Republican Party in York County, SC and now he has declared that he is running for one of South Carolina’s two seats in the RNC. If he wins, he will be the only African American to sit on this 100-person board that decides party platforms and such. Why might you want to support McCall? Well, for one thing, he helped to mobilize support against the immigration bill last year. Because of this, one of his goals is to bring about more party accountability.

“I’m not here to be a yes man,” he said at the time. “I’m here to do what’s right for the party. There are folks saying if this happens, they’ll never vote Republican, they’ll never vote for him. And that’s not what we need.”

 

When he became chairman, McCall made clear that one of his top priorities would be keeping closer watch on the voting records of Republican elected officials. Many party faithful have complained to him that their representatives don’t work hard enough to advance the conservative agenda.

 

“There is an attempt in our party to water down what we believe and stand for,” he said Thursday. “We have been victorious over the past 25 years for standing for those things that most Americans want and believe in.”

 

Asked for examples, McCall mentioned lower taxes, strong national defense and the idea that life is sacred.

He sounds like a winner to me. Read the rest of the article for some of his prior accomplishments.

John Hawkins from Right Wing News conducted an interview with Thomas Sowell about his new book Economic Facts and Fallacies. Sowell is the author of such books like The Vision of the Anointed which discusses the incorrect views of those who view the world as just a series of problems and solutions and not one of variable trade-offs. In this interview, Hawkins asks several interesting questions concerning many of the modern “facts” about poverty and the economic disparity between races. Here is just one of the questions he asks and the answer he gets:

The subprime mortgage crisis has been in the news quite a bit of last. Tell us what caused the subprime mortgage problems and what we should do to fix them.

 

There were any number of things that contributed to it. One of the things was that the Fed lowered the interest rate by a tremendous amount, down to about 1% and under those conditions, many people thought that they could afford to buy a house and in fact, they could afford to buy a house so long as the interest rates remained low and the housing prices kept rising. (However), markets go up and down and have for centuries, so those who got themselves out on a limb, got themselves in deep trouble in part because of that.

 

The government was also, at the same time, leaning on lenders to lend to people they would not lend to otherwise, particularly under the Community Reinvestment Act, that empowered politicians to tell lenders that they ought to put so much money here rather than there — as if politicians know better, which they don’t.

 

Between those two things, you had a lot of people out there in very dicey situations and now the politicians are saying that they want to ride to the rescue. Well heavens, they created the problem and I can only imagine that they’re going to make it worse, the more they intervene.

It is a pretty interesting interview with a lot of the questions directly relating to current economic issues. I would definitely recommend reading the whole article.

Right Wing News posted today the Top Conservatives of 2007 and, surprisingly, Mike Huckabee made the list.

Mike Huckabee: At the beginning of the year, he was practically an unknown nationally and by the end of the year, he was in the hunt for the presidency. He may or may not win the nomination, but he has vaulted to prominence, he probably isn’t going away, and you can be sure other conservatives will adopt his rhetoric on a number of different issues.

Its quite interesting to see Huckabee put on the list with other big conservative names like Rush Limbaugh. Don’t hear me wrong, I totally agree that he should be on this list, but Huckabee is the only presidential hopeful on it which I find interesting.

UK’s The Telegraph is in the process of publishing their picks for the top 100 conservatives and liberals. The surprising part is that many democrats are considered conservative and republicans and considered liberal.

 Although there are many Republicans on the conservative list and many liberals on the Democratic list, not all 200 are aligned with a party. The key to inclusion was the term “influence” – which people do, and will, most affect American politics both in terms of ideas and the enactment of policy.

This list is comprised of many different people from politicians to actors and bloggers. As of today, the top sixty in each category have yet to be published but will be published in the coming days.