Last Hurrah for Reagan Coalition?
The huge Democratic turnout in the Iowa Caucuses, over twice that of the GOP, and the stampede by independents to vote in the Democratic precincts, suggests that Iowa, a swing state carried by President Bush in 2004, may be lost irretrievably to the GOP in 2008.
Why is Iowa walking away from the GOP? Why did Barack Obama win almost as many votes as all the Republicans put together?
First, Iraq. Parties that march nations into what the people come to see as unnecessary or unwinnable wars face the inevitable consequences.
Truman found that out when he was trounced by Estes Kefauver in New Hampshire in 1952. Lyndon Johnson found that out when Sen. Gene McCarthy captured 42 percent of the vote in New Hampshire in 1968 and was about to humiliate LBJ in Wisconsin. LBJ stood down, before the country threw him down. Richard Nixon took the helm.
The GOP lost Iowa because of its persistent failure to recognize and its refusal to address the anxiety and insecurity of the middle class.
George H.W. Bush's failing in 1992 is the failing of son George W. Bush. With the sole exception of Mike Huckabee, the GOP seems unable to comprehend how throwing U.S. workers into Darwinian competition with foreigners earning one-fifth or one-tenth their wages impacts the Reagan Democrats now deserting the GOP. A party that used to admonish one and all, "There is no free lunch," cannot see that free trade is no free lunch.
Moreover, the party is mired in the past, looking back to the time of Reagan. Reagan was a good man and a great president, but our time is no more his time than the Eisenhower 1950s were like the 1920s.
While the GOP is in grave trouble, defeat in 2008 is not foreordained. The Democrats are winning not because of the superiority of their candidates or ideas but because the Republicans are perceived as failing. Neither Hillary Clinton nor Barack Obama has the answer to what ails America. Both, and Barack especially, have moved far outside the mainstream of the nation.
"I am the change agent," each of the Democrats proclaims. But when this country is facing an entitlements crisis with Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—unfunded liabilities adding up to scores of trillions of dollars—is it not madness to promise 50 million people, half of them immigrants, legal and illegal, national health insurance?
Who is going to pay for this when the states are heading back toward bankruptcy, the economy is slowly sinking, U.S. companies are being taxed up to 40 percent and the most successful Americans are already paying half their income to local, state and federal governments?
Does anyone think Democrats have an answer to the immigration crisis that now grips every great American city? The amnesty, the "path to citizenship" they favor, will mean the next invasion will be the last and decisive invasion that makes America unrecognizable.
Does anyone think the Party of Government that depends on government workers and unions at election time can make government more efficient? Does anyone think that a party that depends on teachers unions and the NEA can reform the social Katrina that is inner-city education in America? Was it not Democrats who ran the city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana in the time of Katrina? But the American people want change, and Democrats represent change.
On issue after issue, the Republican Party, if it stood true to its beliefs and purged the twin heresies of neoconservatism in foreign policy and Wall Street Journal ideology in trade and immigration policy, would still stand well with Middle America.
Most Americans are traditionalist on right to life, homosexual marriage, a polluted culture and Hollywood values. Most Americans believe in a defense second to none, while staying out of wars that are not our quarrels.
Conservatives never believed in the United States going into nation-building abroad because they never believed in government nation-building at home. Nations grow organically. They rise from the soil of their own history, culture, faith, traditions.
Republicans believe in conservative judges and strict-constructionists justices like Antonin Scalia, who do not write the laws, but interpret the laws we have written through our elected representatives.
Democrats know this. Thus, they are not promising us any new Ruth Bader Ginsburgs.
What has alienated America is the Bush bellicosity, the my-way-or-the-highway free-trade ideology, the refusal to defend the border with the implication that anyone who wants to preserve the country he grew up in is some kind of bigot. The Party of Reagan is losing the country because it is no longer the party of the principles, policies and persona of Reagan, as applied to the problems of our time.
COPYRIGHT 2008 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.
Entries(RSS)
"Conservatives never believed in the United States going into nation-building abroad because they never believed in government nation-building at home."
Thats an excellent point. What gets me are these Grover Norquist types who've long complained that we need a far less centralized U.S. federal government, but backed Bush's invasion of Iraq and the plan to remake the country in our political image, complete with a highly centralized national government.
Pat's right on the money as usual.
Pat outlines some deep culturist issues that the Republicans must address if they to get in office and save our country.
"Nations grow organically. They rise from the soil of their own history, culture, faith, traditions."
The vision that all people are culturally Americans undermines the idea that our nation is special. It has led the Republicans to think that they can convert tribal Islamic nations into stable first-world democracies. The vision that all people are culturally Americans has led Republicans to flood our country with immigrants with South-of-the-Border values.
Until "Republican" "leaders" stop treating "anyone who wants to preserve the country he grew up in is some kind of bigot," they will not be elected by Americans. They need to remember which country they are vying to be President of - The United States of America.
http://www.culturism.us
Pat's message is poignant and true to anyone who has even a marginal understanding of what this nation is about.
But the fact is this-- it is now about 58 years since TVs became standard in every American home, and about 40 years since entertainment media saturation became virtually nonstop in the USA, with incessant rock music and ever more sensationally violent and openly erotic cinema. Voters no longer think or reason at all very much, and much less along the lines of the propositions of which PB speaks.
There is also the fact of attrition; the so-called "Reagan Democrats" were largely a vestige of disaffected blue collar workers, WW2 vets, old Catholics and mainline Protestants from a day when those institutions were something more than the local McChurch. You can increasingly look for them in the cemetary, replaced by people who have grown up knowing that their mamas had a constitutionally protected right to exterminate them in the womb. How do you really expect such persons to be shocked by anything? They're more like the Eloi in H. G. Wells' Time Machine.
The Iowa primary went to the two candidates with the biggest smiles, the biggest snake oil, and the biggest celebrity supporters -- Oprah and Chuck Norris. The war, gay marriage, Bush pro or con, this didn't really figure. Obama and Huckabee are new news. Figures like H. Clinton & McCain are old news. And sorry, the heartland isn't the heartland anymore. Its a black void of airspace waiting to be filled by fantasy-fulfillment figures.
"Nations grow organically. They rise from the soil of their own history, culture, faith, traditions."
Amen; profound, Faulknerian truth. This is the Pat I know and love.
What is the difference between the two parties? On immigration, foriegn policy they say the same thing, only in a different tone and they usually follow a policy set out by think tanks and there agents in media (with the exception of Ron Paul).
Mr Buchanan,
I am new to Chronicles Magazine, but I did enjoy your analysis above.
"Democrats know this. Thus, they are not promising us any new Ruth Bader Ginsburgs."
I thought this was particularly insightful.
Regards,
JA
We need a kinder, gentler Buchanan.
Jacko,
Love ya' baby. You nailed it. Demographics encounter reality... Good bye U.S.A., ola Muhammed Garcia!
Culture, tradition and even language are no longer local. Kids in the uplands of rural Louisiana dress like, act like and are beginning to talk like those they see on television, in videos, on YouTube and in the magazines. Family, church, local community and legacies from the past no longer influence them. Anything could fill this vacuous void!
There was a certain professor at a college in Louisiana whose class left an impression on myself and a few others.
Pat is right on most everything but I parts ways with him on health care. Will someone tell me what is so bad about the way western Europe and Canada handle their citizens health care? Is health care a commodity?
#12
I think what Mr Buchanan means is that health care isn't free. And with our country trillions in debt, who will finance it? But I think the bigger issue is that politicians are writing checks that their bank accounts can never handle. It is going to be an ugly day when they get the overdraft notice.
The overdraft notice is already 46 trillion, according to the general accounting office last week. A subject of course mentioned by no "major" candidate in Iowa, and which will not be mentioned subsequently. Such sourpuss reality isn't the sort of upbeat jingle that wins votes.
Yeah, "heathcare" was discussed, but who can tell the difference between one of these morons' "plans" and the other's? Nobody; you are just supposed to be "for" heathcare, and move on to the next applause line fast, then get on to your bass guitar gig (which is everywhere seen on today's replays--nary even a sound bite regarding "heathcare" issues in Iowa--much less any other so-called "issue")
Which of course is, incidentally, a "commodity" -- which everything in the USA is today, from religion to shoes. But what's wrong with going down the next step to our exalted brethren in Canada and Europe? You see, its just this -- there is really no such thing as "healthcare." There is only the skill, learning and care of individual doctors, and the efficacy of particular medical technology as invented and then put into practice by individual persons.
Just because you can call something by name in a textbook or talkshow or in a political hack's speech does not = reality. And any human achievement which amounts to more than a hill of beans depends on a degree of incentive to excel. It would be nice if the utopian fantasies plied by Obama, Huckabee et al were true, but they are not and never shall be.
David, I can answer your question directly regarding healthcare -- I would first direct you to the citizens of what was recently called the USSR, where waiting in line for everything for 3+ hours, even lousy shoes, was common. Shortly after the fall of the USSR in the early 90s, I was working late in the office one night when I noticed the clean up crew included an interesting looking late middle aged Russian speaking broken English. Over the coming days I befriended this gent and he tried to communicate with me as best he could. Turned out he had been a medical doctor in Moscow, i.e., a bona fide "healthcare provider" in a system even more "advanced" than in Europe or Canada (using their standards, of course, which are purely egalitarian and communitarian). Anyway, I was properly astonished to learn a Moscow M.D. had come all the way here to dump my trash. Since he couldn't say much, he could only give me the pure essence of his choice: "Better to be trash man in America than a doctor in Moscow."
ReagAnt ... good riddance, he like Carter before him was a Fraud. Soon as Carter let Nader go by the boards and we NEVER got a publically funded Citizen Action Agency to counter-blance all of the other agencies that were & ARE only fronts for the industries they are supposed to regulate - then it was Clear there would be NO approximate balance - and Reagan's first deed was to fire, if you recall, all of the Air Traffic Controlers. We and our air safety - suffer from that crap to this day.
Anyhoo - good riddance SWINE. Wake-up to what's even worse - 'today.' ... IS it actually possible the times Finally ARE changing?
not likely unless a Ron Paul is elected - And no one - if it becomes clear he has a chance - puts a bomb in his hat. ... The SWINE always were and no doubt always will be just that - Swine.
"Most Americans are traditionalist on right to life, homosexual marriage, a polluted culture and Hollywood values."
Mr. Buchanan's wrong here. I wish he were right but he's wrong. The majority financially supports and enjoys the polluted culture and hollywood values.
How can Pat endorse what Paul Craig Roberts calls a "Federalist Society tyrant," like Scalia? The next Supreme Court justice should be a man, like Andrew Napolitano.
The interesting thing is that Europe wants Hillary. Generally, Europeans don't like Republicans. You'll find streets named after Wilson, FDR, Truman and JFK but no Republican. Ike has places named after him as "General Eisenhower", but not as President. The bad blood between Europe and the US started with Kissinger and the Clinton years are seen as a golden age. We can't have Clinton back again, so his wife seems the next best thing! Of course, any Democrat will do, but none of the others are known in Europe.
So a Republican victory in November will be greeted with suspicion. A Democrat, other than Hillary, will be regarded quizzically but positively and Hillary will be greeted with a sigh of relief. Particularly if she sends Bill to Europe. Of course, if she carries on Bush's policy of trying to drag Europe into wars, she'll wear out her welcome pretty fast but evreybody assumes she won't do that.
As to Katrina, the "response" sucked in Alabama and Mississippi as well. However, Buchanan only criticizes the government of a "Democratic" state, which is about as much of a surprise out of him as seeing a bear crapping in the woods. Herein lies a major part of the problem (and I'm not stupid enough to be affiliated with either one of these "two" crime organizations).
What is this mental disease that makes Americans continue to support ANYBODY from either the Gambinos or Geneveses? Who in hell has been in control of the government at practically every level over the last century and-a-half of continual wars, the theft of trillions, boom-bust cycles, ever-increasing police-state legislation, etc., etc., ad nauseam? YOU KNOW THE ANSWER!
Why do you never see either one of these "two" parties repeal any legislation passed by the "other" party, when they take control? Why is it that instead, they treat it as a foundation, and start laying it on with a trowel? Have you seen any -- and I mean ANY -- effort on the part of the Democrats to repeal the PATRIOT Act, Real ID, the Military Commissions Act, etc., etc.? Of course not -- why in hell would they? They voted for every g**-damned bit of it. Good grief -- how stupid are people in this country that they never learn? THEY . . . NEVER . . . EVER . . . LEARN!
If I woke up tomorrow morning and found that everybody in DC was dead, my reaction would be to immediately gas up so I'd be able to drive far enough to find a liquor store that still had any champagne left.
Mr. Aitken,
The overdraft notice has, in my opinion, already, long ago, arrived in the form of the the I's: Income tax, Interest on debt, and Inflation. The problem is that the politicians are not paying for the overdraft; we are as our real wages, savings and true property values (not the previously inflated ones) go down, down and down even more like in the short story, "The Lift That Went Down to Hell." The "gentleman" and his mistress, after a night of cheating ecstasy, (read for metaphorical purposes the politicians and those who intercourse with them for entitlements from welfare, to loans, to grants, to contracts) get on the lift to go to the ground floor. Except that this time, after many times, it does not stop at the ground floor but delivers them to hell! Well, I think that I just saw the ground floor go by and my nostrils detect a faint whiff of sulfur.
P.S. I am not sure that there are any professors left in Louisiana who fit your description. Once as a boy in the Tensas Swamp, back in the very late 50's, I saw, in a cypress bottom, an Ivory Billed Woodpecker, having studied with my mother who was a biology teacher the difference between the Ivory Billed and their cousin the Pilated. Only my mother and my vocational agriculture teacher down Pollock way believed me. The scientists at LSU, after receiving the report through my ag teacher, said that I had made up the story or was mistaken: the Ivory Billed was extinct! Neither was the case, but no one, save for my mom and my teacher, believed me. Therefore, I am inclined to believe you. I'll be on the look out for him, and if I find him in some metaphorical cypress bottom at a point on some forgotten slough, I'll give him your regards.
Big M,
I would drink champagne with you! Would we rendezvous at the liquor store or somewhere else? Could we make that a dry champagne? I'll bring smoked venison.
MR. BUCHANAN'S COMMENTS ARE INSIGHTFUL AS USUAL. HOWEVER, AS LONG AS THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT REMAINS SHILLS FOR THE NEOCONSERVATIVE MEDIA, FOUNDATION, THINK-TANK POWER STRUCTURE, THE DIRE SITUATION OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WILL ONLY DEEPEN. THE DIRTY LITTLE SECRET IS THAT VIRTUALLY ALL CONSERVATIVE PUNDITS AND POLITICIANS (BUCHANAN EXCEPTED) OBTAIN FINANCIAL REWARDS AND SOCIAL STATUS BY ACTING AS MOUTH-PIECES FOR NEOCON JEWS AND THE ISRAEL LOBBY. THUS, WE WILL CONTINUE TO GET ENDLESS WARS IN THE MIDDLE EAST AGAINST ENEMIES OF ISRAEL AND MASS IMMIGRATION TO ALTER THE EUROPEAN-AMERICAN MAJORITY IN THE UNITED STATES.
It doesn’t matter who wins the nomination. In fact, it does not matter whether democrats or republicans win the presidency. All the presidential candidates (with the possible exception of Ron Paul) are bought by the military-industrial complex. No matter who is elected, we will have immigration without limits at home and wars without limits abroad.
Mr Kenny,
True although in Leuven (Belgium) we have a "Herbert Hoover square"
(Hoover helped to collect the money to rebuild the damaged university library after WW1 and WW2).
I wish we would have a "Joseph McCarthy square" , a
"Meldrim Thomson jr street", a "John Tyler boulevard" and an
avenue "Robert E. Lee"as well ....
@4: "You can increasingly look for them in the cemetary, replaced by people who have grown up knowing that their mamas had a constitutionally protected right to exterminate them in the womb. How do you really expect such persons to be shocked by anything? They’re more like the Eloi in H. G. Wells’ Time Machine."
I've known for some time my mind was warped by virture of my birth year (1984). For years I have longed to revert it to a more dignified age. Any suggestions?
@20: "Of course, if she carries on Bush’s policy of trying to drag Europe into wars, she’ll wear out her welcome pretty fast but evreybody assumes she won’t do that."
No, I think if she tries to do that, they'll follow her, just like they did into Yugoslavia in 1998. Never underestimate the stupidity of a people when their newspapers begin to fawn.
REPLY TO ROJACK: I very much like your posts - esp. struck by ultra-true paragraph about the media's effect. In that regard, you'd really enjoy a book I typed (of my husband's Boston College teacher) - it's original title was "No Liberty for License: The Forgotten Logic of the First Amendment" but it was very precient about revolutionary groups and the US's bad law and openness to destructive events (9/11) and after 9/11 it was reissued as:
Present Dangers: Rediscovering the First Amendment by David Lowenthal (see spencepublishing.com for it and all their other great books): "The hottest points of contention in American politics all spring from a single misunderstood sentence—the First Amendment. In a timely and iconoclastic reassessment of the cornerstone of American liberty, David Lowenthal reaches unorthodox yet compelling conclusions about free speech and religion under the Constitution."
And about the media's effect on the populace: I was struck by someone's observation back when Bob Dole was running against Clinton: "The country decided it would be more interesting to watch the 'Bill Clinton Show' than the 'Bob Dole Show.' I laugh through my tears.
@26 Paula
I received an MA in polisci at Boston College and also took a course with Lowenthal. Interesting to see him referenced on this site. The discussion you reference is fascinating and important, yet all but forgotten.
@Culturalist
The problem with your thesis (and I've read and enjoyed your essays past) is that more and more of the people who are being culturally and demographically displaced seem to welcome it and vote for candidates who further it. Consider the bizarre support for McCain in NH. They have Thompson standing before them - a genuine Reagan/Goldwater conservative, not a neocon nor a Ron Paul - but choose McCain, the man most responsible for limiting political speech, smearing immigration reformers and jumping in bed with Leftist Senators. Live Free or Die my ass!
Dear Nicholas, am surprised at your birth year as the usual comments by you I see hereabouts are actually literate, whether or not I agree with them. As for suggestions, am savoring the writings of the Fugitives out of Vanderbilt in the 20s, in these post-holiday days, as I have for 40 years. I would highly recommend WITHOUT RESERVATION anything -- literary, critical, or historical -- by Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, Donald Davidson, John Crowe Ransom, any of that set. A good place to start is Warren's Democracy and Poetry, and his essays on Melville's poetry, particularly his reading of "The Conflict of Convictions" in Selected Poetry of Herman Melville. Ciao.
RE: 28
Dear Jacko,
Am I correct to assume that you refer to the Southern Agrarians, and those men they influenced? I have particularly benefited from Richard Weaver.
Mr. Aitken,
Southern Agrarians are indeed alive and well among certain of us here on fora of Chronicles. In many venues, given the political correctness of our times, we are required to "travel," even exist, incognito!
Dr Peters,
Thank you. While I found many essays in I'LL TAKE MY STAND difficult to read, I have really enjoyed Richard Weaver's corpus. He opened a new world of thought to me during my senior year in college in 2004-2005. But I understand what you mean about traveling incognito due to PC; I have many Christian brothers who dismiss Weaver et al or treat him with scorn due to the Agrarian mentality.
While I realize that many aspects of the old Agrarian cause might not be immediately workable today, I find myself continually drawn to their charm and to a simpler way of life. I was fortunate enough to spend much of my childhood on a farm/country life in Concordia Parish.
Mr. Aitken,
My mother was and remains at nearly ninety-one a genteel lady. Born near Sailes, Louisiana, where Bonnie and Clyde were killed; reared in the earliest years on Chopin Plantation where Harriet Beecher Stowe is said to have encountered personalities which she would later incorporate into her Uncle Tom's Cabin; and finally growing up in Jonesville, Louisiana, on the Black River at the confluence of the Ouachita, Tensas and Little River, she experienced the Louisiana as it was coming out of the penumbra of Reconstruction, as it was dealing with the social changes of WWI, as it dealt with the 1927 Flood, the era of Huey P. Long, the Great Depression and WWII. She finished Louisiana Normal College in Natchitoches at the age of nineteen and at that age became the home economics and biology teacher in a mill-town high school in Roshell, Louisiana, in Grant Parish, a carpetbag parish. During her three years at Roshell, a town then of three thousand and a town which a mere ten years later no longer existed, the mill having "cut out" and left, my mother lived with other single female teachers in the hotel and took three meals a day, seven days a week, in the hotel. She had a lot of time to read and thereby collected an eclectic library. Among the books which she collected was I'll Take My Stand.
I was read to when I was very young and began reading for myself before I began school. From her library, I was allowed to read any of the books upon which my fancy fell. At or about fourteen, I encountered I'll Take My Stand and actually had no interest in it save for the notes which my mother, apparently during the Roshell years had made in the margins. I asked her about the book. She said that such books were not for fools and children and that I was at the very least still a child. She added that the men who had written the book were flawed and dangerous men but somehow still good men whom one should read if one considered oneself educated, particularly, she added someone from our climes. I vividly recall that she took the book and replaced it with her own recommendation, The Robe, a book which I have read more than once.
On my sixteenth birthday, I received from my father a Sweet-Sixteen (gauge) Browning semi-automatic shotgun. From my mother, I received her "annotated" copy of I'll Take My Stand. Casting a teacher's almost evil eye at my father, she said that since I was apparently old enough to receive a shotgun and use it, I was likely no longer such a child that I could not read I'll Take My Stand.
This was my first encounter with the Southern Agrarians. I have been struggling with them ever since and have been gaining some light during the struggle.
david #12
"Pat is right on most everything but I parts ways with him on health care. Will someone tell me what is so bad about the way western Europe and Canada handle their citizens health care? Is health care a commodity?"
1. First off, the term "health care" is a misnomer. The term should be "disease care". In the early part of the 20th century the Rockefeller Family (Foundation) and other similar interests (eg. German pharmaceuticals) created a state regulated monopoly using the AMA, police,bribed politicians, and medical schools. Once the state/captitalist racket was established disease became the biggest money making commodity in America. The unspoken motto of Big Med/Big Pharma became " live short, die long, never treat the cause when you can make money off the symptoms." In short, there's no money in health, there's big bucks in disease management. Consequently, the medicalization of the American culture, especially the aging baby boomers.
2. The Christian approach to health, disease, life and death, suffering and recorvery is counter cultural to what one finds in America today. The Christian culture of aid for the sick doesn't necessarily reject the use of modern medicine and surgery , but it should put healing in context with the relationship to disease and character, disease and sin and death, suffering and enslavement
to sin. A Christian hospice would not offer "modern medical miracles" with the idea of allowing you to live longer to become wronger. In summary, to debate the best way to fund mass scale, managerial disease care is hardly where our focus should be. You can debate the merits of the $253 billion farm bill, but the counter cultural ideas of agrainism is where the real debate begins.
3. The Canadian "socialized" disease care system only differs from the US system in the question of revenue for and management of the vast infrastucture and salaries. Both systems are controlled by Big Med (AMA, CMA), Big Pharm, and Federal Regulators.
Jacko's #14, story about the Soviet doctor is irrelevant. Canadian and Western European doctors,nurses and managers are paid in relationship to US salaries. The simple reality is that, especially in Canada, if you do not come close to US pay levels, the professional packs up and heads South.
The main difference between the Canadian and US system of funding is that :
A) A private/corporate management system makes money by efficiently processing as many patients as posssible. A government/bureaucratic management system saves money by
not processing any more patients than it is forced to . That is why the biggest problem in the Canadian system is shortage of staff and horrendoulsy long waiting periods for a specialist and surgery.
Patients, who can not afford to go to the US, (or India), and pay out of pocket for immediate help, are actually dying while waiting (sometimes 6 months to a year) for surgery or care.
B) In Canada, the funding of the never ending cost of disease care is creating unrealistic strain on the provincial governments' budgets. Each Province looks after its own "medical insurance program". The Feds only implement written "standards for universal health care", but do not directly get involved with the revenue and management side. Except for Alberta, which has more energy reserves than Saudi Arabia and consequently more government revenue, the Canadian provincial governments are going backrupt quickly. If you fund the hospitals, you do not have money for roads, schools, agriculture, etc. It's hard to raise taxes when they are already some of the highest in the Western world.
In summary, the Canadian system of universal, egalitarian deliver of disease care can never survive the coming tsunami of ever growing demands on an already strained system by aging population and obese, disease ridden youth. It will most likely convert to a combination of private and public funding. Regardless of the management system, Big Med/Big Parm will continue to contribute to keeping North Americans mentally serville and finacially in debt. And, if you can handle the cold winters, and need "health care" move to oil rich Alberta.
Our political system is such a farce at this point, that it should be obvious to a kindergartner how contrived it is.
This year's presidential campaign circus is following the corporate news media's script perfectly, as usual. First, they give maximum free airtime to a laughable mountebank from Arkansas, in order to steer him to the republican nomination, while at the same time they do likewise for their favorite "gentry liberal" democrat. However, the powers that be sense that the masses are getting restless this time around with the usual "Republicrats", so they are offering up an "independent" in the form of the reprehensible Michael Bloomberg to satisfy the public demand for a "third choice".
The plan is proceeding beautifully. As we approach the General Election in late summer/fall, the media will go about destroying their handpicked Republican nominee, revealing him as the clueless political jackass he is, while the Bloomberg candidacy will siphon away more votes from the republican side, thus awarding Hillary or Obama the election in a landslide. And the American voters will be left scratching their heads for 4 more years, wondering how they got duped again.
Huh? Pat calls the DEMOCRATS "the Party of Government"?! Wake up, please! The Bush Administration, which Pat urged conservatives to vote for, has given us the biggest, most intrusive, debt-ridden, unGodly, unConstitutional Federal Government in our history!
John Lofton, Recovering Republican
Editor, TheAmericanView.com
JLof@aol.com
The relationship between the Vanderbilt Fugitives and the Agrarians is subtle. Strictly speaking, some of the Fugitives enlisted in the early days of the movement and contribted to I'll Take My Stand; in another sense the Fugitives stopped with their last issue some years earlier. The former was primarily a round-table of poetry and philosophy, aggressively disclaiming any agenda but formed by the Southern background and classical education of its members. The latter was primarily a social and political program as noted by various comments above.
What still binds and links the two movements, I believe, is their concept and critique of the American self. This remains a valid critique whatever one thinks of the practicality of agrarianism as an actual way of life as practiceable by a majority of persons. Inherent in both movements, at least in their early days, was a heavy suspicion of reigning American utopianist ideology, particularly as boosted by (1) the war 1861-1865; (2) the post-1929 crash era. Both of these historical events heavily tended to the abolition of former concepts of selfhood, toward a mass identity fueled by sea to shining sea jingoism and increasingly prone to sporadic mass violence.
Frankly the vision of a writer like Warren is largely tandem with Orwell; it is one small step from Willie Stark to Big Brother. Nor would Warren's voice at all be surprised that, in the end, 1984's protagonist "loved Big Brother." Even the apparently integral personal virtue of love is subsumed by the State as the self dissovles in the miasma of modern political utopianism. This was the little point I was trying, doubtless crudely, to relate with the example of the Russian trash man in my office. Not the supremacy of one "system" over another, but the fact that the fellow at least as my trash man conveyed to me a remnant of personal integrity and selfhood, whatever his "caste," whatever his "job" or trade, and entirely without regard to "healthcare systems" there or here.
Yet even this man's oasis is what is increasingly assailed by both "Democrats" and "Republicans." Buchanan does attempt to speak to the dissolution of American selfhood to a degree, but finally in partisan terms that ignores that Bush 2's power expansions for Big Brother are merely a stepping stone for the next apprentice Caesar of whichever party, in other words, the bigger picture is far from an issue. Mr Miller (no. 34) lays out a plausible scenario of how this is being played out, but if that one doesn't work perhaps the puppet masters have others up their sleeves.
But likely, the practical point of no return is far in the past. Melville saw it during the civil war, symbolically in the new Capitol Dome being set at the time "stronger for the stress and strain/but the Founder's dream shall flee." Another might mark it the day they finished Mount Rushmore. I offer the Fugitives and Agrarians merely as a sustained body of literature (there are few enough in our mono-maniacal culture) that spoke carefully enough and long enough to at least lay out the issues in a manner still highly relevant.
Humor: I was all loaded Up with the Christmas spirt this year (loaded for bear) - and HAPPILY said to my relatives visiting unexpectedly from out of town 'YES - YES - there's room at the Holiday Inn.' I kid. One of em' apparently to my chagrin is a Jamaican... What do you call it when a jamaican Singer can't quite get the comb thru his hair-?- 'Dread-lock'.
Yes there was even a jamaican.
Thank you Jesus.
I kid, I kid.
I'm almost a lay monastic ... content to do (really) not much of anything though not under the auspices of our mother Church.
Saves her a lot of money, I presume.
I have always said probably the most difficult thing to do in life (while it lives you anyway) is just about Absolutely NOTHING.
It ain't easy... well, not always. I do what i'm good at. - How about you?
you want a comparison - i do even LESS than the technophobe Navrazov. i'm too lazy and uncommitted to even be a technophobe.
they'll historically no doubt find no trace of me ... I never was.
__________
"private/corporate management system makes money by efficiently processing as many patients as possible. A government/bureaucratic management system saves money by
not processing any more patients than it is forced to" GLA
Well said! I might add that not only will taxes go up and service goes down, the population becomes trained to use the system for any ache or pain based on their misinformed panic induced need to relieve symptoms or satisfy addictions. The hospital also becomes a source of support for those seeking sympathy and care no longer provided by their dis-functional family. People will "check in" instead of seeking non existent moral and spiritual support of the family or community. The system itself becomes an abused government service, just like many other government agencies, by the people it has conditioned to be self proclaimed victims.
Dear God, I don't ask for much, but please, please, please let John McCain be elected President. It will be so amusing to see if the Free Republic/Lucianne/Limbaugh crowd can stomach sieg heiling him the way they have Bush these last 8 years. They so deserve each other.
John Smith:
I'm not as easily amused as you are. McCain is an f-ing warmonger that makes Bush almost look like a pacifist. It's a damned shame that the Vietnamese didn't finish him off when they had him in the Hanoi Hilton. Then we wouldn't have to put up with his treasonous ass, among a host of others. You should read about the bombshells that Sibel Edmonds is letting loose concerning your dedicated "public servants" and "representatives."
And in case you want to exercise the brain-dead American custom of call McCain a "hero," he was flying bombers that were killing people that he'd never seen, and that had never done a damned thing to him or this country, except what Iraq is doing now, trying to rid themselves of a foreign invader. Kind of sounds familiar, doesn't it? How many countries has the U.S. invaded in the last fifty years, whose only "crime" was to tell Uncle Scam that they'd prefer to live the way THEY wanted to live, instead of the way that Rome-on-the-Potomac told them that they had BETTER live?
If this punk gets elected, we'll be invading every continent on the planet. Look for Greenland to be labeled part of the "Axis of Evil."
Actually, there are three countries that comprise the "Axis of Evil." They are the United States, Great Britain and Australia (yes, I know that it's also a continent.)
P.S.: There's only one candidate among the "leaders" that isn't an out-and-out warmonger with an Israeli UPC bar stamped on his ass, and you know who that is.
I must make a major correction. Guess I needed my coffee this morning. The third member of the "Axis of Evil" is not Australia, it's Israel.
"john t
MR. BUCHANAN’S COMMENTS ARE INSIGHTFUL AS USUAL. HOWEVER, AS LONG AS THE CONSERVATIVE MOVEMENT REMAINS SHILLS FOR THE NEOCONSERVATIVE MEDIA, FOUNDATION, THINK-TANK POWER STRUCTURE, THE DIRE SITUATION OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY WILL ONLY DEEPEN. THE DIRTY LITTLE SECRET IS THAT VIRTUALLY ALL CONSERVATIVE PUNDITS AND POLITICIANS (BUCHANAN EXCEPTED) OBTAIN FINANCIAL REWARDS AND SOCIAL STATUS BY ACTING AS MOUTH-PIECES FOR NEOCON JEWS AND THE ISRAEL LOBBY. THUS, WE WILL CONTINUE TO GET ENDLESS WARS IN THE MIDDLE EAST AGAINST ENEMIES OF ISRAEL AND MASS IMMIGRATION TO ALTER THE EUROPEAN-AMERICAN MAJORITY IN THE UNITED STATES."
Here Here!
Actually, looking at the fact that as of 2007 - fully 50% of all children in the USA (newborn to age 5) are now from third world origins...our future is already sealed.
It is time to stop dreaming about fixing the USA, and start the next stage ...planning a new country - or else just get used to living as an unwanted minority in a third world country.
This country is way beyound fixing.
One notes that the Sibel Edmonds revelations are getting absolutely no traction save on the Internet.
The GOP in Iowa and elsewhere is in trouble not just because of the condition of the country, but also because it is old. Over 80 percent of the voters in the GOP caucuses were over the age of 45. I saw it with my own eyes at the Straw Poll in Ames when supporters fro Tancredo and Romney were using golf carts to ferry back and forth their older supporters to and from the massive parking lots outside the Hilton Coliseum on that hot summer day. The GOP truly risks losing at least two generations of voters with their suicidal policies.
Bravo Leon!
"Leon Holler
...either embrace racial nationalism as the last way to save America and the West, or continue to reject that approach and know that not only have we condemned to extinction through our cowardly omissions our more than THREE thousand year old civilization (yes, that’s right, according to the latest archaeological evidence), as well as the very (sub)species which alone created and alone can perpetuate that civilization, but we will also spend the rest of our lives in perpetual political frustration, as ever greater numbers of colored voters cause conservatives to lose and lose and lose and …."
I started reading Chronicles back in the early 1990's - and I have been waiting years to start reading people like yourself waking up and speaking up.
Racial Nationalism is the ONLY Nationalism - it is the essence of Nationalism. As much as most people would like to deny it - Race is everything in America today. That is what all other ethnic groups in this country identify with, and the basis of what they strive for power for.
Do not interpret me as saying that non-whites are being evil - they are merely doing what nature dictates us all to do...putting their own best interests first.
Unfortunately, our people have been disarmed to compete against other groups in competition for our country - because whites are not allowed to have a legitimate group identity or interests.
And as you pointed out above - it's not just America - it's happening to our people around the world.
It is getting dicey, but as long as our people exist - there is hope for our future, though time is clearly running out.
Oh boy. Who sent this in to Buchanan?
"Race is everything in America today."
Wow, I didn't know Louis Farrakhan had a kid brother.
It's ok Sean, go back to sleep.
Mr. D you're the other side of the same coin