Do you really need to ask?

I've dabbled around a good bit in books on manners, etiquette, and the like, hoping to find some good treatments of the subjects for my young daughter (my mother--the epitome of everything that is good in the Southern lady, and from whom I had hoped my daughter would imbibe these things first-hand--having tragically died while my daughter was quite young, thus depriving us of the best possible source of learning these things). I have not been terribly interested in the Post/Baldridge/ et al. cyclopedia approaches (how to set the table and arrange your guests ,and which forks and spoons to use when and how, which glasses for the reds, whites, burgundies, etc., is pretty ubiquitously available, in as little or much detail as one might desire) but rather in deeper treatments of the underlying elements of gentlemanly and gentlewomanly character and conduct. Here are a few items I've run across that I think are good treatments in various respects, that I think you or anyone might find of interest more broadly as well:

A Book of Couretsy, by Sister Mary Mercedes;

Social Graces, by Platz and Wales;

Better Than Beauty: A Guide to Charm;

Choosing Civility, by PM Forni;

The Rise and Fall of the Plantation South, by Raimondo Luraghi;

Recollections and Letters of Robert E. Lee (several different editions available);

Lanterns on the Levee, by William Percy;

"Manners for Men" and "Manners for Women", by "Mrs. Humphrey"

PJ O'Rourke wrote Modern Manners -- an etiquette guide for rude people. Do the opposite of what it recommends and you'll be close.

Personally I recommend using all the silly rules that have become obsolete.
Walk between traffic and your lady to shield her from drive-by louts.
Drink tea without using bags, brew it in a pot and pour through a strainer. Use special pot and cups. It's a great ritual.
Open doors for ugly women.
Say good morning to people you detest.
Tell really dirty jokes and then apologize to anyone who might be offended, then callously reply, "I'm glad you're offended!"
Remind any and all that political correctness is one of the bitter fruits of Mao's Red Guard and the Cultural Revolution.

In answer to your question, Lew Rockwell rates Warren Harding as the least bad president of the 20th Century. But I prefer, Silent Cal, America's first Libertarian chief executive. He cut the size of government while making services such as the Post Office run more effieiently.

If only the rest of today's elected shower-of-shaving-cream would stop squandering taxpayers' money while claiming that "things" (people) are getting "done," we could have real progress in a return to sanity.

What if there were no "founding fathers" but only community leaders within 13 separate states with quite different interests? What if these local and state leaders were persuaded to get together to make a set of compromises that made it difficult for one group to mistreat another, say big states/small states, commercial/agrarian, northern/southern, Puritan/Anglican. And suppose further that this compromise depended on strong separate states with decentralized internal power structures that permitted Connecticut Baptists to get along, more or less, in a Congregationalist state. One could then imagine an almost unending series of finely tuned compromises that oiled the cooperation of these rather disparate communities. But, instead, the commercial/northern interests and the agrarian/ southern interests broke out in increasingly passionate conflicts over, for example, the admission of Missouri or tariffs that protected northern industry at the expense of southern farming. Suppose further, though it seems silly, that one party decided to go its own way and was forced back into subjugation by its victorious enemies who destroyed everything they could not steal before going on to revolutionize society, education, morality, and culture? Well, sir, that is about the way we got to where we are. For many conservatives, I know, compromise with the likes of Joe Lieberman and John McCain seems a pragmatic exercise. To others, it is nauseating to think that such people have ever been permitted to enter the Senate of the United States.

When I used to spend a good deal of time with my anarcho-libertarian friend, Murray Rothbard, I persuaded Murray to agree to a simple criterion: Political movements, legislation, parties, etc. could be supported so long as the net effect was to reverse the power flow that had sapped real communities--from families to churches to the separate states--and fattened a coercive national government. I called it the federal principle, obviously broadening the notion of federalism a good deal, and it meant, for example, that a good Rothbardian could not support the intrusion of the federal courts in a local censorship case, simply because he believed in freedom of expression, nor could a Catholic conservative support national abortion legislation, except in so far as it stripped all three branches of the national government of their jurisdiction.

What quaint ideas we had in the 1990's! Today, on a practical level, I would be mildly content with a party that sincerely promised to do three of these: lower my taxes, get out of culture and educational funding and control, avoid unjust wars of aggression, defend the border against illegal immigrants, impose a reasonably restrictive immigration policy, and abandon anti-White racialist policies such as affirmative action and multi-culturalism. I don't really care what they say they think about abortion, because they are never going to do anything and probably anything they did do would end up causing more harm than good. The truth is, though, no politician is sincerely advocating any of the above. The idea of trusting Open Borders McCain on immigration ludicrous. I do not say that no one should vote nor do I promise not to vote, when the time comes, if it is not raining or I don't need a hair cut or they are not playing music I like on the radio.

At Chronicles we use the term conservative in a variety of ways that are not inconsistent to refer to those who 1) maintain long-standing traditions, such as the rules of formal manners and formal verse, and 2) those who adhere to many if not all traditional-conservative principles such as the rights of states and smaller communities, rejection of socialism, adherence to traditional moral norms, and 3) an understanding of human nature and the limits it imposes on social and political experimentation. All three are quite distinct from the faux-conservatism preached by globalist neoconservatives or from the conservatism-lite proclaimed by Rush Limbaugh. There are conservative elements in what Ms Palin says, but it would be hard to say she is conservative in any of the three senses I have listed.

I don't think I am alone in believing the term "Christian" is used much too loosely. Everyone who calls "Lord Lord", we are told, will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven, and people who justify the slaughter of Christian Arabs for the sake of the Jewish state have wandered rather far afield from Christian teaching. I do not say that Assembly of God churches are not connected with Christianity, as traditionally understood throughout its history, only that the connection is not always easy to see. A woman who has been baptized in a tradtiional church and then is rebaptized at the age of 12 and has never apologized for it, can fairly be regarded as someone who does not regard Catholics (and by extension Orthodox, and probably Anglicans and Lutherans) as Christian. This shows much the same spirit as Mormons who refer to Christians as "gentiles." It is Ms Palin, and not her critics, who has put herself outside the mainstream of Christianity.

Finally, on casting the first stone. Scriptural citations of this sort are a good illustration of why Biblical interpretations should not be bandied in a frivolous manner. In the first place, our Lord was quite literally telling adulterous males not to kill a woman taken in adultery. This is hardly a command not to make moral judgements. He was Himself far from being non-judgmental in castigating the Scribes, Pharisees, and hypocrites or in kicking the money-changers out of the Temple. But, having said this, I would repeat what has been said many times here. The point is not that Ms Palin's daughter got carried away. It happens all the time. But Ms Palin has chosen to lead a life on feminist rather than Christian terms and yet appeals to Christians for their vote in much the same way that she has declared opposition to earmarks while at the same time being the Alaskan Queen of the earmark.

People who aspire to high position and who hold Christian and conservative banners aloft should not be exempt from scrutiny. When Bill Clinton claimed to be a Christian, Republicans were quick to point out his lapses in marital fidelity. I doubt that conservatives like Newt Gingrich, divorcee and adulterer, were much concerned about casting the first stone. There are reasons why good people will hold their nose and vote for McCain-Palin, but there are also reasons why they should hold their nose. That, I believe, is all we are saying.