George Will: GOP is discrediting true conservatism

....as the Kansas Board of Education, which is controlled by the kind of conservatives who make conservatism repulsive to temperate people, voted 6-4 to redefine science.
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He's one of only two weekly commentaries I'm sure to read. Him and Randi's.

And, agree with him or not, if you study rhetoric, he's a must read.

I found this bit perplexing. Are "limited-govt" conservative that slow or is this just BS? I mean exactly HOW MANY decades will it take these limited-govt. conservatives to realize that the social conservatives are PURE ideologues and will sacrifice anyone and anything
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That was part of his point. When the Republicans were out of power in Congress, decade after decade, the limited government ones could beak off to their hearts' content. Eventually, their ideas swayed the American public, and the Republicans took control -- partially aided by massive threats of power grabs by the Clinton Administration (nationalizing medical care, a BTU tax, etc.)

Now that they're in power, the social conservatives are trashing it all. Witness this:

Brian Riedl of The Heritage Foundation reports that Congress responded to the Korean War by setting priorities, cutting one-fourth of all non war spending in one year. Recently the House failed to approve an unusually ambitious effort to cut government growth. This is today’s ambitiousness: attempting — probably unsuccessfully — to cut government growth by $54 billion over five years.

That is $10.8 billion a year from five budgets projected to total $12.5 trillion, of which $54 billion is four-hundredths of 1 percent. War is hell but, on the home front, it is indistinguishable from peace, except that the government is more undisciplined than ever.
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and

Federal spending — including a 100 percent increase in education spending since 2001 — has grown twice as fast under President Bush as under President Clinton, 65 percent of it unrelated to national security.
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There was a lovely political cartoon in today's Detroit Free Press. In the first panel, an old lady is waving a big handful of paper and complaining how bad it is she has to deal with all this paperwork for the new oldie free drug policy. In the second, a little kid is pulling a wagon stacked to the sky with IOU papers, saying, "Tell me about it..."
 
ranson said:
Sigh . . . I can say I'm right in line with you, Upchurch. If I didn't want to vote in primaries, I'd register independent.
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I don't vote in primaries because I live in Texas. Texas law allows only people who haven't voted in either primary to sign petions allowing people to get on ballots. I consider getting more people on the ballot to be more important than voting in primaries.
 
drkitten said:
It's easy enough to say that you don't fit into the two-party system -- and most people, in fact, say that -- but the way the US electoral system is set up, you either forcibly fit yourself into a cubbyhole, or else you exclude yourself from political discourse altogether.
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Wasn't there a thread recently about this where Americans were complaining that their two-party system didn't represent their views and those in parliamentary systems were saying, yeah, but our parties form coalitions to gain control and thus end up dropping the issues that made them different, effectively creating the same type of two-party system?

My question is then, what electoral system does exist that promotes more than two options?
 
headscratcher4 said:
Why do I feel that Will is reaping the rewards of a revolution he helped to sow?

He, in other articles, has pointed out that Republicans and Conservatism appeals because unlike its opponents it speaks to communities of faith who have felt abandoned. Now, those communities of faith are becoming Taliban like in their zelotry and Will, elequently, would distance himself from that portion of the movement. Typical.
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Absolutely. In the past I OPed a thread about "What's Wrong with Kansas" by Thomas Frank, in which he questioned why lower income people in red states would vote for a party whose economic policies are less favorable to them. In a follow-up column, Will berated Frank and liberals for overlooking the importance of social issues in people's lives. Oddly, not once did he argue against the premise that the GOP's economic policies are worse for low-income families.
 
I loath him. He plays the intellectual but he's so ideological as to defy intellect. Republicans used to complain about East Coast intellectual elites, he now is the embodiment of that ...
 
Magyar said:
Of course my personal opinion is that the "fiscal conservatives" are quit happy with what's going on because all the zelots in their party draw far more attention. Remember the $9 Billion and then some just missing from Iraq? It didn't go to the ACLU or any other Liberal cause. It ended up in the bank accounts of those same fiscal conservatives who, according to this article, lament the state of their party, while they are profiteering from the war and gas prices and slave labor from China. As long as their bottom lines increase they could give a sh8 about the fiscal issues of this country.
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Beeps, I demand you return that $9 billion immediately! And why are you still bothering with that pesky day job? :D
 
rhoadp said:
Wasn't there a thread recently about this where Americans were complaining that their two-party system didn't represent their views and those in parliamentary systems were saying, yeah, but our parties form coalitions to gain control and thus end up dropping the issues that made them different, effectively creating the same type of two-party system?

My question is then, what electoral system does exist that promotes more than two options?
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I believe the conclusion about the parliamentary system came from an American. I live in a parliamentary country, and I don't feel it to be true.

In a coalition, the biggest party always has the most influence. Like in Norway now, we have a coalition of the Labor Party, the Socialist Party and the Centre Party. The Labor party alone is twice the size of the two other parties put together, therefore the official policy of the coalition is more Labor than it's from the two other parties.

Another commom occurance in Norway is the minority coalition, a coalition that is in minority in parliament but has majority backing. This allows the administration to negotiate in both directions.

I personally feel that the parliamentary system is a very democratic thing.
 
rhoadp said:
Wasn't there a thread recently about this where Americans were complaining that their two-party system didn't represent their views and those in parliamentary systems were saying, yeah, but our parties form coalitions to gain control and thus end up dropping the issues that made them different, effectively creating the same type of two-party system?

My question is then, what electoral system does exist that promotes more than two options?
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It isn't the electoral system that causes 2 parties in the US. It's the presidency itself. Parties must band together before the election to pick a leader to run for the presidency.

If the president were picked by Congress, it would quickly dissolve into a temporary coalition type government as in parliamentary systems.

And a parliamentary system that elected some kind of national prime minister who could veto laws would quickly reassemble into just two major parties, because parties likely to select viable candidates would quickly inhale members from lesser, emptying parties, because being in the party with the president is the best way to bring home the bacon.
 
Libs speak frequently of "real conservatives", though they never supported any such entity in the slightest capacity.

Still, it's very thoughtful to imply that "conservative = good"... so long as it's "real".
 
American said:
Libs speak frequently of "real conservatives", though they never supported any such entity in the slightest capacity.
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As do conservatives of "libs". What does that have to do with this thread? Is George Will a lib? :rolleyes: Does George know? :eye-poppi

American said:
Still, it's very thoughtful to imply that "conservative = good"... so long as it's "real".
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Liberalism and conservatism are neither innately good nor bad. Neither is "neocon" as it is defined above (i.e. "promoting democracy throughout the world"). It is the execution of those respective philosophies that can be either good or bad.
 
Upchurch said:
As do conservatives of "libs".
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Do they? I hear Republicans spit out liberal as if it was an epithet, but I've never heard one try to differentiate between a real liberal and whatever the Democratic party is made up of now.
 
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rhoadp said:
Do they? I hear Republicans spit out liberal as if it was an epithet, but I've never heard one try to differentiate between a real liberal and whatever the Democratic party is made up of now.
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I wasn't referring to the term "real liberals". I was referring to the fact that conservatives often talk about liberals are without having ever "supported any such entity in the slightest capacity."

American's was a meaningless statement that infers that one cannot understand something other than oneself. Further that George Will is somehow a "lib", which I find very amusing.

After all, we know that George Will totally copied Al Franken.*




* obligatory reference.
 
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