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| A Great Opportunity | The Lessons of Volcker and Greenspan |
The Conservative Base Rejoins the Bush Team
by Christopher Chantrill
October 28, 2005 at 4:31 am
THERE’S A PROBLEM about belonging to a political base. Sometimes your party ignores you. It takes you for granted and spends all its energy wooing moderates and independents.
So occasionally the base needs to rebel. Just to remind the politicians where they live.
President Bush obviously wants to get Supreme Court nominations through the US Senate with the minimum of fighting. That’s why he chose John Roberts: brilliant, but slippery. Democrats could never get a grip on him, so half of them ended up voting for his confirmation. But last summer conservatives started out unsure about Roberts. It took a while before they climbed on board his nomination bandwagon.
With the Miers nomination, Bush crossed a line. Many conservatives just couldn’t swallow it, and they said so. Now President Bush has to submit a new name, and he understands, no doubt, that the new nominee must be someone that will excite the conservative base even at the cost of a battle in the US Senate with the Roe v. Wade Democrats.
But with the Miers nomination history, it appears that conservatives are willing to come together and fight for the president’s agenda.
According to Donald Lambro and Ralph Z. Hallow conservatives have put the Miers imbroglio behind them and are ready to fight for the president.
"The White House has begun shoring up its support among conservatives who have been upset with them. The president has been more forceful on spending issues, and that bodes well for his administration down the road," said Ron Bonjean, chief spokesman for House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, Illinois Republican."They’ve been playing defense for so long on Harriet Miers that it’s great to see them pivoting and going on offense again on our issues," he said.
President Bush will need a united Republican Party going into the 2006 mid-term elections. Democratic victories in Congress could make the final two years of his term a misery.
Sphere: Related Content |Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
What Liberals Think About Conservatives
[W]hen I asked a liberal longtime editor I know with a mainstream [publishing] house for a candid, shorthand version of the assumptions she and her colleagues make about conservatives, she didn't hesitate. “Racist, sexist, homophobic, anti-choice fascists,” she offered, smiling but meaning it.
Harry Stein, I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next to a Republican
US Life in 1842
Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Society and State
For [the left] there is only the state and the individual, nothing in between. No family to rely on, no friend to depend on, no community to call on. No neighbourhood to grow in, no faith to share in, no charities to work in. No-one but the Minister, nowhere but Whitehall, no such thing as society - just them, and their laws, and their rules, and their arrogance.
David Cameron, Conference Speech 2008
Socialism equals Animism
Imagining that all order is the result of design, socialists
conclude that order must be improvable by better design of some superior mind.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Religion, Property, and Family
But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family.
Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Postmodernism
A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy
Physics, Religion, and Psychology
Paul Dirac: “When I was talking with Lemaître about [the expanding universe] and feeling stimulated
by the grandeur of the picture that he has given us, I told him that
I thought cosmology was the branch of science that lies closest to religion.
However [Georges] Lemaître [Catholic priest, physicist, and
inventor of the Big Bang Theory] did not agree with me. After thinking it over he
suggested psychology as lying closest to religion.”
John Farrell, “The Creation Myth”
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Never Trust Experts
No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.
Lord Salisbury, “Letter to Lord Lytton”
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
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