This one is a classic!
Category: Conservatives (Page 39 of 40)
Charles Krauthammer ridicules Huckabee and Romney:
This campaign is knee-deep in religion, and it’s only going to get worse. I’d thought that the limits of professed public piety had already been achieved during the Republican CNN/YouTube debate when some squirrelly looking guy held up a Bible and asked, “Do you believe every word of this book?” — and not one candidate dared reply: None of your damn business.
Instead, Giuliani, Romney and Huckabee bent a knee and tried appeasement with various interpretations of scriptural literalism. The right answer, the only answer, is that the very question is offensive. The Constitution prohibits any religious test for office. And while that proscribes only government action, the law is also meant to be a teacher.
This is another example of the conservative coalition being ripped apart. Krauthammer is a prominent conservative thinker, and yet even he is getting tired of the silly posturing by GOP candidates to tout their religious beliefs.
Last night on MSNBC, Pat Buchanon argued that the voters were rejecting the GOP but were supporting socially conservative ballot initiatives. It turns out he spoke to soon. Conservatives suffered significant defeats in South Dakota, Missouri and Arizona.
In conservative South Dakota, the voters overwelmingly rejected a ban on all abortions by a 55-45 margin. This is a huge loss for cultural conservatives and a significant win for liberals and for libertarians. This, coupled with the outrage over the Terry Schiavo fiasco, makes it clear that most voters do not want government officials intruding into their personal lives. The social conservatives have reached too far. Hopefully Republicans will pay attention and start moving back towards the middle on social issues. As for Democrats, hopefully they will develope a backbone on these social issues. Their unwillingness to stand up to the Republicans during the Terry Schiavo controversy was shamefull.
Missouri provided the next big win for liberals by passing the stem-cell research initiative. This has become a huge wedge issue for Democrats. Hopefully this vote, along with the gains by Democrats in the House and the Senate, will lead to passage of federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research with margins sufficient to override a veto by President Bush.
Finally, Arizona is the first state to reject a constitutional ban on gay marriage. The proposed amendment would have also banned civil unions. Again, many voters apparantly believed that the social conservatives went to far. A wide majority of Americans oppose gay marriage, but more and more Americans are open to the concept of protecting legal rights for civil unions.
Here’s more evidence that the GOP is coming apart at the seems, as Dick Armey blasts social conservatives for embracing big government to adcance their agenda:
There was a day when social conservatives were united with economic conservatives in the belief that small, limited government was not only good for our economy and the prosperity of American families, but essential to protect traditional family values. We all fought for a limited federal government — a government that had the decency to respect the American people by staying out of their lives. Small government meant that all Christians could practice their faith as they saw fit. Big government violates those rights by meddling in our lives, misusing our hard-earned money, and dictating cultural norms to us. We were and are rightly outraged when government imposes wrong-headed values through its monopoly of schools, government-funded “art,” and taxpayer funded “family planning.”
As a united conservative movement, we win when we defend traditional values against big government pretensions to impose its brand of “morality” on the American people. We lose when we attempt to use government power to impose our values on others.
Armey then provides a brilliant summary of the Terry Schiavo fiasco:
Nowhere was it more wrong, with more disastrous policy ends, than in the Terri Schiavo intervention. While her case was heartbreaking, our Founders created a government built on checks and balances, not a nation run by an arbitrary and imperial Congress. Congress cannot simply override our entire state and federal legal system to intervene in one person’s situation. It was truly a chilling act.
I don’t agree with Dick Armey on many things, but I totally agree that we need to keep the government out of our private lives. Democrats and liberals can learn a thing or two from this column as well. Democrats need to consider reducing the reach and influence of government, especially now that many on the right are eager to use government to legislate their interpretations of morality on the rest of us. I’d like to see libertarian Democrats argue for less interference in our private lives.
The Republican Party has been taken over by the religious right. This is not a controversial statement when speaking to Democrats, but most Republicans would have strenously argued this point in the past. Not so much any more.
This editorial from a Kansas newspaper’s editorial board is fascinating. In it the writer explains why the paper is reversing over 100 years of supporting mostly Republican candidates.
The Republican Party has changed, and it has changed monumentally.
You almost cannot be a victorious traditional Republican candidate with mainstream values in Johnson County or in Kansas anymore, because these candidates never get on the ballot in the general election. They lose in low turnout primaries, where the far right shows up to vote in disproportionate numbers.
To win a Republican primary, the candidate must move to the right.
What does to-the-right mean?
It means anti-public education, though claiming to support it.
It means weak support of our universities, while praising them.
It means anti-stem cell research.
It means ridiculing global warming.
It means gay bashing. Not so much gay marriage, but just bashing gays.
It means immigrant bashing. I’m talking about the viciousness.
It means putting religion in public schools. Not just prayer.
It means mocking evolution and claiming it is not science.
It means denigrating even abstinence-based sex education.
Note, I did not say it means “anti-abortion,” because I do not find that position repugnant, at all. I respect that position.
But everything else adds up to priorities that have nothing to do with the Republican Party I once knew.
That’s why, in the absence of so-called traditional Republican candidates, the choice comes down to right-wing Republicans or conservative Democrats.
And now you know why we have been forced to move left.
Hat tip to mcjoan at DailyKos.
Moderates are fleeing the Republican Party and are finding a welcome home in the Democratic Party. Fiscal conservatives and libertarian conservatives tolerated the religious right for years because they helped them form a winning coalition in the GOP. Moderate Republicans went along for the ride, even if moderate Republicans stopped getting on the ballot. Hopefully this unholy alliance is coming to an end.
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