I would add to this brilliant observation by Kevin Deanna over at Takimag.com that conservatives stand to gain more in the years to come by the teenagers, young folks and other “weirdos” (as the mainstream conservative media liked to paint them) who were energized by the Ron Paul campaign this election than anything coming out of groups like YAF. These formerly apolitical, or even self-described Lefties, have latched on to small government, anti-imperialism in some of their most intellectually formative years, and as we politicos well know, it only takes a few sometimes to create and continue revolution.
Writes Kevin Deanna:
“A small piece of me died inside when I read Kathryn Jean Lopez’s assurance that “the future is bright” from the looks of the aspiring apparatchiks at the Young America’s Foundation conference. Having received reports of my own from attendees and confident in my own qualifications to speak on the state of the young conservative “movement,” I have to give my own opinion.
The largest problem with the youth “movement” is that it is encouraging people to believe that political action is the struggle to advance through the ranks of the established conservative infrastructure. Bringing various conservative celebrities to campus or attending conferences may be entertaining or even educational, but does little to actually retake power on college campuses. Even if the group raises the necessary tens of thousands of dollars to bring Ann Coulter to campus, the overall dynamic of domination by tenured leftists, various multicultural fiefdoms, and the approved radicalism of groups like SDS remains unchanged. There is a serious problem when students can bring people like Ron Paul, Tom Tancredo, Grover Norquist, Karl Rove, and Sam Brownback to campus—and like them all equally. There is far too much focus on access to famous people rather than accomplishing anything useful or really exploring the importance of ideas.
Now, Young America’s Foundation and other institutions (like the one I work for) are useful, and do need to exist, but let’s not kid ourselves that they are anything close to sufficient. Nor is there a “conservative revolution” occurring on college campuses anymore than there was a “Reagan Revolution” that actually limited the growth of the state or reversed the culture war. The last thing we need are conservative students raising more polite suggestions for “diversity of ideas” to contemptuous and bemused campus commissars or serving as cannon fodder for John McCain.
Young conservative activists have more to learn from Saul Alinsky than Ed Meese. While Lopez “kept her shades close by” to shield her from the bright future, I can only look away from what resembles something more like a dark nightmare of years of failed strategy. If we actually want to win this thing, and not just congratulate ourselves on who we have had our picture taken with, we need to recognize that.”
Ernest “Fritz” Hollings was a Ron Paul Republican? Not quite, but close. In the former Senator’s new book, Making Government Work, Hollings reveals that he was a Robert Taft supporter at the 1940 Republican Convention. Taft, as you may know, is something of a political hero to Ron Paul and the conservative anti-war crowd. He was also one of the biggest advocates of Constitutional government, and the leading advocate on Capitol Hill for a non-interventionist foreign policy during the post-WWII period.
Of course Hollings’ and Conley’s shared enthusiasm for principled leaders isn’t the only thing that the former Senator and the future Senator have in common. Both left the GOP when it became apparent that the party had been bought out by the Wall Street/Beltway cabal and neither has any intention of ever turning back. Furthermore, Sen. Hollings was a great leader (and representative for our State) on the issues of trade and protecting American jobs, both of which are major focuses of Bob’s campaign.
Down here in South Carolina we elect men and women who respect the rule of law and aren’t ashamed to put America first. We are proud of the populist, conservative, Democrat “Fritz” Hollings and we are excited to have a candidate like “FlatTop” Bob Conley ready to pick up where “Fritz” left off, as the leading voice for South Carolina’s workers in the twenty-first century.
During an interview with “Ron Paul Democrat” Bob Conley (challenger to GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham), SA is accused of being the “Northern Avenger” by regular caller “Dan” who typifies the conventional neoconservative talk radio “Kool-Aid drinker:”
“The Politico reports that Ron Suskind’s new book claims the Bush administration suborned the CIA to forge “a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein,” linking Iraq to al-Qaeda. What the Politco doesn’t mention, but the Anonymous Liberal blog picks up, is that the allegedly forged letter also advanced the Niger uranium fable. “I’m not sure what proof, if any, Suskind has that the White House was responsible for this letter,” Anonymous Liberal concludes, “but if that claim is true, it’s a HUGE deal.” (Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan.)
While I admit this is a “shocking” revelation of sorts, it isn’t really surprising. The duplicity of this administration is well noted at this point and nothing should surprise us.
One thing this does illustrate however is just how pro-war the neocon infested media is. The case for collusion between Saddam and Wahabbi inspired “Islamic Radicals” was always flimsy and the fact that this one piece of information was seen as a trump card over all the other available evidence is truly a massive indictment of the media echo chamber.
When San Jose Mercury News reporter Gary Webb broke a story about possible CIA complicity and engagement in the South Central Los Angeles drug trade, his “friends” in the media took potshots at him and the credibility of his story was called into question by numerous news outlets the world over. At the heart of Webb’s story was the allegation that Nicaraguan gangsters were running cocaine onto the streets of L.A. with some of the profits being funneled back to finance the U.S. supported Contras in the countries brutal Civil War. Webb’s work was meticulously documented and the end result was a five hundred page book. Despite the spin coming out of Washington (and the governments obvious interest in suppressing the story), the internal investigations conducted by the Justice Department and the Agency revealed widespread complicity on the part of the CIA with various Central American drug dealers, many of whom were running cocaine into the United States. Even many of Webb’s biggest critics acknowledged after the fact that he had been more right than wrong in his reporting, but it was too late. Webb was persona non grata with the MSM. Left to die by his own newspaper, in 2004 Gary Webb took his own life.
On the other hand the biggest media peddler of the “Saddam-Al Qaeda” alliance myth was Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard. Hayes’ work was riddled with errors and demonstrably false claims. His comprehensive review of the evidence linking the Iraqi government to Osama and friends was a brief book called “The Connection“. Despite the governments obvious interest in supporting Hayes argument, the Pentagon called his work “inaccurate” and much of the rest of the book was discredited by the intelligence community before the book even hit the shelves. Hayes “smoking gun” was firing blanks, but as an active agent of state propaganda he is still allowed to parrot his nonsensical claims on television as a paid pundit.
In one case we have an investigative reporter coming to some inconvenient conclusions based on numerous sources. The crux of his allegations turnout to be true and yet his work is attacked as fradulent conspiracy mongering.
In the other case we have a partisan media pundit coming to some very convenient conclusions, based on widely discredited evidence. His allegations turnout to be almost completely false, and yet they were widely used as a justification for a war of aggression against a third world country.
The dividing line here is clear. Those who side with state and the establishment will always get the benefit of the doubt from the “watchdogs” in the media, no matter how far-fetched their conspiracy theories are. Those that challenge power get the noose.
Prejudice is of little concern to me. In the grand scheme of things, how someone feels about a certain movie is as inconsequential as how they feel about a certain race. If a white racist assaults a minority, I am concerned with the assault, not his opinion. Most racists, white, black, or otherwise never take things that far, and their opinion remains their prerogative, however goofy or wrong it may be. In fact, I know die-hard racists who are otherwise decent people. Bad opinions don’t necessarily equal bad character.
Likewise, I know liberals who are wrong about virtually everything, who subscribe to a number of vicious stereotypes, yet remain the salt of the earth. One of the strongest prejudices commonly expressed by liberals and various cosmopolitan elites is the scorn shown towards Christians who reject the theory of evolution and believe in “creationism.” This anti-Christian prejudice, as it relates to creationism, can be as harsh as any racism and is often as illogical. I remember a woman who called in to WTMA during the presidential primaries who claimed she liked former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, but could not vote for him because he rejected evolution and put “religion above science.”
But we vote for leaders who place faith above facts all the time. What creationism is to fundamentalist Christianity, the belief in the strength of “diversity” is to fundamentalist liberalism. Common sense tells us the earth probably wasn’t created in seven days and is older than a few thousand years. Common sense also tells us that racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural diversity creates friction everywhere it exists.
“Alexander Isayevich Solzhenitsyn, the most famous Russian writer and historian of our age, has died at eighty-nine years of age. Solzhenitsyn was the earliest to bring first-hand knowledge of the Gulag, the Soviet system of prison colonies and labour camps, to wider Western attention. For this noble task, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 and expelled from the Soviet Union four years later, returning in 1994. After the fall of the Soviet regime, he despised Boris Yeltsin’s incompetence, identifying 1998 as the low point of Russia’s recent history. “Yeltsin decreed I be honored the highest state order,” Solzhenitsyn explained. “I replied that I was unable to receive an award from a government that had led Russia into such dire straits.”
Influenced by his experience in exile in both Switzerland and New England, Solzhenitsyn insisted on the need for local self-government in Russia.
Solzhenitsyn expressed further disappointment with the new Western imperialism being waged against Russia, embodied in the 1999 War against Serbia which turned so many Russian minds against the Western powers they had previously been quite friendly to.
Giving the 1978 Commencement Address at Harvard University, Alexander Solzhenitsyn delivered a sharp and stunning rebuke to the modern West, repudiating its liberalism, materialism, and supremacism.
“There is this belief,” Solzhenitsyn said, “that all those other worlds are only being temporarily prevented by wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension from taking the way of Western pluralistic democracy and from adopting the Western way of life. Countries are judged on the merit of their progress in this direction. However, it is a conception which developed out of Western incomprehension of the essence of other worlds, out of the mistake of measuring them all with a Western yardstick. The real picture of our planet’s development is quite different.”
He went on to describe the mentality which led the Western elites to adopt multiculturalism and pluralism, while they simultaneously lacked the courage to defend their Western culture or to challenge Communist governments which did not have the support of the peoples they governed. Solzhenitsyn described this lack of courage as “the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days”.
Solzhenitsyn went on to condemn the materialism of Western culture, fostered by the welfare state. He argued that the extreme safety and prosperity of the Western world caused Western people to be unwilling and reluctant to defend the most essential and important values that their culture and tradition were based upon, for fear of relinquishing the “physical splendour” they enjoy “to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about.”
“Alexander Solzhenitsyn died yesterday at the age of 89. Though Solzhenitsyn was most well known for his fierce opposition to totalitarian socialism in his native Russia, I will always remember him fondly as a true patriot who refused to play the role of propagandist in the service of any empire, communist or otherwise. Like his American, Cold War counterpart, George Kennan, Solzhenitsyn appreciated the beauty of smallness and the value of communal tradition. The world will miss him and could use many more like him.”
Ben Wattenberg, author of the new book Fighting Words: A Tale of How Liberals Created Neo-Conservatism (which is technically true since neoconservativism’s founding fathers were all Leftists and ex-Trotskyites), appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart last night. In defending the Iraq invasion, Wattenberg sounded about as sincere as a cheating husband trying to explain his activities to his wife, and Stewart’s counterpoints made for an uncomfortable interview.
Good. Men like Wattenberg deserve to feel uncomfortable. I honestly don’t know how they sleep at night.
Watching neocons and their fellow travelers rationalize what the U.S. has done in the Middle East is almost comical at this point. This is a good example:
The "Southern Avenger" Jack Hunter is a conservative commentator (WTMA 1250 AM talk radio) and columnist (Charleston City Paper) living in Charleston, South Carolina.
