The myth of conservative strength: Several not-so-conservative conservative ideals proven wrong when given the chance

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There are many examples of the failed philosophy of neo (new) conservatism, such as the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute , the Project for New American Century, and last but not least, financial ‘innovation’ in the economy.  You can argue until you are blue in the face about philosophy and theory, but some evidence is empirical.  It just can’t be argued.  The outcome, or the results, of particular programs and policies in action speak for themselves, similar to how if you mix water, milk, eggs, and Bisquick just right you get pancakes.

The WPRI was a group that had advocated for school choice vouchers in Milwaukee.  After the program was instituted and studied, they issued this report which said, among other things:

“The report you are reading did not yield the results we had hoped to find,” George Lightbourn, a senior fellow at the institute, wrote in the paper’s first sentence. 

On the same topic of vouchers but not from the same report, I spent a day in Jefferson City speaking with a local Republican State Representative at the time named Jim Lembke.  It was a very cordial conversation on education policy in the Missouri.  However, the conversation ended quite abruptly after I said to him:

My grandfather was a conservative.  (I like to call him an Eisenhower conservative.) And as I understand it, in his day, they believed that public tax dollars should not be used for private purposes.  In relation to vouchers, what ever happened to that conservative ideal?

Then there is The Project for a New American Century, a conservative think tank formed during the Clinton Administration and whose membership included the likes of Steve Forbes, Bill Kristol, William J. Bennett, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Bolton, Robert Kagan, Richard L. Armitage, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, “Scooter” Libby, Dan Quayle, and more. They penned a letter that said some of the following (keep in mind, this was before 9/11 and a few years before W. was ever elected POTUS):

“That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power.”

“Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction”

“Such uncertainty will, by itself, have a seriously destabilizing effect on the entire Middle East.”

“a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard…”

“…removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy.”

“…If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country. If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our interests and our future at risk.

Of course, we know how all of that worked out.  $150 a barrel for oil, $10 billion a month in Iraq Afghanistan, oh, and no Weapons of Mass Destruction.  Notice how almost all of the people mentioned in the letter to President Clinton seen here ended up in the Bush Administration.

The phrase that freaks me out the most from the Project for a New American Century is an excerpt from the following paper:

Further, the process of transformation,
even if it brings revolutionary change, is
likely to be a long one, absent some
catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a
new Pearl Harbor. Domestic politics and
industrial policy will shape the pace and
content of transformation as much as the
requirements of current missions.

And last but not least, the financial market.  So far, we have talked about two of the items that the conservatives are traditionally given credit for as their strength.  Taxes, Defense, and now Finance.  It is clear that their strength in these areas is nothing more than a myth, and a very damaging myth at that.  Here is the latest from Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke:

“One would be forgiven for concluding that the assumed benefits of financial innovation are not all they were cracked up to be,” the Fed chairman said today in a speech at the central bank’s community affairs conference in Washington. “The damage from this turn in the credit cycle — in terms of lost wealth, lost homes, and blemished credit histories — is likely to be long-lasting.”

Bernanke Says Crisis Damage Likely to Be Long-Lasting (Update2) - Bloomberg.com

Man speaks truth to the hogwash at a Tea Party

DaddyHogwash.com has been paying extra attention to the ignorance of the Tea Parties because, well, it is a bunch of hogwash.  It is amazing how uninformed these people are.  A more appropriate name would be the Boston Hate Parties.

Watch this guy catch the ignorance red-handed:

Churches around the world make Playboy’s Virgin Mary edition a hit!

Put this one down for more stupidity.  I mean really, I think the best thing that could ever happen to a movie, or a magazine, or a book is to have a major national organization condemn, boycott, or burn it.  I would have never heard of this edition of the magazine if the church had just ignored it and taken the high road.  Every time a priest or church speaks out about it and calls it ‘blasphemous’ it just gets printed and displayed again.

Perhaps communications and public relations should be a part of theology training?

Case and point.  My father-in-law is a Catholic deacon.  He told me a few years back that some of the people of his parish approached him about condemning the movie Dogma with Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.  He politely let the lady know that if you would want the movie to be a hit, that is a sure way to make it so.  Up until that point, he had not even heard of the movie.  Now he has a little figurine of ‘Buddy Jesus’ on his desk.

I hope some church’s gather around and boycott DaddyHogwash.com.  “Bring it on,” as my buddy George Bush likes to say.

Priest: Playboy cover resembling Mary ‘desperate,’ ‘blasphemous’ - CNN.com

(CNN) — Playboy magazine issued an apology Monday for the cover of its Mexican edition, which features an Argentine model in what many observers say is meant to be a depiction of the Virgin Mary.
Playboy issued an apology after outrage erupted over this cover of the magazine’s Mexican edition.

Playboy issued an apology after outrage erupted over this cover of the magazine’s Mexican edition.

Playboy Mexico has said the cover was not meant to portray the Virgin Mary, despite being printed just days before the Feast of the Immaculate Conception and the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe — both Catholic holidays centering on the Virgin Mary.

CNN’s Rick Sanchez sat down with CNN Español’s Glenda Umana and Father Albert Cutie, a Radio La Paz host, to discuss the reaction among Mexicans and Catholics. The transcript has been edited for clarity.

Peggy Noonan says, “At least Bush kept us safe” - Hey! Where did the twin towers go?

“At least Bush kept us safe, at least Bush kept us safe, at least Bush kept us safe.”  I think if you keep saying it, you might believe it.  Has everyone forgotten that when Bush was elected we had two very tall twin towers in New York that no longer exists!  What kind of bumbling blow hard could ever say, “At least Bush kept us safe” with a straight face.  Especially when you picture him sitting there reading children’s books even while knowing the attacks were happening.

Not only did 9/11 happen under his watch, he completely bumbled the after-strikes.  It is widely believed we had Bin Laden at Tora Bora, but the sudden shift in focus back to Iraq, which had nothing to do with September 11, 2001, allowed him to escape, and eventually to regroup along the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and everything to do with securing a strategic position in the middle of oil country.  Now, Afghanistan and Iraq, both, are infected, bubbling, boiling, blisters on the backside of America.

Here is the question of the day:

Do you think that if broccoli was the number one export of Iraq that we would have over 100,000 American troops there today?

Just picture your average Republican with a long brown haired wig, and a blue and white checkered farm dress, and red, ruby slippers, tapping his heels together and screaming at the top of his lungs….

“At least Bush kept us safe,” “At least Bush kept us safe,” “At least Bush kept us safe!”

Petty Noonan - Back to the Christmas gathering. There was no grousing about John McCain, and considerable grousing about the Bush administration, but it was almost always followed by one sentence, and this is more or less what it was: “But he kept us safe.” In the seven years since 9/11, there were no further attacks on American soil. This is an argument that’s been around for a while but is newly re-emerging as the final argument for Mr. Bush: the one big thing he had to do after 9/11, the single thing he absolutely had to do, was keep it from happening again. And so far he has. It is unknown, and perhaps can’t be known, whether this was fully due to the government’s efforts, or the luck of the draw, or a combination of luck and effort. And it not only can’t be fully known by the public, it can hardly be fully known by the players at all levels of government. They can’t know, for instance, of a potential terrorist cell that didn’t come together because of their efforts.

‘At Least Bush Kept Us Safe’ - WSJ.com.

Embarrassing actions of Justice Uncle T(h)om(as) in unworthy Constitutional attack on Obama

All Barack Obama had to do was challenge Justice Clarence Thomas in public once, just once, and you had to know he would get a legal challenge out of it.

“I don´t think that he was a strong enough jurist or legal thinker at the time, for that elevation, setting aside the fact that I profoundly disagree with his interpretations of a lot of the constitution.”

American Chronicle | Method to Thomas Madness on Obama Birth Certificate.

As you can probably imagine, that really infuriated Uncle T(h)om(as) who has spent his entire life ingratiating himself to the powers that be to get to his Supreme Court decision.

Most people think of Barack Obama as a community organizer because that was a very large part of his campaign.  Most even know that he was also a professor at the University of Chicago.  However, most people don’t know what he was a professor of.  Obama was a professor of Constitutional law.

Considering the assault on the Constitution waged by Bush and Cheney and company, I can not think of a better person that Obama to restore the sole document that makes America better than any other country on Earth.

That being said, Uncle T(h)om(as) isn’t going to make it very easy on him.  It is almost embarrassing that U.T. has decided to pick up this fight, but it is really par for the course:

The harebrained lawsuit demanding disclosure whether President elect Barack Obama is a U.S. citizen or not was laughed out of New Jersey courts in October. A few weeks later Supreme Court Justice David Souter gave it just as short shrift. He denied a stay to get Obama removed from the ballot in that state. But that didn´t end the matter. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas saw to that. He took the almost never heard of step of reopening the issue by agreeing to put the matter to a conference vote. Thomas´s ridiculous lone wolf effort to arm twist the justices to examine the birth certificate issue made no sense to most legal experts. Obama was born in Hawaii. And he has produced more than enough evidence to back that up.

But Thomas´s legal meddle on the Obama birth certificate non-issue fits perfectly in with his jaundiced interpretation of law and its practice and his private vow to get revenge on his liberal tormentors. Obama is the latest would be victim. He almost certainly stirred Thomas´s personal ire back in August. Obama was asked at a joint church gathering with Republican rival John McCain at the mega Saddleback church in Lake Forest, California which justice he wouldn´t have nominated to the Supreme Court. He didn´t hesitate. He named Thomas. And he told why.

Thanks to Phil Gounis for the heads up on this story.

Obama National Security Team Exhibits American Altruism

In the days following 9/11, I felt very close to President Bush, as did millions of other Americans.  His approval rating was over 80%.  The country rallied around him and our immediate and decisive action on the Taliban of Afghanistan.  But then things changed.  As we are all aware, the focus shifted to Iraq, and that is when my satisfaction with Bush began to decline.

It was about motive, and it was hard to trust that Bush and Cheney were not looking for any excuse to invade Iraq and Saddam Hussein from day 1 of their administration.  And with their ties to oil, the line was blurred from the outset as to whether or not the Iraq War really was about national security, or oil, or some misguided combination of the two.

Regardless, that is history.  When Obama announced his national security team today, I felt eerily at peace with his choices.  Originally I was very uncomfortable with him picking Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State because my impression that the Clinton’s, while smart and qualified, are also known (worthy or not) to be political backstabbers.

However, when I saw the picture today of Obama, Clinton, Biden and others on the stage, the feeling came over me that we are in the best of hands.  Other than the typical ulterior motives of ego and power that possess most politicians, the real and absolute motive of this team will be what is best for America as a whole is good for all Americans in the long run.

This team, I believe, radiates a sort of American altruism.  One that believes in and respects the Constitution as the one binding document that makes us what we are, and that the idea of America is what we are protecting and fighting for, not the individuals who live contained within the borders of that idea.

This team is just more evidence that with Obama, we are in the best of hands.

Obama Introduces Clinton, National Security Team - Huffington Post

President-elect Barack Obama announced Monday that Robert Gates would remain as defense secretary, making President Bush’s Pentagon chief his own as he seeks to wind down the U.S. role in Iraq. Obama picked former campaign rival Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state.

At a news conference, Obama also introduced retired Marine Gen. James Jones as White House national security adviser, former Justice Department official Eric Holder as attorney general and Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano as secretary of homeland security.