Gottfried: What is Conservative About Middle East Colonization?

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – Gottfried has an interesting thing about Jeffersonians at American Conservative magazine this morning.  If you took my challenge and my homework assignment and read the actual transcript of the debate, you would have read that there were two men on stage that were jousting over which one was going to spend the most amount of money on the failed socialist program known as Medicare.  You would have discovered which one was going to spend the most amount of money on the failed programs we have that train people to work.  They’re called job training programs.  I could continue to list.  You would have seen an argument over which man was going to unconstitutionally continue the Department of Education and which one would hire the most new teachers.  Read the transcript.  It’s in there.

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Gottfried has an interesting thing about Jeffersonians at American Conservative magazine this morning.  If you took my challenge and my homework assignment and read the actual transcript of the debate, you would have read that there were two men on stage that were jousting over which one was going to spend the most amount of money on the failed socialist program known as Medicare.  You would have discovered which one was going to spend the most amount of money on the failed programs we have that train people to work.  They’re called job training programs.  I could continue to list.  You would have seen an argument over which man was going to unconstitutionally continue the Department of Education and which one would hire the most new teachers.  Read the transcript.  It’s in there.

Caller:  Rainbows and unicorns.

Mike:  I know.

Caller:  They’re getting the money from the same places.  I don’t buy it.  I don’t know.  I just saw an article in the Post from a friend about Honduras, about them opening up a new city based on free market.  I think I’m moving to Honduras.

Mike:  Switzerland remains an option.  The Canadians seem to have done a better job at managing their leviathan when it got too large than we are currently doing, probably because there’s a lot more money involved.  There may be other options.  There are little islands in the Pacific we could probably head to.  We should probably find us an atoll out there somewhere and make a break.  Interesting observation here from Paul Gottfried at The American Conservative magazine this morning, “Defining Conservative Down.”

[reading]

George Will’s observations about political labels are highly questionable.  He stretches the term “conservative” so far that it means whatever he (and presumably the “conservative” press) wants it to mean.  Judging by polls, the majority of Americans stand well to the left on social issues of where the American left and even the European far left used to be positioned.  European Communist Parties well into the post-World War II era were strikingly traditional about gender roles, immigration, and gay rights –- certainly in comparison to where most American voters currently stand.  Our corporate income tax rates are the highest in developed world, and the percentage of our population that does not pay federal income tax seems to be higher than what one finds in most “progressive” European countries.  And lest I forget, those who were ranting at the GOP convention about our duty to spread human rights globally did not sound even vaguely “conservative.”  They seemed to be imitating the zealots of the French Revolution who sought to carry their “Rights of Man” at bayonet point to the entire human race.  No one has ever explained to me how this radical revolutionary foreign policy is in any sense conservative.

Since the terms “conservative” and “liberal” are now mostly empty rhetorical phrases, it is not surprising that Obama voters are being classified as inconsistent “conservatives.”  Why not call them Martians?  The operative terms exist in order to differentiate mostly similar products.  To me this overlap is far more obvious than those distinctions the media would like us to emphasize.  According to Will, Americans consider themselves to be conservative rather than liberal by a ratio of two to one.  But this matters about as much as the fact that some voters have black hair and others brown hair.  [Mike: This is what I wanted to point out.  This describes people that listen to and get their daily [r]epublican bread from this radio program and our continuing historical, moral, and gentlemanly research towards these things.]  The real difference is between those who seek to dismantle our centralized administrative state, with its apparatus of behavioral control, and those who support its continuation and inevitable growth.  On one side we have the authorized but often indistinguishable “conservatives” and “liberals,” and on the other side, a small percentage of the adult population standing alone and voting for a third party that is not likely to get anywhere.

I’d be happy if we changed our current terminology to something as descriptively useful as “social democrats A” and “social democrats B.”  And I make this suggestion not as a libertarian (which I am not) but as someone who favors accurate labeling.  It would be nice never again to have to gaze at anything like Will’s remarks about his “cognitive dissonance” in noticing that some “conservatives” vote for the Dems.  His labeling problem is certainly not mine.

[end reading]

Mike:  I like the part about the real differences between those who are comfortable with the leviathan, welfare, post-FDR, aconstitutional, national democracy state and those that wish to dismantle it.  There’s another option.  You don’t have to dismantle it.  The only problem with not dismantling it and going your own way is that if you go your own way and you become Venezuela to the remaining states of the union, it won’t be long before the union that you were formerly a member of begins looking for brown people in our new country or republic to bomb.  It is not peril-free to decentralize and break this thing down, but it is the inexorable course of human history.  It’s going to happen.  It will happen, otherwise we will be what we despise.  We will become China with all its attendant potential, yet still attached to that top-down, central planning, Communist methodology.

End Mike Church Show Transcript