In Search Of Conservatism Among Conservatives

[mp3t track=’04112011_Transcript1_What_conservatism_means_in_2011_edit.mp3′]Audio, Mandeville, LA –  Begin Mike Church Show Transcript –

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript
Update I – Tom Woods argues that Herman Cain boosters and supporters are not even bothering to re-arrange the Titanic’s deck chairs in their promotion of Cain as the "beau ideal of conservatism" (Mike’s term)

Woods writes: "Under Cain its only slightly less obvious. His big proposal is a revenue-neutral tax shifting. He has no plans to cut anything (and please, spare me the hell-cut-the-rate-of-growth-of-spending stuff). He supported Romney in 2008. He supported TARP he had no idea it would be used to pick winners and losers! which means on the key economic issue of our time, which Reagan budget director David Stockman calls the single greatest economic-policy abomination since the 1930s, or perhaps ever, Cain chose the Establishment over the people. He lectured free-market purists for opposing it.

You can imagine how much change we can expect from a guy like that the whole establishment lines up on one side (the New York Times, the Washington Post, the cable news commentators, John McCain, Barack Obama) and the American people on the other, and Cain goes with the establishment. But hell be a big maverick next time that happens, right?" Sure. 

Mike: So if you ask the question of those that identify themselves as being very conservative, heres what you will find: Cain leads among GOP voters who consider themselves very conservative with 38 percent of the vote. Among those who are somewhat conservative, Romney picks up 28 percent of the vote, while Cain has a mere 24 percent. So 38 percent of very conservative people say then that Herman Cain is the beau ideal, the ideal representation of what a conservative is or what conservatism is.

So then the conservative position is we will solidify the federal Leviathan in its current position. It will stay exactly where it is. We might try and stop it from growing. But weve got to put the right people in there and look at these problems. We cant just throw babies out with bathwater. We will continue our occupations of the planet. Thats if the generals tells Mr. Cain or President Cain that we should do it. We will continue our military buildup. As a matter of fact, we will double, double the patrols, double the night patrols. We will double the night patrols around Iran and anyone else that moves in the Middle East. We will lock in federal government spending as a percentage of GDP, somewhere around 21 or 22 percent. We will have a national sales tax on top of all the other taxes that we have. We will not do away with any federal agencies because Mr. Cain says thats irresponsible.

And so that is the conservative position now, which as I have always argued is the conservative position, which in my humble estimation, its just one mans opinion, is not very conservative at all. What are you conserving? So to summarize, then, conservatism today seeks to conserve the legacy of George W. Bush. Conservatism today seeks to conserve the legacy of the Dennis Hastert Congress plus two years. Conservatism today seeks to make a deal with, to make peace with, to get along with, to have parties with, to have the annual pancake dinner with the Pelosi Congress, pre-Obama. Its only what Obama has done that needs to go. Everything else that the federal Leviathan has done is magical. Its wonderful. Its whimsical. Its successful. Its exactly what the rest of us should be doing. We start proposing all these things, and were no better than liberals.

You know what I find is the most hypocritical thing in all this and about all this is this: For decades we have listened to television and radio and print conservative commentators drone on endlessly, lecturing the entire country or the world and all of conservative-dom, about how those mean, nasty, arrogant, disrespectful, Marxist, sodomite, vampire, liberal Democrats think the Constitution is a living and breathing thing. Am I right? Does anyone have any problem with having said that? Reason were in this pickle is because liberals only like the parts of the Constitution that they like. The rest of it they care not for. They dont care to use it. They dont care to abide by it. Liberals want the Constitution. They twist it. Its a living, breathing document. It can mean whatever you want it to mean. It can say whatever it is that you need it to say at any point in time. Havent we heard this? Has this not been the conservative accusation against citizens of Libtardia? Why, Mike, it has been. Yes, it has.

Well, I am here to tell you today, Friday, 4 November 2011, that that is exactly what conservatives have morphed into. This is exactly what conservatism now means. You only really agree with the parts of the Constitution that suit you. You only agree and swear an oath to uphold and defend and protect against incursion or against abuse those parts of the Constitution that you find comfort with. The rest of it, you dont have much care for it. You have certainly no desire to defend it. You certainly dont have a problem with abusing it, as we see demonstrated all across conservatism today, do we not? We have think tanks. We have almost every candidate for President. We have members of the talk radio Mafia and all the rest of them out there that have made their peace with Leviathan, regardless of if what Leviathan does comports with the Constitution.

Now, this is not to say that there has to be across-the-board hegemony on this. But I think in the principle of the thing you must agree that, if something is going to be some thing, then it must stand for something and not fall for anything. Well, apparently that is not true of conservatives or conservatism any longer. So for those of us that hold out for the slim, maybe 8, 9, 10 percent minority and were minorities inside the Republican Party. I know not if there are any minorities that agree with us in the Dumbocrat or independent strains of American political classes. But apparently our its almost like we are the Jedi knights here of the early part of the 21st Century here. And everyone else is the empire. Everyone else says, Your tired devotion to that old worn out religion is getting old. Its getting irritating and aggravating.

So for those of us that hold out and cling to this old, antiquated and fuddy-duddy notion that there can be a better way and a better life forward by not stealing from our neighbors, by simply enforcing our laws, by simply agreeing that we need to govern ourselves, by simply dropping most of the nationalism and the jingoism that goes along with so much of the war machine and the propaganda machines, by simply obeying what it is that the Constitution actually says, not what you want it to say, by adhering to the ideals. And its not just that the men that called themselves Founders, that they did not do this or that they did do that. Its that they believed in a way of life. There was a way of life. There was a I dont want to say or maybe it was an ethos. There was an ethos that governed most of what they did. And much of what we worry and fret about today, they did not have to worry and fret about because it was taboo. It just didnt happen. You just did not do certain things. But today, oh, you can do those things and get away with them. No, you dont have to worry about that. Cmon, everybody makes a mistake.

You cannot make those kinds of mistakes and pass them on through generations and hope to survive them. It seems to me also that whats going on in Eu
rope today, when we hear that, Oh, dont worry about that, thats Europe, theyre a bunch of real socialists. Theyre not like us. Oh, no. Were all in this together, brother. We are all in this together as we have walked away from the traditions and institutions and ethos that those men called Founders and even the isnt it amazing that for almost five generations after 1776, five generations, there were men that were willing, that committed their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honors to defending what the original men who committed their lives, fortunes, and sacred honors to defend. For almost five generations that happened. And then after that the percentage of people that were willing to do that began to shrink.

So if youre looking for answers at the start, at the dawn of the 21st Century, I would suggest to you that they are not found inside of what is known as modern-day conservatism. And also, the idea that we have to incrementally do this, and that this must be done, that even if we could fix our problems, that it would take decades, hell, maybe a half a century to do it when it comes to balancing the budget thats what were told I think is ridiculous. I dont think that, having studied the time of 1776 and written an audio documentary about it and then a motion picture, The Road to Independence, which you can get at my website and at Amazon.com, the men that called themselves that founding generation and those 56 men that signed the Declaration, they went from being loyal subjects of His Majesty and of the British Parliament in 1774, 1775 they were sending petitions to the King, just like we do to the President and the Congress. Please, sir, dont bother with us anymore. Cmon, man, give us a break, dude. All were saying is let us govern ourselves. They went from saying that to in May of 1776 saying, All right, thats it, weve had it. This does not take eons. But it will take forever and will never happen as long as people say that, well, its going to It took a hundred years to get into this, its going to take a hundred years to get out.

End Mike Church Show Transcript

TheKingDude

Host of the Mike Church Show on The Veritas Radio Network's CRUSADE Channel & Founder of the Veritas Radio Network. Formerly, of Sirius/XM's Patriot channel 125. The show began in March of 2003 exclusively on Sirius and remains "the longest running radio talk show in satellite radio history".

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