"Why conservatives must not vote for Bush"

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For one thing, there is a growing belief at the Institute that the Republicans--not just Bush, but the congressional leadership as well--have sold out traditional small-government conservatives, spending lavishly to woo cultural conservatives and big business... In contrast, New Democrats may not always talk the small-government talk, but Cato staffers note that, under Clinton, the Democrats reined in government spending and deregulated a broad swath of industries. "Perhaps we are being unfair to former President Clinton," wrote Cato fellow Veronique de Rugy for National Review Online in 2003, pointing out that Clinton reduced nondefense discretionary spending. At the same time, there is a more philosophical, and more cynical, pro-Kerry argument that has gained credence within the Institute--namely that the best way to limit government spending is to divide the parties' control between the executive and the legislative branches. And, given the GOP's advantage in Congress, the best way to affect such a division is to pull the lever for Kerry. In April, [Cato senior fellow Doug] Bandow outlined this view in a widely syndicated column (originally published in Fortune), arguing that "the biggest impetus for higher spending is partisan uniformity, not partisan identity." Therefore, he urged his conservative readers, "Vote Democratic."

There was an interesting opinion piece in yesterday's LA Times by Lee Siegel on how liberals shouldn't let complexity be used as an epithet against them and how it shouldn't deter them from action (Commentary; Election '04: a Guide for the Complexed; Relax, it's OK for liberals to hate Bush.; [HOME EDITION]
Lee Siegel. Los Angeles Times. Los Angeles, Calif.: Sep 9, 2004. pg. B.11):

Thus liberals, in order to prove their tolerant, complex liberalism, are bending over backward to accommodate the conservatives' position, which consists, in turn, of the belief that the concept of "liberal" has been betrayed by its present-day adherents and is now synonymous with the words "radical" and "intolerant."

* In matters of intellect, when you meet a contradiction, make a distinction. In politics, when you meet a contradiction, blame it on the other side. There is no intellectual beauty and little intellectual clarity in the practice of politics.

An underlying notion of conservative politics is that words and phrase of language are like territory in warfare: owned and controlled by one side or the other. [...]

George Bush, likewise, owes his election in great measure to a new language that his people engineered for him. His favorite word, for example, is "heart". This type of linguistic engineering is highly evolved in the business milieu from which conservative public relations derives, and it is the day-to-day work of countless conservative think tanks. [...]

More importantly, conservative rhetors have been systematically mapping the language that has historically been used to describe the aristocracy and the traditional authorities that serve it, and have twisted those words into terms for liberals. This tactic has the dual advantage of both attacking the aristocracies' opponents and depriving them of the words that they have used to attack aristocracy.

From now on I'm going to picture W as a Care Bear. Yeah, interesting stuff Youn. I do think Left Wing politics, and all politics, are equally interested in treating words and phrases as weapons and battlegrounds.

You talkin' to me Blount?

Fuck off with the LV shit--no self-respecting billionaire like myself would stoop to such hack coutoure.

Conservativism was never a strong point of the Bush family, as far as I can tell.

i'm not sure the "PC" thing flies as a parallel to what youn's talking about though

We're Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore

By Garrison Keillor August 26, 2004

Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party. Once,
it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed
spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their
communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all
ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier
elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat
Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element.
The genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero of D-
Day, who made it OK for reasonable people to vote Republican. He
brought the Korean War to a stalemate, produced the Interstate
Highway System, declined to rescue the French colonial army in
Vietnam, and gave us a period of peace and prosperity, in which
(oddly) American arts and letters flourished and higher education
burgeoned - and there was a degree of plain decency in the country.
Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today's. Richard Nixon
was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward
the poor.

In the years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich, the party migrated
southward down the Twisting Trail of Rhetoric and sneered at the idea
of public service and became the Scourge of Liberalism, the Great
Crusade Against the Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a gang of
pirates that diverted and fascinated the media by their sheer
chutzpah, such as the misty-eyed flag-waving of Ronald Reagan who,
while George McGovern flew bombers in World War II, took a pass and
made training films in Long Beach. The Nixon moderate vanished like
the passenger pigeon, purged by a legion of angry white men who rose
to power on pure punk politics. "Bipartisanship is another term for
date rape," says Grover Norquist, the Sid Vicious of the GOP. "I
don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the
size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the
bathtub." The boy has Oedipal problems and government is his daddy.

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of
hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based
economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of
convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking
midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts
in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks,
Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong's
moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to
diminish the rest of us, Newt's evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch
president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of
information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble
of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1
reason the rest of the world thinks we're deaf, dumb and dangerous.

Rich ironies abound! Lies pop up like toadstools in the forest! Wild
swine crowd round the public trough! Outrageous gerrymandering!
Pocket lining on a massive scale! Paid lobbyists sit in committee
rooms and write legislation to alleviate the suffering of
billionaires! Hypocrisies shine like cat turds in the moonlight! O
Mark Twain, where art thou at this hour? Arise and behold the Gilded
Age reincarnated gaudier than ever, upholding great wealth as the
sure sign of Divine Grace.

Here in 2004, George W. Bush is running for reelection on a platform
of tragedy -- the single greatest failure of national defense in our
history, the attacks of 9/11 in which 19 men with box cutters put
this nation into a tailspin, a failure the details of which the White
House fought to keep secret even as it ran the country into hock up
to the hubcaps, thanks to generous tax cuts for the well-fixed,
hoping to lead us into a box canyon of debt that will render
government impotent, even as we engage in a war against a small
country that was undertaken for the president's personal satisfaction
but sold to the American public on the basis of brazen
misinformation, a war whose purpose is to distract us from an
enormous transfer of wealth taking place in this country, flowing
upward, and the deception is working beautifully.

The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few is the
death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humanity has
survived this. The election of 2004 will say something about what
happens to ours. The omens are not good.

Our beloved land has been fogged with fear -- fear, the greatest
political strategy ever. An ominous silence, distant sirens, a
drumbeat of whispered warnings and alarms to keep the public uneasy
and silence the opposition. And in a time of vague fear, you can
appoint bullet-brained judges, strip the bark off the Constitution,
eviscerate federal regulatory agencies, bring public education to a
standstill, stupefy the press, lavish gorgeous tax breaks on the rich.

There is a stink drifting through this election year. It isn't the
Florida recount or the Supreme Court decision. No, it's 9/11 that we
keep coming back to. It wasn't the "end of innocence," or a turning
point in our history, or a cosmic occurrence, it was an event, a
lapse of security. And patriotism shouldn't prevent people from
asking hard questions of the man who was purportedly in charge of
national security at the time.

Whenever I think of those New Yorkers hurrying along Park Place or
getting off the No.1 Broadway local, hustling toward their office on
the 90th floor, the morning paper under their arms, I think of that
non-reader George W. Bush and how he hopes to exploit those people
with a little economic uptick, maybe the capture of Osama, cruise to
victory in November and proceed to get some serious nation-changing
done in his second term.

This year, as in the past, Republicans will portray us Democrats as
embittered academics, desiccated Unitarians, whacked-out hippies and
communards, people who talk to telephone poles, the party of the
Deadheads. They will wave enormous flags and wow over and over the
footage of firemen in the wreckage of the World Trade Center and
bodies being carried out and they will lie about their economic
policies with astonishing enthusiasm.

The Union is what needs defending this year. Government of Enron and
by Halliburton and for the Southern Baptists is not the same as what
Lincoln spoke of. This gang of Pithecanthropus Republicanii has
humbugged us to death on terrorism and tax cuts for the comfy and
school prayer and flag burning and claimed the right to know what
books we read and to dump their sewage upstream from the town and
clear-cut the forests and gut the IRS and mark up the constitution on
behalf of intolerance and promote the corporate takeover of the
public airwaves and to hell with anybody who opposes them.

This is a great country, and it wasn't made so by angry people. We
have a sacred duty to bequeath it to our grandchildren in better
shape than however we found it. We have a long way to go and we're
not getting any younger.

Dante said that the hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who
in time of crisis remain neutral, so I have spoken my piece, and
thank you, dear reader. It's a beautiful world, rain or shine, and
there is more to life than winning.

i like that one

But yeah, one of the best pieces of US political writing I've read for a while, if I'm not overstating things.

no, he describes a lot of people in Congress who preceded Reagan and especially the Gingrich Revolution

Kevin, in response to your question - there are still a number of 'moderate' Republicans at the state level. In my home state of Illinois, the state GOP is well-known for its hatred of conservatives (and vice-versa). I don't think they've ever been conservative in any sense of the word, for that matter. They're just a 'pro-business' party. We had an election a few years ago in which the Democrat was more conservative than the Republican.

can you imagine i have loads of money?

Sorry, the reason you don't have loads of money is because I imagined it that way. Don't worry though, wealth is a curse.

I am not enamored with John Kerry, but I am frightened to death of George Bush. I fear a secret government. I abhor a government that refuses to supply the Congress with requested information. I am against a government that refuses to tell the country with whom the leaders of our country sat down and determined our energy policy, and to prove how much they want to keep that secret, they took it all the way to the Supreme Court.

Those of you who are fiscal conservatives and abhor our staggering debt, tell your conservative friends, "Vote for Kerry," because without Bush to control the Congress, the first thing lawmakers will demand Kerry do is balance the budget.

The wonderful thing about this country is its gift of citizenship, then it's freedom to register as one sees fit. For me, as a Republican, I feel that when my party gives me a dangerous leader who flouts the truth, takes the country into an undeclared war and then adds a war on terrorism to it without debate by the Congress, we have a duty to rid ourselves of those who are taking our country on a perilous ride in the wrong direction.

---

The writer, a Republican formerly of Louisville, was Jefferson County judge from 1962-1968 and U.S. senator from Kentucky from 1968-1975.

I wouldn't call this an insurrection or anything, and you're not going to see any open statement from current GOP Congressmen or governors, I'll bet, but this is starting to turn into a clearer breaking of ranks, and there's still a week and a half to go for final decisions and quite possibly public statements. The impact? Potentially minimal, but if there's enough articulation going on that those who feel they are being directly addressed -- GOP voters/members with an inclination for wonkery and reflection in equal measure -- then the results could be interesting indeed.

Also, though I've seen a couple of declared 'liberal for Bush' pieces, they've been few and far between, and the people saying them don't include any elected officials past and present from my recollection. Correct me if I'm wrong, though.

Yes, but if Bush wins, Senator Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) will be squarely in the sights of Karl Rove's Fantastic Vengeance Machine (tm) for his courageous statements about the Iraq fiasco during an election year.