AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

Reagan ran on a three-point platform. He didn't promise a bunch of goodies from the national treasury. He didn't presume that government was the agent of prosperity and opportunity. Rather just the opposite.

What did we get for that? The economic and subsequent political destruction of the USSR which freed hundreds of millions of people to chart their own destinies...

…. and removal of the threat of nuclear annihilation from the USA and others. Was the cost worth it? You bet it was.

To state a fact of history without the modifiers that put that history into proper perspective distorts history.

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Reagan ran on a three-point platform. He didn't promise a bunch of goodies from the national treasury. He didn't presume that government was the agent of prosperity and opportunity. Rather just the opposite.

The bottom line on the Reagan administration is that whatever achievements were made...were made at the expense of tripling the national debt. There is no getting around that. During his administration...the national debt was tripled...and the budgets passed during those years were Reagan's...and were conservative dominated.

The Democrats acted liked pussies when Reagan was in office.

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What did we get for that? The economic and subsequent political destruction of the USSR which freed hundreds of millions of people to chart their own destinies...

Why has this nation building feature become such an integral part of conservative philosophy? Why has sticking our nose into other people's business become such an integral part of conservative philosophy?

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…. and removal of the threat of nuclear annihilation from the USA and others. Was the cost worth it? You bet it was.

Has the threat of nuclear annihilation actually been removed...or is the threat just as great as it has ever been? Has taking the nuclear capability away from the Soviet Union...and giving it to several smaller states...each with all sorts of ethnic and cultural disagreements...and each with much less security capability...really improved the situation...or has it ameliorated the threat?

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To state a fact of history without the modifiers that put that history into proper perspective distorts history.

I agree. So we both ought to be very careful of what we are asserting. I stand by what I've said so far.

Conservatives talk about reining in spending and being more fiscally prudent "and don't do it.

The liberals pretty much say they are going to spend money to provide safety nets...and they do it.

I think the liberals win that contest!

I am reminded here of something I wrote when a former governor of ours was selected to a cabinet position...and found herself dealing with a nannygate scandal. It was published in Time Magazine.

Rich conservatives spend hundreds of thousands of dollars each year on lawyers and accountants to tend to their money...and try to get their kids tended to on the cheap. Says something about priorities.

Safety nets are needed. We've gotta pay for 'em.

And if the question of “how do we do that” pops its ugly head...the answer has to be: We gotta find a way.

My suggestion runs along the lines of...

...while I agree completely with the conservative mantra that free enterprise capitalism is the surest way to prosperity...we need to tweak the system so that it allows for everyone to have plenty...before the mad scramble for who gets the lion's share of the rest. If you want to view that as cradle to the grave socialism...do so. I think that characterization is horseshit. I think we can make the capitalistic system work in a way that allows much more equitable sharing of our great wealth...without hurting or destroying any of the other fundamentals of our capitalistic system.

But you're ignoring that we got something tangible to show for that debt. Can you show much of anything tangible that we have to show for subsequent debt created by massive social spending?

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What did we get for that? The economic and subsequent political destruction of the USSR which freed hundreds of millions of people to chart their own destinies...

Why has this nation building feature become such an integral part of conservative philosophy? Why has sticking our nose into other people's business become such an integral part of conservative philosophy?...

Well schools no longer felt it necessary to conduct 'duck and cover' exercises in the classrooms

Additionally, I must point out that "sticking our nose into other people's business" may be good sometimes, when we're trying to help someone else in a bad situation.

Nation building is not a MAC principle...

But none of that has nothing to do with breaking up the USSR and freeing hundreds of millions of people to chart their own destinies.

Well schools no longer felt it necessary to conduct 'duck and cover' exercises in the classrooms. But no, the danger of nuclear weapons in the hands of irrational madmen is as real as ever, but there is no longer exists a superpower with the capability of utterly destroying us with one orchestrated attack.

We got our money's worth when the USSR came down.

Charity is best managed by the private sector.

MACs know that charity provided by the government is an inevitably corrupting influence far too tempting to politicians to use to buy votes from their contituencies and otherwise increase their personal power and fortunes.

MACs believe a moral society does take care of the truly helpless.

MALs believe that, without government intervention and provision, all but the evil rich are helpless.

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Additionally, I must point out that "sticking our nose into other people's business" may be good sometimes, when we're trying to help someone else in a bad situation.

Except that that's rarely the case. You stick your nose in other people's lives in order to secure more material wealth for yourselves. Helping others doesn't include the deaths of half a million Iraqi children, raping and torturing numerous Central American nationals, napalming villages, ...

Once the USSR came down and that threat was mostly removed, kids no longer were having nightmares about being blown to smithereens or exhibiting other anxious symptoms.

Collating these two different trends yields a picture for the entire country where the civilian death rates stayed consistently high (at around 2,500 per month) for the first eight months, changing fairly suddenly to around 1,000 per month over the last four months to the end of the year 2007. (The trend line is complicated by a single massive event in August, 2007, IBC entry k7225, which alone accounted for more than 500 of the deaths in that month.)

While violence in Baghdad apparently continues its decline, areas elsewhere exhibit less positive signs, and have shown sharp rises in some of the places where violence is most concentrated (for more on this see the following section).

Let's talk more about the "deaths of half a million Iraqi children." You say Americans killed them?

Squeezed to death

Half a million children have died in Iraq since UN sanctions were imposed - most enthusiastically by Britain and the US. Three UN officials have resigned in despair. Meanwhile, bombing of Iraq continues almost daily. John Pilger investigates

Wherever you go in Iraq's southern city of Basra, there is dust. It gets in your eyes and nose and throat. It swirls in school playgrounds and consumes children kicking a plastic ball. "It carries death," said Dr Jawad Al-Ali, a cancer specialist and member of Britain's Royal College of Physicians. "Our own studies indicate that more than 40 per cent of the population in this area will get cancer: in five years' time to begin with, then long afterwards. Most of my own family now have cancer, and we have no history of the disease. It has spread to the medical staff of this hospital. We don't know the precise source of the contamination, because we are not allowed to get the equipment to conduct a proper scientific survey, or even to test the excess level of radiation in our bodies. We suspect depleted uranium, which was used by the Americans and British in the Gulf War right across the southern battlefields."
Under economic sanctions imposed by the United Nations Security Council almost 10 years ago, Iraq is denied equipment and expertise to clean up its contaminated battle-fields, as Kuwait was cleaned up. At the same time, the Sanctions Committee in New York, dominated by the Americans and British, has blocked or delayed a range of vital equipment, chemotherapy drugs and even pain-killers. "For us doctors," said Dr Al-Ali, "it is like torture. We see children die from the kind of cancers from which, given the right treatment, there is a good recovery rate." Three children died while I was there.

Six other children died not far away on January 25, last year. An American missile hit Al Jumohria, a street in a poor residential area. Sixty-three people were injured, a number of them badly burned. "Collateral damage," said the Department of Defence in Washington. Britain and the United States are still bombing Iraq almost every day: it is the longest Anglo-American bombing campaign since the second world war, yet, with honourable exceptions, very little appears about it in the British media. Conducted under the cover of "no fly zones", which have no basis in international law, the aircraft, according to Tony Blair, are "performing vital humanitarian tasks". The ministry of defence in London has a line about "taking robust action to protect pilots" from Iraqi attacks - yet an internal UN Security Sector report says that, in one five-month period, 41 per cent of the victims were civilians in civilian targets: villages, fishing jetties, farmland and vast, treeless valleys where sheep graze. A shepherd, his father, his four children and his sheep were killed by a British or American aircraft, which made two passes at them. I stood in the cemetery where the children are buried and their mother shouted, "I want to speak to the pilot who did this."

This is a war against the children of Iraq on two fronts: bombing, which in the last year cost the British taxpayer £60 million. And the most ruthless embargo in modern history. According to Unicef, the United Nations Children's Fund, the death rate of children under five is more than 4,000 a month - that is 4,000 more than would have died before sanctions. That is half a million children dead in eight years. If this statistic is difficult to grasp, consider, on the day you read this, up to 200 Iraqi children may die needlessly. "Even if not all the suffering in Iraq can be imputed to external factors," says Unicef, "the Iraqi people would not be undergoing such deprivation in the absence of the prolonged measures imposed by the Security Council and the effects of war."

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In Washington, I interviewed James Rubin, an under secretary of state who speaks for Madeleine Albright. When asked on US television if she thought that the death of half a million Iraqi children was a price worth paying, Albright replied: "This is a very hard choice, but we think the price is worth it." When I questioned Rubin about this, he claimed Albright's words were taken out of context. He then questioned the "methodology" of a report by the UN's World Health Organisation, which had estimated half a million deaths. Advising me against being "too idealistic", he said: "In making policy, one has to choose between two bad choices . . . and unfortunately the effect of sanctions has been more than we would have hoped." He referred me to the "real world" where "real choices have to be made". In mitigation, he said, "Our sense is that prior to sanctions, there was serious poverty and health problems in Iraq." The opposite was true, as Unicef's data on Iraq before 1990, makes clear.

The irony is that the US helped bring Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party to power in Iraq, and that the US (and Britain) in the 1980s conspired to break their own laws in order, in the words of a Congressional inquiry, to "secretly court Saddam Hussein with reckless abandon", giving him almost everything he wanted, including the means of making biological weapons. Rubin failed to see the irony in the US supplying Saddam with seed stock for anthrax and botulism, that he could use in weapons, and claimed that the Maryland company responsible was prosecuted. It was not: the company was given Commerce Department approval.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguardian/2000/mar/04/weekend7.weekend9

What is the real death toll in Iraq?
The Americans learned one lesson from Vietnam: don't count the civilian dead. As a result, no one knows how many Iraqis have been killed in the five years since the invasion. Estimates put the toll at between 100,000 and one million, and now a bitter war of numbers is raging. Jonathan Steele and Suzanne Goldenberg report
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Lieutenant General Tommy Franks, who led the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan during his time as head of US Central Command, once announced, "We don't do body counts." This blunt response to a question about civilian casualties was an attempt to distance George Bush's wars from the disaster of Vietnam. One of the rituals of that earlier conflict was the daily announcement of how many Vietnamese fighters US forces had killed. It was supposed to convince a sceptical American public that victory was coming. But the "body count" concept sounded callous - and never more so than when it emerged that many of the alleged guerrilla dead were in fact women, children and other unarmed civilians.

Foxfyre...the Democrats, with Tip O'Neill or without Tip O'Neill, were pussies when Reagan was in office...and pretty much have been pussies ever since. They seemed to have developed a bit of spine lately. I hope it sticks.

As for something tangible in tripling our national debt...yeah...we got three times as much debt. Not a hell of a lot else. The downfall of the Soviet Union seemed to be coming. Communism simply did not work! All the bluster from Reagan was just that, blustere...and nobody, not you, not me, not anybody...can tell if the bluster truly helped speed the process up.

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Nation building is not a MAC principle...

You brought it up as one of the objectives of the tripling of our debt! I commented on it.

But none of that has nothing to do with breaking up the USSR and freeing hundreds of millions of people to chart their own destinies.

Not sure what you meant to say here!

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Well schools no longer felt it necessary to conduct 'duck and cover' exercises in the classrooms. But no, the danger of nuclear weapons in the hands of irrational madmen is as real as ever, but there is no longer exists a superpower with the capability of utterly destroying us with one orchestrated attack.

We got our money's worth when the USSR came down.

So...the two items you brought up as making the tripling of our national debt reasonable were:

Freeing hundreds of millions of people to chart their own destinies. (Which is a form of nation building and which you now say is not a MAC principle)...and

removal of the threat of nuclear annihilation from the USA and others...

which you now say hasn't really happened.

So why are you trying to make it seem Reagan's tripling of our national debt is not a big deal????

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Charity is best managed by the private sector.

No it isn't!

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MACs know that charity provided by the government is an inevitably corrupting influence far too tempting to politicians to use to buy votes from their contituencies and otherwise increase their personal power and fortunes.

Yeah...MAC's think that. But they also think that Republican presidents are more fiscally responsible than Democratic presidents...and that is close to being absurd

So...who cares what MAC's think about this"except MAC's?

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MACs believe a moral society does take care of the truly helpless.

Really! You'd never prove it by the way most conservatives act! I think most of them don't really give a rat's ass about the “truly helpless”...and one of their preoccupations seems to be dumbing down the definition of “truly helpless” so that their greed and lack of empathy isn't so transparent...and doesn't seem so gruesome.

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MALs believe that, without government intervention and provision, all but the evil rich are helpless.

Yeah...they are a bunch of assholes, aren't they. But for MAC's to be pointing that out is like wart hogs pointing out that water buffalo are ugly animals.

Well, essentially, yes.

X = After surge.

Civilians killed in Baghdad.


Civilians killed out of Baghdad.

How do you know they were killed by Americans?

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Collating these two different trends yields a picture for the entire country where the civilian death rates stayed consistently high (at around 2,500 per month) for the first eight months, changing fairly suddenly to around 1,000 per month over the last four months to the end of the year 2007. (The trend line is complicated by a single massive event in August, 2007, IBC entry k7225, which alone accounted for more than 500 of the deaths in that month.)

While violence in Baghdad apparently continues its decline, areas elsewhere exhibit less positive signs, and have shown sharp rises in some of the places where violence is most concentrated (for more on this see the following section).

Well both Gorbachev and Yeltsin publicly gave Reagan the credit. That was the same Gorbachev who, with tears in his eyes, attended Reagan's funeral. You don't earn respect like that without meriting it.

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Let's talk more about the "deaths of half a million Iraqi children." You say Americans killed them?

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Squeezed to death

Half a million children have died in Iraq since UN sanctions were imposed - most enthusiastically by Britain and the US...

What you're saying is unclear. Were these half million children killed by economic hardships caused by the sanctions, or by bombs, or by pollutants in the air?

Nation building is not a MAC principle EXCEPT that MACs do not object to helping a vanquished foe rebuild into better, peaceful entity who will be a friend to the USA. We did that with Germany and Japan and are attempting to do that in Iraq.