AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

A different perspective on the Jeremiah Wright - Obama bruhaha:

". . . . Like everyone else, I have also been hearing a lot lately about Jeremiah Wright, former pastor of the church that Barack Obama has belonged to for 20 years.

Both men, in their different ways, have for decades been promoting the far left vision of victimization and grievances?- Wright from his pulpit and Obama as a community organizer for the radical group ACORN, as a collaborator with former Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers, and as the member of the U.S. Senate with the farthest left voting record.

Later, when the ultimate political prize?- the White House?- loomed on the horizon, Obama did a complete makeover, now portraying himself as a healer of divisions.

The difference between Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright is that they are addressing different audiences, using different styles adapted to those audiences.

It is a difference between upscale demagoguery and ghetto demagoguery, playing the audience for suckers in both cases.

People on the far left like to flatter themselves that they are for the poor and the downtrodden. But what is most likely to lift people out of poverty?- telling them that the world has done them wrong or promoting the work ethnic of the Korean girls, the dogged determination of my Harvard classmate with the newspaper in his shoe, or the self-reliance of my fellow junior high school student in Harlem who had too much pride to take charity?

Note: background on the analogies used is related elsewhere in the piece excerpted

In the real world, a sense of grievance or entitlement, as a result of the mistreatment of your ancestors, is not likely to get you very far with people who are too busy dealing with current economic realities to spend much time thinking about their own ancestors, much less other people's ancestors. , , , ,

Another seemingly unrelated experience was being in a crowd at a graveside in a Jewish cemetery last week. That crowd included people who were black, white, Asian, Catholic, Jewish and no doubt others. This country has come a long way, just in my lifetime.

. . . .We don't need people like either Jeremiah Wright or Barack Obama to take us backward. The time is long overdue to stop gullibly accepting the left's vision of itself as idealistic, rather than self-aggrandizing."
THOMAS SOWELL

Fox - I thought the point was to talk about the flaws of the conservative political philosophy etc?

It seems like you just want to try and drag the Wright thing out as long as you can, and you're looking for any platform where you can post this.

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And this is a perfect platform for it, isn't it?

What the hell? No. This is not the perfect platform. Not perfect, not even appropriate. The appropriate place is in a thread where Obama or Wright are being discussed.

Bringing it up here, only shows the shallowness of attack.

Edit: Actually, this thread is perfect. A thread that nobady reads anymore is a perfect place to put more useless on-and-on about Rev Wright.

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And yes, this is the proper forum to discuss the flaws of the conservative perspective and also the virtues of the conservative perspective and/or where the conservative perspective is superior to that of the liberal perspective. Consider again Sowell's take on it:



Conservatism does not focus on victimization nor does it presume that any group is inferior to or must be nurtured by Big Brother. Conservatism considers that point of view to be counterproductive if not destructive or down right racist.

So where better to discuss that than here?

If conservatism is so perfect then it should not require the context you are so desperately trying to create.

Sowell's article is just another article to try to liken Obama to Wright and make their actions and ideas synonymous.

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He did not make them synonymous nor did he....nor have I.....ever said that conservatism is perfect.

What he did say is that they both appeal to feelings of victimization rather than the potential within the people as the recipe to achieve their goals and dreams.

You're such a noob.

n00b is spelled with two zeros. And you like to insult my spelling.

IRt3h1337!!!1!1one!!!1uno!1!onefactorial1!

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You didn't do any research on the definition or spelling of 'noob' did you. While it can be spelled with two zeros--n00b--it does not HAVE to be spelled with two zeros and usually isn't.

Advice: Precision is not important in philosophy or mental exercises. It is essential in the field of engineering.

Are you kidding? He's never researched the spelling of any word.


noob

This is now offically the best thread in A2K.

LOL

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Another 'which candidate most reflects your views' site:

http://www.votechooser.com/

And now this. . . .

George Will has raised the questions and I think these are questions that deserve an answer or at least a philosophy--I admit I had to look up the definition for 'peripatetic'.

While I don't think any of the candidates can say specifically what they will do until they know what circumstances they will be facing, I think all should advise us that they are aware of and have given seriously consideration to these issues:

Questions For McCain
You say 'some greedy people' on Wall Street 'perhaps need to be punished.' So, government should treat greed as a crime?
May 19, 2008 Issue
by George Will

Peripatetic John McCain, the human pinball, continues to carom around the country as his rivals gnaw on each other. Although action, not reflection, is his forte, perhaps he should go to earth somewhere, while the Democrats continue the destruction, and answer some questions, such as:

• You say you are not "ready to go to war with Iran," but you also say the "one thing worse" than "exercising the military option" is "a nuclear-armed Iran." Because strenuous diplomacy has not dented Iran's nuclear ambitions, is not a vote for you a vote for war with Iran?

• You say that although Russia has blocked "everything we have tried to do" through the United Nations, you are confident that a "league of democracies" that "control so much of the world's economy" can modify the behavior of Iran, which has "a lousy economy." Does that mean war can be avoided only if France, Germany, Japan and China, which have important commercial relations with Iran, impose severe sanctions, and they break Iran's nuclear ambitions?

• Your goal in Iraq is "success," which you define as "the establishment of a generally peaceful, stable, prosperous, democratic state." Would a "generally" peaceful, stable, prosperous but authoritarian state be unacceptable? Or a mildly prosperous and "generally" stable state but one with simmering violence?-which describes a number of nations today, including Iraq? Does the task of making your four adjectives descriptive of Iraq require and therefore justify more years of military involvement in the suppression of groups that are manifestations of sectarianism, criminality and warlordism? What other nations should we police?

• In 1999, during U.S. intervention in the Balkans, you advocated mobilizing infantry and armored divisions to show Serbia's Slobodan Milosevic that there was "no self-imposed limit to our determination to liberate Kosovo from his tyranny." You described your policy as "rogue-state rollback" against those who threaten "our strategic interests and political values." How did Serbia threaten America's strategic interests? Are America's political values threatened by any state that does not practice them? If so, how long is your list of nations eligible for "rogue-state rollback"?

• You vow to nominate judges who "take as their sole responsibility the enforcement of laws made by the people's elected representatives." Their sole responsibility? Do you oppose judicial review that invalidates laws that pure-hearted representatives of the saintly people have enacted that happen to violate the Constitution? Does your dogmatic deference to popular sovereignty put you at odds with the first Republican president, who nobly insisted that there are some things the majority should not be permitted to do?-hence his opposition to allowing popular sovereignty to determine the status of slavery in the territories? Do you also reject Justice Antonin Scalia's belief that the Constitution's purpose is "to embed certain rights in such a manner that future generations cannot readily take them away"? Does this explain your enthusiasm for McCain-Feingold's restrictions on political speech, and your dismissive reference to, "quote, First Amendment rights"? Would you nominate judges who, because they think those are more than "quote … rights," doubt McCain-Feingold's constitutionality?

http://www.newsweek.com/id/136308

They aren't synonymous? What evidence for that?

Notice how those who make unsupportable statements flee the thread?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, this one is almost too dead on accurate to be funny:

No they aren't. And the burden of proof is not for me to prove that something is not. However if it was I'd start with Obama's track record. It does not illustrate the ideas of Rev Wright for which he is being criticized.

Foxfyre - People aren't fleeing, they are becomeing bored. This used to be a pretty good thread when it was a discussion about how the conservative movement has been out of phase with either it's voters or itself. Now it's just another platform for useless babel on things like Rev Wright because people elsewhere don't care anymore.

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I think it is okay to use current events, especially those which have caught the interest or imagination of the people, for illustration within a discussion of conservative values. Do you disagree that McCain is not tolerated by the left because he is more centrist than right wing? Do you disagree that both Obama and Clinton campaign as more centrist than liberal? That is what the cartoon illustrates.

Is centrist better than left wing? Or right wing? These are valid considerations for discussion.

As for Wright versus Obama, this definitely falls within the scope of conservative values that reject Marxist and socialist doctrines. If you watch and listen closely, both Wright and Obama preach a liberation theology that is softly rooted in Marxism and embraces socialism to a degree that is alarming to conservatives. The difference between the rhetoric of the two is only a matter of degree, emphasis, and semantics.

If you agree emotionally with the doctrine, it sounds really good. For conservatives who do not, it is scary stuff.

Well, it's commonly known that the encyclicals Rerum Novarum, Quadragesimo Anno, and Centesimus Annus were actually written by Marx, Engels and Lenin and not by Leo XIII, Pius XI and John Paul II.

Can you say Israel?