AMERICAN CONSERVATISM IN 2008 AND BEYOND

From that Pew poll:



And the link:
http://people-press.org/report/517/political-values-and-core-attitudes

Both parties continue to lose favor with the general public, but the Democrats more so at a faster rate since President Obama took office. It would appear that a lot of folks are not all that pleased with the way that things are going.

But people like Colin Powell want the party to be more centrist even after we just lost an election by 10 million votes when we ran the most liberal candidate ever to head a GOP ticket.

Foxfyre wrote:

But people like Colin Powell want the party to be more centrist even after we just lost an election by 10 million votes when we ran the most liberal candidate ever to head a GOP ticket.

yeah, you took a moderate candidate, and then had him run a ultra conservative campaign then paired him up with an anti-intellectual-super conservative poster child Sarah Palin.

I love that when you lose to the liberals, it was the (claimed) liberal qualities of the conservative's campaign that you give credit to the loss.

McCain certainly had the disadvantage after Bush. People just don't want the right-wing agenda. Deal with it. Mourn if you must, but cut the dishonesty.

T
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I think, on balance, that those moves help [us]," said the chief of U.S. Central Command. "In fact, I have long been on record as having testified and also in helping write doctrine for interrogation techniques that are completely in line with the Geneva Convention. And as a division commander in Iraq in the early days, we put out guidance very early on to make sure that our soldiers, in fact, knew that we needed to stay within those guidelines.

With respect to Guantanamo,I think that the closure in a responsible manner, obviously one that is certainly being worked out now by the Department of Justice -- I talked to the Attorney General the other day [and] they have a very intensive effort ongoing to determine, indeed, what to do with the detainees who are left, how to deal with them in a legal way, and if continued incarceration is necessary -- again, how to take that forward. But doing that in a responsible manner, I think, sends an important message to the world, as does the commitment of the United States to observe the Geneva Convention when it comes to the treatment of detainees.
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http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/o/orwell/george/o79n/
NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR by George Orwell
...
APPENDIX.
The Principles of Newspeak
Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles in ‘The Times’ were written in it, but this was a TOUR DE FORCE which could only be carried out by a specialist. It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or Standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050.
...
It was impossible to translate any passage of Oldspeak into Newspeak unless it either referred to some technical process or some very simple everyday action, or was already orthodox (GOODTHINKFUL would be the Newspeak expression) in tendency. In practice this meant that no book written before approximately 1960 could be translated as a whole. Pre-revolutionary literature could only be subjected to ideological translation"that is, alteration in sense as well as language. Take for example the well-known passage from the Declaration of Independence:

WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT, THAT ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL, THAT THEY ARE ENDOWED BY THEIR CREATOR WITH CERTAIN INALIENABLE RIGHTS, THAT AMONG THESE ARE LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS. THAT TO SECURE THESE RIGHTS, GOVERNMENTS ARE INSTITUTED AMONG MEN, DERIVING THEIR POWERS FROM THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED. THAT WHENEVER ANY FORM OF GOVERNMENT BECOMES DESTRUCTIVE OF THOSE ENDS, IT IS THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO ALTER OR ABOLISH IT, AND TO INSTITUTE NEW GOVERNMENT...

It would have been quite impossible to render this into Newspeak while keeping to the sense of the original. The nearest one could come to doing so would be to swallow the whole passage up in the single word CRIMETHINK. A full translation could only be an ideological translation, whereby Jefferson’s words would be changed into a panegyric on absolute government.
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blah blah blah racist nonsense blah blah

Rasmussen Reports notes the following:

Daily Presidential Tracking Poll
Tuesday, May 26, 2009.
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Tuesday shows that 31% of the nation's voters now Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Thirty percent (30%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of +1. That’s the lowest positive rating yet received by the new President .

end of quote

THE LOWEST POSITIVE RATING RECEIVED BY THE NEW PRESIDENT!!!!!

And this is only four or five months since BO has been elected!!!!

The Republicans in the House and in the Senate( those up for re-election) are hoping that the Community Organizer from Chicago keeps fouling up, contradicing himself, endorsing the Bush policies he eschewed in his campaign and raising the Unemployment Rate.

It is possible that the election in 2010 will produce a Democratic Party that did not know what hit it--somewhat like the Democratic Party in 1994!

Yup. But people like Colin Powell want the party to be more centrist even after we just lost an election by 10 million votes when we ran the most liberal candidate ever to head a GOP ticket. I think General Powell's advice is not wise to follow on that score. John McCain looks like a conservative extremist compared to Barack Obama, but I don't think the GOP is losing members because it emulates conservative values, but it is losing members because it has abandoned so many conservative values.

The GOP does need to distance itself from the more radical extremists in its midst and not include agenda on its platform that should not be prerogative of the federal government. But it does NOT need to become more liberal.