It will be well and vividly remembered, of course, that Bush mistakes on, say, weapons of mass destruction were morphed into “lies.” That a philosophical commitment to keeping America safe by taking the fight to enemies abroad was treated not as a serious difference of opinion or judgment but rather as evidence of a lust for deliberate murder in the mode of the infamous mass murderer of six million Jews. That this lust included a desire to murder the children of American citizens. And so on and on and appallingly and drearily so on.THE QUESTION NOW IS, should conservatives pick up the cudgel? Should Obama be Bushed in the style of Mr. Rich and his friends? For example, is President-elect Obama’s trillion dollar spending plan simply a wrong-headed (if spectacularly mammoth) example of even more government financial mistakes that will prove ruinous for generations? Or, in Rich-think, is it the mark of a venal liar (the new President Obama) scheming to rob average Americans blind in perpetuity to reward both his own political cronies and those of his party? Is the push to close Guantanamo a mistaken decision that could allow a collection of vicious killers to go free under the guise of legal protections never given before in American history? Or is it instead the action of a devious fool who has no intention of protecting American citizens because in reality he believes Americans should be murdered for their multiplicity of sins (against blacks, native Americans, all people of color etc., etc., etc.) during their history? Did Obama’s support for the election and re-election of the now-nationally infamous Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich mean that he was just doing the routine rally-around-my-party’s-nominee-for-governor dance common to all politicians? Or was he a sinister cynic and a willing participant if not a leader in the effort to elect as governor a man whose ethics were plenty visible to insiders before caught on tape trying to sell a seat in the U.S. Senate?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This is a serious question for conservatives. There are now (as there have been the last eight years) vital issues at play in the world. Issues of economics, constitutional law, national security, foreign policy, health, immigration and on and on. If conservatives start down the road of these Frank Rich-style Shallow Hal’s of the left — and doubtless there will be some unable, understandably, to resist the temptation — the conservative movement will not be back any time soon. Nor would it deserve to be. The fundamental successes of the Reagan era and, yes, of the George W. Bush presidency are devotion to ideas. In Reagan’s case it was a well thought out and deeply serious commitment to end the Cold War and put right (no pun intended) the American economy. Volumes have been written about the serious approaches inherent in launching the defense buildup that included the 600-ship Navy and Strategic Defense Initiative while rejecting the nuclear freeze or installing Pershing missiles over the vociferous objections of the American and European left. Or the intellectual work that went into supply-side economics and the understanding of tax cuts and monetary policy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Read the whole thing.<\/p>\n
And eschew the dark side.<\/p>\n
Much, much more later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
There’s an add running on some online conservative podcasts lately; paraphrasing it, it says something like “join the resistance to Obama!” Big, dumb mistake. For starters, applying military metaphors to politics and government is (unless one is fighting a war) always, always a dumb mistake. Back away. And beyond that? It’s the sort of talk […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3977","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war","category-liberal-tyranny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3977","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3977"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3977\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3977"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3977"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3977"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}