In the Age of Obama, many conservatives are consoling themselves with this thought: Conservatism wins on the issues. Polls show majorities of Americans want less government and fewer and lower taxes; they want leaders who will stand up to our enemies; they are skeptical about the science of global warming; they want public policy to show respect for human life at all stages, and, yes, most Americans still believe marriage should remain between a man and a woman.

A Gallup poll this week showed 40 percent of Americans interviewed describe their political views as conservative, while just 21 percent self identify as liberal.

Though conservative values remain popular among Americans overall, they have never been embraced by the popular culture. Hollywood, the music industry, sports and the fashion world are all overwhelmingly liberal. In these sectors of American society, conservative positions almost always lose.

These realities make the recent Sarah Palin-David Letterman dust-up quite interesting. For decades conservatives have engaged the popular culture at their peril. Whenever conservatives pushed back against the excesses of the pop culture, they risked getting labeled bigoted, ignorant or, worst of all, prudish.

But Sarah Palin has proved that conservatives can fight the pop culture and win. That’s because while many Americans consume the entertainment of people like David Letterman, they embrace the values of people like Sarah Palin.

The controversy surrounds comments made more than a week ago by the “Late Show” host. Letterman joked that Palin, who was in New York City to attend an autism event, had bought makeup from Bloomingdale’s to update her “slutty flight attendant” look. He later added that Palin had attended a New York Yankees baseball game, and that during the seventh inning stretch Palin’s daughter had been “knocked up” by Yankees’ libidinous third baseman Alex Rodriguez.

Letterman claims he was referring to Palin’s 18-year-old daughter, Bristol, but only Palin’s 14-year-old daughter, Willow, attended the game with her mother. So Letterman ended up joking about statutory rape.

Initially, Letterman did not apologize. While jokes that sexualize kids are “crude, sexist, perverted,” as Palin stated in response to Letterman, they have sadly become a comedic staple. Watch the most popular comedians and you’ll find many jokes are intended to humiliate, demean and tear down. Throw in some disgusting sexual references and you have a perfect recipe for big laughs in today’s popular culture. And if the target of the comedian’s demeaning sexual jokes is a conservative politician, so much the better.

There is an obvious double standard. What would have happened had Letterman made the same joke about Barack Obama and his family? We know. Letterman would have been forced into early retirement, and perhaps prosecuted under some “hate crimes” statute.

Letterman then offered a snarky non-apology apology in which he insisted he had meant to suggest that Bristol, not Willow, had been “knocked up” by A-Rod. While there is a significant legal difference, only according to our cultural elites could the addition of four years transform a beyond-the-pale insinuation into an acceptable punch-line. The target of his cruel insinuations remained a young girl who, through no fault of her own, is the daughter of a political figure.

Finally, after a week, Letterman offered something closer to a legitimate apology, which Palin graciously accepted. I doubt Letterman would have apologized had he not been forced to do so. But his jokes caused a huge backlash among his viewers, some of whom formed a campaign to urge CBS to fire him.

Viewers were so irate that one “Late Show” advertiser pulled its sponsorship. Letterman was slammed by women’s groups across the ideological spectrum. Even the National Organization for Women denounced him for “snicker[ing] about men having sex with teenage girls (or women) less than half their age…”

Despite the strong backlash, some conservatives argued that Palin was wrong to call out Letterman for his outrageous remarks. One commentator predicted that critiques of Letterman would lead to a form of censorship, while a former GOP advisor said going after Letterman made Republicans look small, and insisted the entire episode was a “win-win for Letterman.”

Letterman has enjoyed a temporary ratings boost, but there’s deeper meaning in the incident. The cultural left lampoons Palin because her values and life are completely foreign to them. They find it bizarre that she hunts, prays and says things like “you betcha.’” They can’t fathom that she brought a child with Down syndrome to term and that she didn’t pressure her daughter into aborting an unexpected pregnancy.

Letterman may not know anyone who would vote for Palin or a family that looks like hers. But his Palin joke backfired in part because scores of millions of Americans are living lives that more closely resemble Palin’s life than Letterman’s. Like Palin, they pray in churches, hunt and fish and raise imperfect families with unconditional love. They are more than uneasy about the culture’s sexualization of children and its infantilization of adults.

The cultural left mocks Palin’s values, but its taunts often fail to gain traction, because Palin’s politics and principles are much more main-stream than those of her critics. Sarah Palin is a false target for the popular culture. It can’t resist the temptation to ridicule and lampoon her, but she offers too much common sense and inspiration to make for good jokes.

In the Age of Obama, pop culture elites may be excused for their over-the-top bashing of conservatives. Liberals have always controlled the popular culture, and now they control government too. They probably assume most of the country has shifted leftward and come round to their view of the world. But it hasn’t. Just ask David Letterman.

Former presidential candidate Mr. Gary Bauer is president of American Values and chairman of the Campaign for Working Families.

Copyright © 2009 HUMAN EVENTS. All Rights Reserved.

In a story found at the New York Post website (http://www.nypost.com/seven/01232009/news/politics/prez_zings_gop_foe_in_a_timulating_talk_151572.htm), Obama gloats over his majority in the House and Senate while asking the GOP for support for his “stimulus” package.

In what can only be described as a strange way of asking for votes, Obama reminded the GOP that he really doesn’t need them at all.

“In an exchange with Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) about the proposal, the president shot back: ‘I won,’ according to aides briefed on the meeting.

‘I will trump you on that.’

Not that Obama was gloating. He was just explaining that he aims to get his way on stimulus package and all other legislation, sources said, noting his unrivaled one-party control of both congressional chambers.”

Then why is he asking for support? For the same reason that Pelosi did in the Fall for the original $700B TARP program: she didn’t want to be flogged for being the big spending liberal that she is. It would give her and her liberal-left colleagues political cover against being slammed for it by GOP conservatives.

So also with Obama, under the guise of “bi-partisanship.” Well, there is more than one way to interpret the election. Maybe the American people don’t want bi-partisanship. Maybe they just want the Democrats to do it. Fine. Well, if this package does for the economy what the New Deal did, the GOP might just as well tell Obama that they won’t sign on. Then there won’t be any doubt whose program it was when it fails, and the GOP moderates and spenders will not have sold us out (again).

After a GOP beating, there is always a debate between the people who want the party to become more principled and those who want to turn the GOP into a poll-driven pile of mush that they believe will be more appealing to centrists. The problem with this whole discussion is that the “we need to be more moderate” crowd tends to simply ignore a number of inconvenient facts that make their position completely untenable.

We’ve already gone the moderate route — and lost. One of the most surreal aspects of the post-2008 campaign is listening to moderates pretend that the last eight years never happened.

You say that the GOP can’t win as a small government party. Well, we’ve already tried being a big government party for the last 8 years and it failed. You think running a moderate, pro-amnesty candidate who eschews social issues is the key to winning elections? Well, that’s who we ran in 2008 and he received even less votes than George Bush did in 2004.

Basically, we have a lot of moderates in the GOP taking the same attitude that the Left used to take towards communism, “It works, but it just hasn’t been tried by the right people yet.” It didn’t make much sense when the lefties were saying it and it makes even less sense now.

A “moderate” GOP can’t generate the volunteers or money needed to win. Yes, the GOP needs both moderate and conservative voters to win elections. Additionally, in certain districts and states, moderate Republicans are more electable than conservatives.

That being said, the rightward leaning media, fundraising, and campaign workers are dominated by conservatives. So, if the right side of the party is depressed, there’s not enough money or campaign workers to go around and there isn’t a strong pushback against the lies put out by Democrats.

That’s exactly what happened over the last two election cycles, when the conservative base was too demoralized to generate enough excess cash and campaign workers to float the entire Republican Party. Many of the strongest Republicans managed to survive, but the more marginal Republicans, moderates in the West and Northeast, were practically wiped out.

There can be no fiscal conservatism in D.C. without social conservatism. There are some people who think the GOP needs to kick social conservatives to the curb and focus entirely on fiscal conservatism in order to help our election prospects, but they’re missing three very important points.

#1) For the most part, fiscal conservatives are socially conservative and vice-versa. Yes, there are socially conservative Republicans who aren’t fiscal conservatives (See George Bush for example), but they’re not typical.

#2) In Congress, although there are exceptions, the overwhelming majority of Republicans who aren’t socially conservative, aren’t fiscally conservative either. Show me a Republican in Congress who’s pro-abortion at least 75% of the time, I will show you a Republican who’s a big spender, too.

#3) People who are most concerned about traditional values make up such a large block of voters that the GOP would be lucky to hold 100 seats in the House and 30 seats in the Senate without their help. So, if the social conservatives are sidelined, the fiscal conservatives will be sidelined by default, too, because they won’t have the votes to get elected.

The GOP’s drop amongst Hispanics hasn’t been caused by opposition to illegal immigration. This myth, propagated by proponents of amnesty and open borders, doesn’t bear up under scrutiny.

In 2000, George Bush received 35% of the Hispanic vote. In 2004, although the exit polls showed that Bush got 44% of the Hispanic vote, they were horribly flawed. Realistically, Bush probably pulled in 38%-39% of the Hispanic vote that year. In 2006, the GOP pulled 30% of the Hispanic vote and McCain captured about 31% of the Hispanic vote in 2008.

First off, the fact that McCain only pulled 31% of the Hispanic vote should prove once and for all that the amnesty issue doesn’t move Hispanic votes over to the GOP. If it did, certainly McCain, who has been the biggest advocate of amnesty in the entire Republican Party would have been the candidate to do it.

Additionally, trying to pin the GOP’s drop with Hispanics on illegal immigration makes very little sense given that there are plenty of other groups whose support has dropped a similar amount over the same period of time as the GOP has become less popular.

For example, take the swing in the demographic numbers, from roughly 38% in 2004 to 31% in 2008. Now compare it to the shifts we saw in other demographic groups over that same time period: from 2004 to 2008 our Catholic support dropped 7 points, urban voters dropped 8 points, and non-religious voters dropped 8 points. In other words, the GOP has bled out with a large number of groups as it has become less popular, not just Hispanics. Since that’s the case, as we start to go in the right direction again, we have every reason to think the GOP can reach the same level of support from Hispanics it did in 2000 and 2004, whether we back amnesty or not.

The GOP cannot win without the conservative media. You may like talk radio hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity or you may not, but the reality is that the GOP absolutely cannot win elections when they’re telling everyone who’ll listen that the Republican Party is mediocre.

There are two reasons for that.

#1) Those radio hosts are popular in the first place largely because the conservatives who make up the GOP’s base agree with them. If the talk show hosts are not happy with something, their listeners probably aren’t happy with it either — and making your core supporters happy is the first lesson of Politics 101.

#2) Because the mainstream media is so heavily biased towards the Democratic Party, most independent voters take what they say about Republicans with a grain of salt. However, independents perceive conservative talk radio hosts and their listeners to be on the “GOP’s side.” So, if they hear criticism of the Republican Party from those people, they tend to think it must be true.

So, Republicans can afford to have Keith Olbermann and Katie Couric telling people that they stink, but they can’t win elections if conservative talk radio hosts, columnists, and bloggers are ripping them up one side and down the other.

Copyright © 2008 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

The surpise of the election locally (sort of) was the switch of John Woodward from Republican to Democrat in order to run against Sam Rohrer.

Supporting Woodward was ex-GOP Party Chairman James J. Manganell, who also contributed money to “ActBlue,” a left wing Democratic web-based fundraising group. Also helping him were ex-GOP State Representative James Gallen, Fred Mogel, an erstwhile Republican attorney from Wyomissing, and even, allegedly, Republican ex-Sheriff, Barry Jozwiak.

Of course, this news is all anyone needs to know, to know why Manganell is an ex-chairman. Manganell was a flunky for former State Treasurer Barbara Hafer. He put his ex-used car salesman skills to work selling her Invest program. Jim’s Republican values have always been rather suspect, which is why he follows his old boss, Barbara Heifer, into well-deserved political obscurity.

The Wyomissing country-club Republican crowd has always suspected that the 128th District stopped at the border of Wyomissing. The mere fact that Sam keeps winning has not dissuaded them. Hence, their latest embarrassment.

A massive Democratic turn-out, oodles of money, and heavy duty arm-twisting wasn’t even enough. If they couldn’t beat Sam this time, they will never do it.

Which is as it should be. John Woodward is nothing but a small-minded man from Wyomissing that evidently thinks that money and influence can buy anything. He has a promounced prejudice against those who are conservative Christians, an attitude that I have experienced personally. I have not set foot in his “meat-market” of a bar in years, despite many oppotunities to do so.

He is now a liberal Democrat. Here’s a picture of John accepting a check from a far-left socialist local PAC.

As far as I’m concerned, his friends can join him. Don’t let the door hit your butts on the way out.

The Great Election of 2008 is over. Barack Obama is the 44th President of the United States.

Now is the time to ask what this election was about.

Here’s what this election was not about: Barack Obama. It was not about his record: He didn’t have one. It was not about his views, which are radical in the extreme. It was not about his associations: Americans didn’t care about Wright, Ayers, or Khalidi. The media didn’t want Americans to know about Obama. Obama didn’t want Americans to know about Obama. And Americans didn’t want to know about Obama.

This election was not about John McCain. No one cared about McCain, except the liberal media that nominated him president after one win in New Hampshire.

This election was not about President George W. Bush. Bush was used as a punching bag by both sides — and by election time, he was completely irrelevant.

And this election was certainly not about the issues. In the general election, Barack Obama campaigned as a centrist, titularly abandoning his more extreme positions to do so. He lied about his policies. And no one cared.

This election was about one thing and one thing only: Americans’ puerile need for unity through self-congratulatory, cathartic membership in a broad, transformative political movement.

For eight years, Americans have been engaged in hostile politics. And after eight years, Americans were sick of it.

That isn’t to America’s credit. Hostile politics — hard-fought political conflict over the issues that matter — is not a bad thing. It is precisely the sort of messy republicanism the founders embraced. Early elections were replete with mudslinging, character assassination, brawls and scandals. They were also replete with some of the most substantive debate on policy ever put before mankind.

Apparently, we’re no longer interested in the dirty business of politics. We’d rather feel ourselves part of a high-minded movement. Not the sort of movement that espouses particular policies — not the antiwar movement, or the pro-life movement — those movements are too divisive. We want to be part of a movement that is solely about us.

Barack Obama was the vessel for that movement. He was an utter cipher. But he embodied the need of the American public for unity by hearkening back to the ultimate unifying feature of American life: third-grade slogans. He spouted Hope and Change. He told us, “We’re All Americans.” He told us, “Yes, We Can.”

From any other politician, it would be ridiculous drivel. From a black candidate, it was inspiring. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson didn’t talk like that — they spoke the language of division. Because Obama spoke the language of unity, he had to be a moderate. So went our logic.

Barack Obama had us from the moment he said, “Hope.” In that moment, Obama accomplished two simultaneous transformations. First, he transformed himself into a moderate. Second, he transformed himself into a messianic figure, the object of our longing: the physical embodiment of America’s progression beyond racial conflict. If America wanted to move beyond conflict, what better way than to embrace a candidate who could end all racial conflict?

And the Obama campaign subtly played on this theme. They implied that if we voted against him, we were engaging in racial hatred; some supporters even implied America would undergo a race war if he lost. That’s the last thing we wanted.

We wanted to feel good again. That is what the Great Election of 2008 was about. It was about Americans’ desire to feel a part of Something Larger. To do something together, as Americans. In today’s day and age, that Something Larger cannot be the America Ronald Reagan preached about — the left has attacked that America as racist, sexist, and selfish. That Something Larger had to be an individual who could provide us with the feeling of unity.

Barack Obama told us that we could do Something Larger simply by voting for him. When he said, “Yes We Can,” and we followed by screaming it, chanting it, shouting his name in unison, we were Doing Something Larger. We were uniting.

America has always recognized that unity for its own sake is useless at best and dangerous at worst. Unifying behind a mysterious charismatic figure promising transformational change may make us feel good, but it is a betrayal of the open and honest governmental debate our Founding Fathers sought and so many Americans have fought and died to preserve.

Americans think they grew up during Election 2008. They think they moved beyond the past. In one way they did. In another, more important way, they regressed dramatically — to a time before politics mattered. In the next four years, there will be plenty of growing up to do.

Copyright © 2008 Salem Web Network. All Rights Reserved.

I didn’t like him at all during the campaign. He is a communist, with communist friends. He attempted to campaign from the center, hiding all of his big government solutions behind a contrived concern for the middle class (as if he could even figure out what it is). I hated all the alleged Republicans (Buckley, Powell) who took the opportunity to endorse him, evidently hoping that he really couldn’t be as radical as he appeared because surely he would have to govern from the center.

However, his supporters, acting more like rock star groupies than issues-oriented political types, are not likely to settle for any less than a gigantic raid on the public treasury. Some people work for a living; others, vote for a living.

His choice of Rahm Emmanuel for his chief of staff signals that, for all the talk of bipartisanship, his White House will be bipartisan if the Republicans will only be so kind as to agree with him. Further, he will be a creature of his caucus because he will need all of their votes if he is to appease the left. Already Pelosi has tried to moderate the demands, but the radical hard left in the Congress simply gave her the verbal equivalent of “the finger.”

I urge the Republicans not to cooperate in the slightest. He has made his bed and gotten his majority. He is the Messiah: let him produce wine from water like Jesus and water from the rock like Moses by his lonesome. His first test will be backing off of his capital gains tax increase in light of the historic tanking of the market in the two days since his election. He will flunk because then he will not be able to fund the Leviathan. If McCain and Hagel and Graham want to join him, they should be encouraged to keep on stepping. The country doesn’t want “Democrat-lite” when it can get the real thing, and Republicans only win when they are true Republicans.

Palin 2012.

If Barack Obama is not a socialist, he does the best imitation of one I’ve ever seen.

Under his tax plan, the top 5 percent of wage-earners have their income tax rates raised from 35 percent to 40 percent, while the bottom 40 percent of all wage-earners, who pay no income tax, are sent federal checks.

If this is not the socialist redistribution of wealth, what is it?

A steeply graduated income tax has always been the preferred weapon of the left for bringing about socialist equality. Indeed, in the “Communist Manifesto” of 1848, Karl Marx was himself among the first to call for “a heavy progressive or graduated income tax.”

The Obama tax plan is pure Robin Hood class warfare: Use the tax power of the state to rob the successful and reward the faithful. Only in Sherwood Forest it was assumed the Sheriff of Nottingham and his crowd had garnered their wealth by other than honest labor.

“Spread the wealth,” Barack admonished Joe the Plumber.

“From each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” said old Karl in 1875. When Barbara West of WFTV in Orlando, Fla., put the Marx quote to Biden, however, Joe recoiled in spluttering disbelief.

West: “You may recognize this famous quote: ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’ That’s from Karl Marx. How is Sen. Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around?”

Biden: “Are you joking? Is this a joke?”

Biden’s better defense, however, might have be the “Tu quoque!” retort: “You, too!” — the time-honored counter-charge of hypocrisy.

Indeed, how do Republicans who call Obama a socialist explain their support for Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, welfare and the Earned Income Tax Credit? What are these if not government-mandated transfers of wealth to the middle and working class, and the indigent and working poor?

Since August, the Bush-Paulson team has seized our biggest S&L, Washington Mutual, and largest insurance company, AIG. It has nationalized Fannie and Freddie, pumped scores of billions into our banks, bailed out GM, Ford and Chrysler, and paid the $29 billion dowry for Bear Stearns to enter its shotgun marriage with JPMorgan Chase.

And with federal, state and local taxes taking a third of gross domestic product, and government regulating businesses with wage-and-hour laws, civil rights laws, environmental laws, and occupational health and safety laws, what are we living under, if not a mixed socialist-capitalist system?

Norman Thomas is said to have quit running for president on the Socialist ticket after six campaigns because the Democratic Party had stolen all his ideas and written them into its platforms.

Did Ike repeal the New Deal? Did Richard Nixon roll back the Great Society? Nope. He funded the Great Society. Did Ronald Reagan cut federal spending? Nope, defense spending soared. Bill Clinton slashed defense, but George Bush II set social spending records with No Child Left Behind and prescription drug benefits for the elderly under Medicare. Surpluses vanished, deficits returned, the national debt almost doubled.

Is the old republic then dead and gone, in the irretrievable past? Are we engaged in an argument settled before we were born?

In his 1938 essay “The Revolution Was,” Garet Garrett wrote:

“There are those who think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of the Depression, singing songs to freedom.”

Nevertheless, there is a difference not just of degree but of kind between unemployment compensation for jobless workers, welfare for destitute families, and confiscating the income of taxpayers who earned it — to hand out to chronic tax consumers who did not.

This last is the socialism Winston Churchill called “the philosophy of envy and gospel of greed.” And it is this suggestion of socialist ideology in Obama’s words that has produced the belated pause by a nation that seemed to be moving into his camp. What did Barack say in 2001?

He spoke of the inadequacy of the courts as institutions to bring about “redistributive change” in society, of the “tragedy” of the civil rights movement in losing sight of the “political and organizing activities on the ground that are able to bring about the coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change.”

Normal people don’t talk like that. Socialists do.

This is ideology speaking. This is the redistributionist drivel one hears from cosseted college radicals and the “Marxist professors” Obama says in his memoir he sought out at the university. It is the language of social parasites like William Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and Father Pfleger.

Enforced egalitarianism entails the death of excellence. For it seizes the rewards that excellence earns and turns them over to politicians and bureaucrats for distribution to the mediocrities upon whose votes they depend. One need not be Ayn Rand to see that Barack has picked up from past associates utopian notions that have ever produced nightmare states.

Mr. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Churchill, Hitler, and “The Unnecessary War”: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, “The Death of the West,”, “The Great Betrayal,” “A Republic, Not an Empire” and “Where the Right Went Wrong.”

Advertise | Privacy Policy | Terms and Conditions
Copyright © 2008 HUMAN EVENTS. All Rights Reserved.

When Mark Foley was outed as having propositioned male pages in congress, the story not only made national headlines, but partially contributed to conservatives staying home and costing the Republicans the House in 2006. Foley resigned.

When Larry Craig was accused of making gay propositions in a men’s room in Minnesota, he became a national and GOP disgrace.

Now the man who replaced Mark Foley in 2006, Democrat Tim Mahoney, running on a platform of Democratic “family values,” and won the seat in 2006, has admitted to several affairs while in his brief period in office.

Beside the obvious question of “what’s in the water down there?,” Mahoney has answered the obvious one. He will not resign because he has done nothing illegal.

Nor should he.

Because the Liberal Democrats have re-set the standards. It used to be said that hypocrisy was the tribute that vice paid to virtue. If so, the Democrats, beginning with Bill Clinton, have individualized the standard around “personal choice” so effectively that the only way a liberal can be a hypocrite is to be untrue to his or herself.

After all, the liberals in Massachusetts rewarded Gerry Studds with several more terms after he admitted to homosexual affairs with pages, and still maintain Barney Frank in office despite the accusations of a homosexual prostitution ring operating out of his home in D.C. in the past.

So, a glass raised to Congressman Mahoney. Hang in there. With the standard of morals prevalent in today’s Democratic Party, you too may have a bright future as head of the house financial services committee.

Where you will be able to inflict real damage.

So the other day I’m having lunch. I sit at a table populated with row officers and judges. One of the judges accuses me of being a “neo conservative.” I reply, in my usual diplomatic way, that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. What I’m really thinking is that he shouldn’t use big words like that, or he’ll hurt himself, but I managed not to say that. Nevertheless, as a lifelong conservative, there is nothing “neo” or “new” about it. But this had become more common as paleo-conservatives wrongfully apply it to any conservative that believes that the United States should have a proactive foreign policy, and then liberals, sensing a split in the conservative camp to their very great delight, pick up the refrain, not knowing anymore about it than the paleos. Of course, the judge was even more ignorant than this because for some reason, he thinks it applies to all who are, in his estimation, extreme conservatives, whatever that means.

The 2008 version of “neoconservative” bears little resemblance to the context that resulted in the minting of the term. As Alfred Regnery points out in his book, Upstream: The Ascendance of American Conservatism, “What is called neoconservatism in 2008 has little to do with its original inception.” He goes on to point out that the modern term is used to describe journalists, think-tank scholars, and government officials that support foreign interventionism and “big-government” conservatism.” The supporters of Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul use the term to describe those who they believe have departed from the pure libertarianism of the 1950’s as described by Frank S. Meyer.

However, “neoconservatism,” as Regnery points out, began as a term of derision applied by liberal intellectuals to colleagues, who, becoming convinced of the failure of liberal social policies as well as alarmed by the unrest of the New Left of the 1960’s, departed from the true faith and moved to the right. The most notable of these were Irving Kristol and his wife, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Norman Podhoretz and his wife, Midge Decter, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Ben Wattenberg, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Poderetz himself has stated that neoconservatives constituted “repentant liberals and leftists” that broke with Left twenty to thirty years earlier. He explains:

Strictly speaking, only those who fit this description ought to have been called neo-(i.e., new) conservatives. But partly out of ignorance and partly out of malice, the sobriquet was now applied to people like Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice, who had been conservatives all their lives, as well as to a number of younger hawks who had never been on the Left. (Norman Poderetz, World War IV, 61)

Thus, in an effort to imply that anyone who supports a hawkish stance with respect to the war on radical Islam in general and the Iraq war in particular is part of this cabal, the term “neoconservative” is applied to anyone who holds an interventionist view or endorses the “Bush doctrine” in foreign policy regardless of the wide sweep of the term. It is difficult to escape the conclusion that those who are the most eager to apply the term are those who were too cowardly to do so when the interventionism opposed the Soviet Union since doing so would have been roundly condemned as “unpatriotic” and “pro-communist.”

However, in the post-Soviet era, there are signs that the old détente within the conservative movement on foreign policy regarding interventionism is breaking down. The “paleo-conservatives,” as they have been known (i.e., Pat Buchanan), have always had an isolationist streak, and, on foreign policy issues, have always made somewhat common cause with the pacifism of the “pure libertarians” that Frank Meyer used to condemn, now represented by Ron Paul. Arrayed against them at the time was the conservatism of the National Review and its group of conservative intellectuals: Russell Kirk, James Burnham, Frank Meyer, William Buckley and Wilmoore Kendall.

Despite being interventionist and pro-foreign policy, the National Review types would bristle at being called “neo-conservative.” They have been conservative and interventionist right along for a great many years, thank you very much, and they make up a great number of those still supporting intervention against that new great international menace of our time, radical Islam. As do I.

A cartoon that appeared at the beginning of the Reagan presidency depicted Brezhnev moaning that he “liked the arms race when we were the only ones in it.” I’m sure Osama Bin Laden feels that way about World War IV. To insist on victory in the war that radical Islam already declared on us doesn’t necessarily make one a neo-conservative. It just means one has common sense.

In certain unscripted moments, Barack Obama has given us a glimpse of his socialist inclinations, but I wonder what percentage would vote for him if they truly understood the extent of his radicalism.

Yet the financial crisis has created a climate of fear and uncertainty and unleashed an unprecedented tolerance for large-scale government intervention, which is playing perfectly into Obama’s hands. People are blaming this largely Democratic-spawned mess on Republicans because Bush is still president.

Maybe I’m being too much of an alarmist, but I’m worried for the first time in my life that the election of a presidential candidate could lead to a fundamental change in our system of government. Just listen to the comments of post-debate focus group members expressing a knowing willingness to accept Obama’s socialism, such is their angst at the subprime mortgage mess.

Already some 38 percent of Americans do not pay income taxes, and Barack Obama wants to increase that percentage dramatically. How ironic that he and other Democrats pretend to be targeting their message to “working-class” people when many of their constituents aren’t working. But such is class warfare that the upper-middle class and wealthy are demonized as not earning an honest living.

Do you suppose it has registered with class warfare-receptive Obama voters that Obama is deliberately turning the American dream on its head? Could it be any clearer that his message to the middle class is: Don’t aspire to achievement, success and wealth because a) it is immoral to have more than others, b) the government will take your wealth away from you and give it to others, and c) why bother to bust your rear end to make more when you can vote yourselves money from the public trough?

Obama let slip his socialist proclivities to Joe the plumber when he denied he wanted to punish wealth and insisted he just wanted to spread the wealth around. Joe was justifiably repulsed by Obama’s cavalier attitude toward the American dream.

Democratic commentator Bob Beckel was dismissive of the significance of Obama’s outright nod to socialism, saying we’ve had a progressive tax system since the income tax was initiated. Yes, Bob, and we’ve had socialists in America since then, too.

But what Beckel did not explain is that at least in those days, the stated purpose of the income tax system was to fund government services, not to redistribute wealth.

It’s one thing to say that higher income earners should pay a higher percentage for government services. But Obama makes no pretense of stopping there. He told Joe that he wants to use the tax code to confiscate money from higher income earners and give it to others. But he hasn’t been so open about that in the presentation of his fraudulent tax plan.

When Obama says he will cut income taxes for 95 percent of Americans, he is dissembling. If 38 percent are already not paying, his tax credits to them amount to transfer payments from higher income earners, which are actually spending increases, not tax cuts, as The Wall Street Journal editors have noted.

Liberals, such as Obama, might deny human nature, but they can’t change it. And human nature happens to dictate that people will not produce as much when you confiscate more of what they produce and give it to others. The working wealthy, especially Christians and conservatives, are some of the most generous people in the world, but we’re talking about voluntary charitable contributions, not unconstitutionally coerced redistributions.

How many times must history repeat itself before we learn that socialism and communism cannot work. Liberals love to mock the trickledown theory, but they simply cannot refute the axiom that people produce less when they aren’t allowed to keep as much of what they produce. When do-gooder social planners try to control how much we keep, they guarantee that everyone gets less in the end because they shrink the GDP pie.

We know from the writings of William Bradford that the Pilgrims learned this lesson the hard way when they tried a communal system of sharing, thinking it “would make them happy and flourishing; as if they were wiser than God.” Instead, “This community … was found to breed much confusion and discontent, and retard much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort.” Men refused to “work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense; … this was thought injustice.”

Socialism and communism have failed everywhere they’ve been tried in the world, yet die-hard socialists, such as William Ayers, still smarter than God, insist on cramming them down our throats in the name of “fairness.” Unreconstructed radicals always say that true socialism hasn’t been given a real chance.

Well, if Obama is elected, we may get that chance.

Posted by David Limbaugh on October 16, 2008 03:08 PM to David Limbaugh