sailingaway
11-26-2011, 02:50 PM
He quotes Ron Paul's 'Revolution - a Manifesto" as being timely now that the election is in full swing:
"A substantial portion of the conservative movement has become a parody of it's former self. Once home to distinguished intellectuals and men of letters, it now tolerates and even encourages anti-intellectualism and jingoism that would have embarrassed earlier generations of conservative thinkers. There are still some good and decent conservative leaders to be found, and a portion of the grass roots has remained uncorrupted by the transformation of conservatism into just another Big Government movement. But Big Government at home and abroad seems to suit many conservative spokesmen just fine. Once in a while they will latch on to phony but conservative-sounding causes like "tax-reform" - almost always a shell game in which taxes are shuffled around rather than actually reduced overall - in order to pacify the conservative base, but that's about it.
The supposedly conservative candidate tells us about "waste" in government, and ticks off $10 million in frivolous pork-barrel projects that outrage him - the inevidable bridge-to-nowhere project, or a study of the effects of celery consumption on arresting memory loss - in order to elicit laughter and applause from partisan audiences. All right, so that's 0.00045 percent of the federal budget dealt with; what does he propose to do with the other 99.99955 percent, in order to return our country to living within it's means? Not a word. Those same three or four silly programs will be brought up all campaign long, and that's all we'll hear about where the candidate stands on spending. But conservatives are told that they must support these candidates, and so they do, hoping for the best. And nothing changes."
"A substantial portion of the conservative movement has become a parody of it's former self. Once home to distinguished intellectuals and men of letters, it now tolerates and even encourages anti-intellectualism and jingoism that would have embarrassed earlier generations of conservative thinkers. There are still some good and decent conservative leaders to be found, and a portion of the grass roots has remained uncorrupted by the transformation of conservatism into just another Big Government movement. But Big Government at home and abroad seems to suit many conservative spokesmen just fine. Once in a while they will latch on to phony but conservative-sounding causes like "tax-reform" - almost always a shell game in which taxes are shuffled around rather than actually reduced overall - in order to pacify the conservative base, but that's about it.
The supposedly conservative candidate tells us about "waste" in government, and ticks off $10 million in frivolous pork-barrel projects that outrage him - the inevidable bridge-to-nowhere project, or a study of the effects of celery consumption on arresting memory loss - in order to elicit laughter and applause from partisan audiences. All right, so that's 0.00045 percent of the federal budget dealt with; what does he propose to do with the other 99.99955 percent, in order to return our country to living within it's means? Not a word. Those same three or four silly programs will be brought up all campaign long, and that's all we'll hear about where the candidate stands on spending. But conservatives are told that they must support these candidates, and so they do, hoping for the best. And nothing changes."