Conservatives You Like

http://www.leary.com/archives/photo/gems/GGordonLiddyLAdebate.gif

Can someone point me to this article?

John McCain is a raving lunatic. I know he speaks his mind and stuff, but it is the mind of a mentalist. Let's not forget this.

Most of the conservative ideals - keeping marijuana illegal, opposing a woman's right to choose, expanding the military (I'd add tax breaks to the rich, but I don't think a conservative would admit that) seem pretty fucking far from libertarianism to me.

In fact, the only republican who actually truely believe the stated conservative goal of "less government" is John McCain who gets shit for being too liberal.

And, unrelated, but why would you ever proudly assert the label "conservative" on yourself; it seems like such an insult -- it implies a fear of change and longing for the past that doesn't seem positive at all to me.

a : tending or disposed to maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions : TRADITIONAL b : marked by moderation or caution < a conservative estimate > c : marked by or relating to traditional norms of taste, elegance, style, or manners

The idea that you would be proud that you want to "maintain existing views, conditions, or institutions" or "traditional norms" especially considering that "norms" at one point included slavery and segregation, seems pretty irrational to me.

I admit to liking Tucker Carlson more than I should. I hate myself for finding Liddy amusing, and appreciating his being less nuts than many of these guys. I wouldn't say I like John McCain, but I (mostly, and comparatively) respect and appreciate him. I feel similarly about Lugar, and also Hagel, though (a lot?) less so. I don't agree with Dole on most things, but I would find him inoffensive if he were less of a sellout (and the war wound and he's funny). I didn't mind the Hatfield/Packwood types much, but I wonder if they would have lost my respect if they had been around when the Gingrich revolution came. Colin Powell has completely lost whatever respect I had for him. I dislike PJ O'Rourke and loathe David Brooks the hack (I have some gruding respect for David Brooks the occasional journalist). I find Stanley Crouch occasionally interesting, but typically pompous and in other ways annoying. I like Trent Lott at least twice as much as Bill Frickin Frist.

I think there was an ILM thread about it. If you want to know my feelings about it, I could link you to my long and incoherent blog post about it.

He seems like a good bloke despite being what he would call a "natural conservative" and his autobiography is very entertaining.

lol

I now like David Brooks and dislike everyone else I big-upped

Jay, http://www.city-journal.org/html/13_3_how_hip_hop.html

I think there was an ILM thread about it. If you want to know my feelings about it, I could link you to my long and incoherent blog post about it.

-- Symplistic (shmuel), Friday, June 18, 2004 12:19 AM (3 years ago) Bookmark Link

Ha, I never saw this response.

i like ross douthat, most of the 'american scene' crew (tho they're all a bit indie-nerdy, esp. reihan salam)

but yeah i like 'em batshit too: mark steyn, ledeen (i'd read the corner but their rss feed doesn't include author info, so fuck it, life is too short to weed thru tons of kathryn jean teasdale lopez or whoever the fuck). it's amazing to read dudes like that and know that every single assertion is flat out wrong

SPENGLER, fuck it i love spengler 4lyfe. he's just bizarre. and openly genocidal, it's...refreshing?

i had a minor crush on nicole gelinas of city journal for a little bit.

kathryn jean teasdale lopez

Best damn nickname for her ever.

haha ned i knew you'd like that

It's perfectly accurate.

Cato Institute

Admit it - you really hate modern art
By Spengler

There are esthetes who appreciate the cross-eyed cartoons of Pablo Picasso, the random dribbles of Jackson Pollock, and even the pickled pigs of Damien Hirst. Some of my best friends are modern artists. You, however, hate and detest the 20th century's entire output in the plastic arts, as do I.

"I don't know much about art," you aver, "but I know what I like." Actually you don't. You have been browbeaten into feigning pleasure at the sight of so-called art that actually makes your skin crawl, and you are afraid to admit it for fear of seeming dull. This has gone on for so long that you have forgotten your own mind. Do not fear: in a few minutes' reading I can break the spell and liberate you from this unseemly condition.

this one... just flabbergasting:

Jimmy Carter's heart of dorkiness
By Spengler

After Iran let the diplomats go, the provincial peanut farmer who stumbled into the presidency flew to the US air force base in Germany to meet them. He asked the Central Intelligence Agency psychiatrists who were debriefing the hostages, "Didn't the Iranians know what they were doing was wrong?" Call it the heart of dorkiness: Carter was so horrified by the Iranians' capacity for evil that he could not absorb the information, even when it grabbed him by the scruff of his neck and threw him out of the White House.

...

The Palestinians are not an oppressed people, but rather the irreconcilable remnants of a once-victorious but now defeated empire, living in an irredentist dream world in which a new Salahuddin will drive the new Crusaders into the sea. Pour a few bourbons into the average white citizen of the US state of Georgia, and the same irredentist fantasy will bubble up: "The south shall rise again!"

As I argued in another location, the poor whites of the US south fought for a dream of an empire in which they, too, would have land and slaves. [3] The Scottish and Irish poor of the Confederacy saw themselves as an oppressed people fighting for their rights against Anglo-Saxon oppression. Their battle flag displayed the Scots' Cross of St Andrew. In defeat, they did not even have the consolation of fighters for a lost but noble cause, only the self-reproach of the frustrated freebooter who got what he deserved.

White southerners who dwell on the subject of forgiveness and reconciliation can evince a unique sort of self-serving hypocrisy. They cannot come to terms with the evil of the ancestors whom they portray as gallant, aristocratic warriors. It is not the descendants of African slaves whom they pity as an oppressed class, but rather themselves.

Think of Frodo Baggins in Lord of the Rings explaining to Samwise why he cannot give up hope for Gollum's redemption from the curse of Sauron's ring, because that would weaken Frodo's hope for his own redemption. This form of obsessive self-pity produces the unctuous forms of expression that make it so painful to listen to a Jimmy Carter or a Bill Clinton talk about political morality, with a lip-sucking, voice-throbbing, eye-tearing, fixed-staring, self-pitying, and downright creepy form of bathos that is painful to watch. The difference, of course, is that Bill Clinton is an utter hypocrite, while Jimmy Carter is quite sincere - which makes him all the more nauseating.

It is easy to ridicule the fixation of white US southerners. But it is the Americans of the north who embraced the legend of the gallant south and the Lost Cause, in the form of travesties like Gone With the Wind, with its cloying faux aristocratic masquerade of the brutal world of the slave plantation. Americans invented the war of extermination in the modern world - the total war that only can be won killing so many of the enemy that not enough young men are left to be put into the line. The US south chafes in anger and shame at its defeat, and the north recoils in horror from its own victory. Americans, in their amnesia and denial, blot out the idea that other peoples also must fight until they have exterminated the recalcitrant among their own populations.

The Palestinian and Iraqi civil wars, in the deepest sense of the term, are the true American solution, that is, the solution consonant with America's actual history. It took exactly 100 years between the end of the Civil War and the Voting Rights Act of 1865 for one-man, one-vote democracy to arrive in the US south. The Middle East, in the time-honored expression, has not begun to fight. More killing, please!

I actually don't mind Jonah Goldberg when he spars with Peter Beinart in those "What's Your Problem?" skits, in which he comes across as erudite, self-deprecating, and at least willing to accept differences.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Rudman.jpg

Geir Hongroe.

Sometimes I feel like David Brooks is more of an ideologue than he lets on to be and that gives him a mildly sinister quality.

However, I give him props for coming up with Bobo

Bill Buckley is a man with some flash to 'im. The rest of these chumps can go waterboard themselves.

most republicans aren't actually "conservative" in any way - you could make a strong case that carter (modest foreign policy, decent 'everyman' image, lack of ambitious 'vision' for america) was more genuinely conservative than reagan (radical crackpot economics, belligerent interventionism, secretive and corrupt ruling style).

i like christopher caldwell's writing a lot. andrew ferguson, who writes for the weekly standard, is also good.

Some of my best friends are modern artists.

this is still making me lol

Geir Hongroe.

-- Noodle Vague, Friday, 25 January 2008 22:39 (Yesterday) Bookmark Link

^^^this

"conservative" pundits and politicians are douchebags and hypocrites, I can't stand any of them. but I've got a couple misguided friends who vote republican. they're really great people, we just avoid discussing politics.

Mark Corrigan

William Buckley, Jr. is a writer of considerabl elegance, and certainly worth reading.

I enjoy reading most of the writers for the American Conservative but then they spend most of their time attacking The Weekly Standard and Commentary.

my dad ;_;

I got the joke but isn't Geir a social democrat?

I abhor their economic views but I genuinely enjoy reading hardcore libertarians sometimes. AFAICT they all used to be socialists or Marxists and it shows in the combination of hyper-rationalism and utopianism, the effort to ground every view on policy in an all-encompassing philosophy grounded in values of reason and individual liberty. Their criticisms of the far left are actually worthwhile sometimes. (The problem, of course, is that they're too uncritical of private property ownership and its relationship to the individual in capitalism.) Anarcho-capitalists are pretty classic, albeit somewhat frightening, in how they take this to the insane extreme. P. J. O'Rourke would be OK if he were too committed to libertarianism to be a Republican.

Robert Stanfield and Joe Clark aren't bad but I don't know if they even really count as "conservatives." (I'm assuming Jean Charest doesn't.) I seriously kind of think of Bill Clinton as a conservative and he wasn't terrible.

Lincoln??

Obv I'm not counting everyday conservative individuals, who can be great to have a beer with.

(Part of the problem is I'm not sure which definition of "conservative" to use.)

this guy, maybe, although he's more libertarian than "conservative."

william buckley might be a good stylist but he's also an arrogant blowhard who penned a preposterous apology for mccarthy and once declared that we'd be better off having a nuclear war with the soviet union than let communism go on existing.

lincoln, like a lot of pre-1933 people, doesn't fit the "conservative" or "liberal" label too well. probably the only definition of american liberalism/conservatism that makes sense is "would support or oppose the new deal."