Republican presidential candidates held a presidential debate last night. Much of the debate centered around criticizing Hilary Clinton, but before they got to Hilary, they spent some time arguing over who is more conservative.
My problem is this: listening to them in the debate, all of the candidates sound good.
I know that Giuliani is too liberal on too many issues to earn my vote.
Romney, as the former governor of the liberal haven of Massachusetts gives me pause if for no other reason than he was elected in Massachusetts. I've heard many things from Romney that make me think he would be a good president - better than Giuliani, anyway (or anyone the Democrats are running).
Thompson looked good...then he actually entered the race, at which point it became hard to tell just what he stands for. He may make a good conservative candidate, but that has yet to be seen for sure.
I've heard some good things from McCain during the campaign that make me wish he were consistent enough to earn my vote. However, he co-sponsored the McCain Feingold Act, as well as the recently defeated immigration bill. I have a lot of respect for John McCain - it takes a lot of courage to go through what he went through in the Vietnam War...but his record just isn't conservative enough to earn my vote.
Duncan Hunter looks like the best candidate to me...the primary problem is that he's largely an unknown: he doesn't generate the type of press that big names like Giuliani, Thompson, and Romney do. Hunter has been consistently conservative on a range of issues, and I believe that he would make an excellent president.
Personally, I have a problem with what has been going on in the conservative camp. The candidates are trying to out-conservative each other, each trying to pass himself off as the most conservative candidate. Basically, they're trying to out-Reagan Reagan (whose name was mentioned multiple times during the debate).
Ronald Reagan was a man who stood for conservative values in the face of harsh criticism. He stood up for his beliefs, unafraid and unashamed to stand up for his beliefs. This is what America needs in a president.
But this election is not just about having a candidate who knows what he believes and will stand up for it. This election is about America's future, and just what course the nation will take. Will we become yet another bastion of socialism, a nanny state destined for failure, or will we stand up for the true value of the individual, knowing that the feel-good option is not always the right one...or will we opt for the status-quo of straddling the fence, halfway between what we need and what feels right?
I think Duncan Hunter is what America needs. He will stand up for conservative values in the face of criticism; he has shown this in the past. In order to successfully move forward, we need to look at the values and the policies that have made the United States the world's superpower. Socialism didn't get us to where we are today. The United States of America got to where it is today through what is known as the American spirit: the willingness to buckle down and work hard, knowing that through hard work and perseverance you can be successful.
Showing posts with label conservatism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label conservatism. Show all posts
Monday, October 22, 2007
Friday, October 19, 2007
I'm In Love With Ann Coulter
(post title taken from the song by The Right Brothers)
I finished reading Ann Coulter's latest book the other day...needless to say, it was excellent. Not her best work, to be sure (that would be Godless), but still well worth the money.
Coulter is constantly under attack by the left. Nearly every time Coulter's name is mentioned, it's followed by phrases such as "gone too far" or "beyond the pale." She is commonly called a fascist, racist, anti-semite, and any other of various names that leftists can come up with.
The thing that I love about Ann Coulter is that she gets under liberals' skin. She combines facts with conservative ideology and a healthy dose of humor to produce some of the best material the Right has ever seen.
The answer to the question posed by Time Magazine (is she serious or just having fun?) is: both.
This is something many liberals have lost: it's possible to promote your ideology without taking yourself too seriously.
It's possible to engage in political debate and have fun doing it.
The one thing that draws me to conservatism is that it makes sense. Conservative positions require logical reasoning, where liberalism is ruled by emotion.
Just to show that she's not affected by liberal lies, smears, and name calling, her latest book (If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans) is a collection of the quotes that earned her the most ridicule from the Left.
The sad thing is, political correctness has so inundated our society that Coulter draws a lot of criticism from people on the Right, as well. These people need to stop listening to liberal lies about what is and isn't appropriate. They need to grow up and get a sense of humor. They need to turn their backs on the liberal doctrine of wussification and understand that if we listen to the liberal lies every time they say "gone too far" or "beyond the pale," liberalism will win. We cannot let the other side dictate just what is and is not appropriate. Conservatives need to stand up for conservatism, if for no other reason than that it is worth defending.
When it comes to conservative icons, Ronald Reagan is king. He was the President for two terms, and he showed the world just what it means to stand for freedom and true conservative values. The world may never see such a high quality of man come out of Hollywood ever again.
The thing that draws people to Ann Coulter is that she is truly Reaganesque. Many Republicans try to sell themselves as Reaganesque on issues, but issues didn't make Reagan great. The thing that made Ronald Reagan the great man that he was was the fact that he was conservative through and through, and he wasn't afraid to stand up for his beliefs. He had deep faith, and he wasn't ashamed of it. He didn't buy into the liberal lies about "separation of church and state" meaning that religious people somehow shouldn't let their faith values effect how they vote. He wasn't willing to give evil a pass just because America doesn't have a spotless record.
Ann Coulter, like Ronald Reagan, is a not ashamed to be a conservative. She isn't afraid to call evil out for what it is. And she's not afraid to address liberal emotionalism bluntly and with wit.
The liberal doctrine of political correctness makes people tremble when they hear someone like Ann Coulter speak plainly about liberal hypocracy. And liberals truly are hypocrites: we only have one Ann Coulter, whose doses of truth spun with biting wit send liberals into temper tantrums, but liberals have dozens of people who are unafraid to spread hateful lies, smearing conservatives and trying to ruin their lives just because of political disagreements.
Any conservative who denounces Ann Coulter as being too harsh should be ashamed. The conservative movement needs more people like Ann Coulter, unafraid to speak their minds, unashamed of their beliefs, willing to stand up before an onslaught of liberal hate speech and tell it like it is. If we allow liberals, in the guise of political correctness, to dictate what we can and cannot say, we may as well kiss the United States of America, the freest nation on the planet, goodbye. America needs Ann Coulter to remind conservatives that liberal speech isn't the only form of speech protected under the First Amendment.
And any liberal that says that this comment has "gone too far," or that comment was "beyond the pale" should look at their own side of the aisle and see the hate speech emanating from their own party.
I finished reading Ann Coulter's latest book the other day...needless to say, it was excellent. Not her best work, to be sure (that would be Godless), but still well worth the money.
Coulter is constantly under attack by the left. Nearly every time Coulter's name is mentioned, it's followed by phrases such as "gone too far" or "beyond the pale." She is commonly called a fascist, racist, anti-semite, and any other of various names that leftists can come up with.
The thing that I love about Ann Coulter is that she gets under liberals' skin. She combines facts with conservative ideology and a healthy dose of humor to produce some of the best material the Right has ever seen.
The answer to the question posed by Time Magazine (is she serious or just having fun?) is: both.This is something many liberals have lost: it's possible to promote your ideology without taking yourself too seriously.
It's possible to engage in political debate and have fun doing it.
The one thing that draws me to conservatism is that it makes sense. Conservative positions require logical reasoning, where liberalism is ruled by emotion.
Just to show that she's not affected by liberal lies, smears, and name calling, her latest book (If Democrats Had Any Brains, They'd Be Republicans) is a collection of the quotes that earned her the most ridicule from the Left.
The sad thing is, political correctness has so inundated our society that Coulter draws a lot of criticism from people on the Right, as well. These people need to stop listening to liberal lies about what is and isn't appropriate. They need to grow up and get a sense of humor. They need to turn their backs on the liberal doctrine of wussification and understand that if we listen to the liberal lies every time they say "gone too far" or "beyond the pale," liberalism will win. We cannot let the other side dictate just what is and is not appropriate. Conservatives need to stand up for conservatism, if for no other reason than that it is worth defending.
When it comes to conservative icons, Ronald Reagan is king. He was the President for two terms, and he showed the world just what it means to stand for freedom and true conservative values. The world may never see such a high quality of man come out of Hollywood ever again.The thing that draws people to Ann Coulter is that she is truly Reaganesque. Many Republicans try to sell themselves as Reaganesque on issues, but issues didn't make Reagan great. The thing that made Ronald Reagan the great man that he was was the fact that he was conservative through and through, and he wasn't afraid to stand up for his beliefs. He had deep faith, and he wasn't ashamed of it. He didn't buy into the liberal lies about "separation of church and state" meaning that religious people somehow shouldn't let their faith values effect how they vote. He wasn't willing to give evil a pass just because America doesn't have a spotless record.
Ann Coulter, like Ronald Reagan, is a not ashamed to be a conservative. She isn't afraid to call evil out for what it is. And she's not afraid to address liberal emotionalism bluntly and with wit.
The liberal doctrine of political correctness makes people tremble when they hear someone like Ann Coulter speak plainly about liberal hypocracy. And liberals truly are hypocrites: we only have one Ann Coulter, whose doses of truth spun with biting wit send liberals into temper tantrums, but liberals have dozens of people who are unafraid to spread hateful lies, smearing conservatives and trying to ruin their lives just because of political disagreements.
Any conservative who denounces Ann Coulter as being too harsh should be ashamed. The conservative movement needs more people like Ann Coulter, unafraid to speak their minds, unashamed of their beliefs, willing to stand up before an onslaught of liberal hate speech and tell it like it is. If we allow liberals, in the guise of political correctness, to dictate what we can and cannot say, we may as well kiss the United States of America, the freest nation on the planet, goodbye. America needs Ann Coulter to remind conservatives that liberal speech isn't the only form of speech protected under the First Amendment.
And any liberal that says that this comment has "gone too far," or that comment was "beyond the pale" should look at their own side of the aisle and see the hate speech emanating from their own party.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Consensus doesn't make it right...
I'd like to cover two things today:
The first is global warming. Recently, a gal from The Weather Channel decided to make some bloviations about global warming. One of the things that she said was that she believed that any weather broadcaster who did not believe in global warming should have their AMS (American Meterological Society) membership revoked.
This, I believe, is a prime indicator that the global warming debate is nothing but an absurd cacophony of opinion and politics.
One of the main defenses of global warming given by its proponents is that there is a supposed consensus among scientists that man-made global warming exists, and that it is a very real, very dangerous problem.
The problem with this line of thinking is that consensus does not make science.
Does global warming exist? Yes, the evidence bears this out. The average global temperature has risen somewhere in the neighborhood of one degree Farenheit in the past 100 years. Is this something we should be worried about? I don't know. The global warming activists would have us believe that global temperature will continue to rise until the planet becomes uninhabitable. Some add on "unless we do something about it," others believe it's already too late.
My problem with the global warming debate is that there are other scientists out there who believe that these temperature changes are cyclical - that they are natural phenomena, not created by man. As yet, the issue is unresolved, due to simple lack of information: temperature records do not go back far enough to make a decisive judgment.
But the truth is that the "debate" about the existence of global warming is largely one-sided: the proponents of global warming control the money and power in the scientific community, and thus have gained control of the debate. This debate is very similar to the debate over evolution and intelligent design: scientists who question the existence of man-made global warming are shunned in the scientific community. Their articles are not published, and their research grants are revoked or denied.
This is the problem with science today: it is too tied to money and to the government. Instead of looking at all of the evidence inclusively, and, at the least, saying, "Well, we don't know for sure, but we should probably take some measures just in case," science has become political. He with the most money and power determines which theory is right. Governmental agencies dealing with scientific matters are stacked with scientists who adhere to the politically accepted beliefs of the time. Grant money is granted or withheld based on a candidate's beliefs rather than their experience or the merits of their research.
Science should be about investigation. Any and all hypotheses and theories should be subject to question and investigation. But instead, science and politics are tied too closely together, and this has tainted the advancement of science to a horrible degree. Science is no longer a pure search for knowledge, it is a political endeavor.
The greatest evidence for the fallacy of consensus science lies in the history of science: which scientists are remembered? Which are looked at as foolish? Today, Galileo is lauded because he was willing to stand up against the consensus of his time to say that the world was round. Even Darwin is remembered because he stood against the consensus of Biblical creationism. The scientists who stood up in the face of "scientific consensus" are the ones whose names are written down in the history books, proving to anyone not blinded by politics that science is not a democracy: when the votes are cast and the ballots are counted, the majority may very well be entirely wrong.
When it comes to global warming, I am a skeptic. I just don't know whether global warming is man-made or cyclical. I have seen evidence for both arguments. Both have merits, and both have questions that remain unanswered. But given the political factors surrounding the debate and the historical background of "consensus science," I must say that I tend to lean more to the other side of the debate.
The second thing I'd like to talk about is President Bush's latest poll numbers. The poll numbers released shortly before the President's latest State of the Union speech were abysmal, to say the least - somewhere around 28%. Much of the media has tried to cast this disapproval of the President as a swell of support for the Democrats, but I believe that this is not true (and from what I have heard, the poll numbers bear that out - the Democrats' poll numbers were not much better than the President's).
Personally, I believe that the reason the President's poll numbers are now so low is because of the question being asked: "Do you approve of the job the president is doing?" Now, many on the left do not approve because of the war in Iraq. Many on the right do not approve because the President has not done enough to secure the border, or to try and fix the illegal immigration problem. President Bush's problem is not that the nation is leaning toward the Democrats, President Bush's problem is that he has been trying so hard to be a moderate - and when politicians are moderate, instead of getting both sides' approval, they tend to get both sides' disdain. President Bush ran for president as a Republican, and that should carry with it an ideology much more conservative than the one the President has espoused. In his drive to moderation the President, and many Congressmen, have driven many away from the Republican Party, whose roles are made up of more conservatives than moderates - this is evidenced in the Republican's losses in November's election. By denying the people of his party the strong voice for conservatism that they crave, the President has driven his approval numbers down.
I believe very strongly that if the Republican party wants to win the next presidential election, they must run a candidate who will stand up strongly for conservatism, both in values and in government. Conservatives in America are tired of seeing wishy-washy RINOs in power such as Lincoln Chafee or Arlen Specter. If the Republican party wants to win elections once again, it must, once again, truly become the party of conservatism.
The first is global warming. Recently, a gal from The Weather Channel decided to make some bloviations about global warming. One of the things that she said was that she believed that any weather broadcaster who did not believe in global warming should have their AMS (American Meterological Society) membership revoked.
This, I believe, is a prime indicator that the global warming debate is nothing but an absurd cacophony of opinion and politics.
One of the main defenses of global warming given by its proponents is that there is a supposed consensus among scientists that man-made global warming exists, and that it is a very real, very dangerous problem.
The problem with this line of thinking is that consensus does not make science.
Does global warming exist? Yes, the evidence bears this out. The average global temperature has risen somewhere in the neighborhood of one degree Farenheit in the past 100 years. Is this something we should be worried about? I don't know. The global warming activists would have us believe that global temperature will continue to rise until the planet becomes uninhabitable. Some add on "unless we do something about it," others believe it's already too late.
My problem with the global warming debate is that there are other scientists out there who believe that these temperature changes are cyclical - that they are natural phenomena, not created by man. As yet, the issue is unresolved, due to simple lack of information: temperature records do not go back far enough to make a decisive judgment.
But the truth is that the "debate" about the existence of global warming is largely one-sided: the proponents of global warming control the money and power in the scientific community, and thus have gained control of the debate. This debate is very similar to the debate over evolution and intelligent design: scientists who question the existence of man-made global warming are shunned in the scientific community. Their articles are not published, and their research grants are revoked or denied.
This is the problem with science today: it is too tied to money and to the government. Instead of looking at all of the evidence inclusively, and, at the least, saying, "Well, we don't know for sure, but we should probably take some measures just in case," science has become political. He with the most money and power determines which theory is right. Governmental agencies dealing with scientific matters are stacked with scientists who adhere to the politically accepted beliefs of the time. Grant money is granted or withheld based on a candidate's beliefs rather than their experience or the merits of their research.
Science should be about investigation. Any and all hypotheses and theories should be subject to question and investigation. But instead, science and politics are tied too closely together, and this has tainted the advancement of science to a horrible degree. Science is no longer a pure search for knowledge, it is a political endeavor.
The greatest evidence for the fallacy of consensus science lies in the history of science: which scientists are remembered? Which are looked at as foolish? Today, Galileo is lauded because he was willing to stand up against the consensus of his time to say that the world was round. Even Darwin is remembered because he stood against the consensus of Biblical creationism. The scientists who stood up in the face of "scientific consensus" are the ones whose names are written down in the history books, proving to anyone not blinded by politics that science is not a democracy: when the votes are cast and the ballots are counted, the majority may very well be entirely wrong.
When it comes to global warming, I am a skeptic. I just don't know whether global warming is man-made or cyclical. I have seen evidence for both arguments. Both have merits, and both have questions that remain unanswered. But given the political factors surrounding the debate and the historical background of "consensus science," I must say that I tend to lean more to the other side of the debate.
The second thing I'd like to talk about is President Bush's latest poll numbers. The poll numbers released shortly before the President's latest State of the Union speech were abysmal, to say the least - somewhere around 28%. Much of the media has tried to cast this disapproval of the President as a swell of support for the Democrats, but I believe that this is not true (and from what I have heard, the poll numbers bear that out - the Democrats' poll numbers were not much better than the President's).
Personally, I believe that the reason the President's poll numbers are now so low is because of the question being asked: "Do you approve of the job the president is doing?" Now, many on the left do not approve because of the war in Iraq. Many on the right do not approve because the President has not done enough to secure the border, or to try and fix the illegal immigration problem. President Bush's problem is not that the nation is leaning toward the Democrats, President Bush's problem is that he has been trying so hard to be a moderate - and when politicians are moderate, instead of getting both sides' approval, they tend to get both sides' disdain. President Bush ran for president as a Republican, and that should carry with it an ideology much more conservative than the one the President has espoused. In his drive to moderation the President, and many Congressmen, have driven many away from the Republican Party, whose roles are made up of more conservatives than moderates - this is evidenced in the Republican's losses in November's election. By denying the people of his party the strong voice for conservatism that they crave, the President has driven his approval numbers down.
I believe very strongly that if the Republican party wants to win the next presidential election, they must run a candidate who will stand up strongly for conservatism, both in values and in government. Conservatives in America are tired of seeing wishy-washy RINOs in power such as Lincoln Chafee or Arlen Specter. If the Republican party wants to win elections once again, it must, once again, truly become the party of conservatism.
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