The True Conservative Scandal

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/art...al_112049.html

The True Conservative Scandal
By E.J. Dionne
WASHINGTON -- Conservatives need to contemplate what the Rick Perry and Herman Cain stories say about the state of their movement and the health of their creed.

Perry's debate gaffe last week was about something more important than "brain freeze." Memory lapses can strike anyone, even if they are more awkward when they occur during a presidential debate.

What really matters is the subject that sent Perry's brain into lockdown. He was in the middle of describing sweeping changes in the federal bureaucracy closely connected to his spare vision of American government. One presumes a candidate for president ponders such proposals carefully, discusses them with advisers, and understands their implications.

Forgetting an idea at the heart of your program, in other words, is not the same as forgetting a phone number, a friend's name, a football score or the title of a recently read book.

Perry's memory lapse showed that he wasn't asserting anything that he is truly serious about because he is not serious about what government does, or ought not to do. For him, governing seems a casual undertaking.

"And I will tell you," he declared, "it's three agencies of government when I get there that are gone, Commerce, Education and the -- what's the third one there? Let's see."

Yes, let's see what "gone" might imply. Would Perry end all federal aid to education? Would he do away with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the part of the Commerce Department that, among other things, tracks hurricanes? Energy was the department he forgot. Would he scrap the department's 17 national labs, including such world-class facilities as Los Alamos, N.M., Oak Ridge, Tenn., or -- there's that primary coming up -- Aiken, S.C.?

I'm not accusing Perry of wanting to do any of these things because I don't believe he has given them a moment of thought. And that's the problem for conservatives. Their movement has been overtaken by a quite literally mindless opposition to government. Perry, correctly, thought he had a winning sound bite, had he managed to blurt it out, because if you just say you want to scrap government departments (and three is a nice, round number), many conservatives will cheer without asking questions.

This is a long way from the conservatism I used to respect. Although I often disagreed with conservatives, I admired their prudence, their affection for tradition, and their understanding that the intricate bonds of community are established with great difficulty over time and not easy to reweave once they are torn asunder. At their best, conservatives forced us to think harder. Now, many in the ranks seem to have decided that hard and nuanced thinking is a telltale sign of liberalism.

That brings us to Herman Cain, who is trying to get out from under charges of sexual harassment. His approach is to have his campaign attack the individuals who leveled them, and, even more, to go after those who made these charges public.

True, he's been inconsistent about laying blame. Off and on, he pointed to his Republican opponents. But Cain and his defenders have settled on a strategy to rally conservatives by assailing the "liberal media" and "the Democrat machine."

Politico ran the first stories about the allegations, and to argue that Politico is "liberal" requires an extraordinary leap of the imagination. Most liberals see Politico as leaning over backward to give conservatives more than their share of journalistic spin.

In any event, while women of a variety of political stripes have been in the forefront in demanding accountability from Cain, plenty of liberals have been happy to look on and let the GOP settle this one. And most members of "the Democrat machine" defended Bill Clinton against impeachment in the Monica Lewinsky matter and are aware of the meaning of the word "hypocrisy."

Not so with the many conservatives who donned full feminist armor during the Clinton scandal and now defend Cain reflexively, not even asking that he come clean about the facts.

There are honorable exceptions: Bill Bennett, for one, and to some degree -- hard to admit, I know -- Karl Rove. But that so many other members of a movement theoretically devoted to traditional values on sexual matters would eagerly jump into this mess on Cain's side speaks volumes about its condition. To paraphrase Bennett from another context, where's the outrage about a conservatism that is losing both its intellectual moorings and its moral compass?

"At their best, conservatives forced us to think harder. Now, many in the ranks seem to have decided that hard and nuanced thinking is a telltale sign of liberalism".

That sentence speaks volumes.

When you hate something so irrationally (liberals) it destroys any chance of clear thought. The right has brainwashed their slow-thinking supporters to prevent independent analysis that would show their positions are overwhelmingly irrational.

The result is to harm the country because obstruction becomes their only reason for existence. As Sen. Mitch McConnell said, "My most important priority is to defeat the president".

That comment should have been condemned by everyone. It wasn't, was it?

http://www.thedailybeast.com/article...nt-issues.html
GOP Debate Showed Candidates' Reality Gap on Important Issues
Nov 14, 2011 4:45 AM EST
In Saturday’s GOP debate, candidates argued for bombing Iran and staying longer in Afghanistan, ignoring the threat of Asian economic power, the global financial crisis, and the financial constraints on U.S. foreign policy.
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It was hard to know who were worse at Saturday night’s Republican presidential debate, the candidates or the moderators. With American and European economic might in near collapse, and the world witnessing a once-a-millennium power shift from West to East, Scott Pelley of CBS News and Major Garrett of the National Journal waited until the debate’s closing minutes to ask about the global financial crisis—and when Jon Huntsman and Rick Perry tried to answer, Pelley cut each of them off.

The exaggeration of the threat America faces from jihadist terrorism and the minimization of the threat it faces from Asian economic power is one of the most disastrous legacies of Bush foreign policy. And listening to Pelley and Garrett—and their overwhelming focus on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran (China was mentioned briefly; India not at all)—was to re-inhabit the world according to Dick Cheney, not the world in which America actually lives.

Then there were the candidates’ answers. In their debates on domestic policy, the Republican presidential contenders described America as a bankrupt nation, too poor to afford even the meager welfare state we have. It would be nice if someone introduced those candidates to the folks who debated last Saturday night.

When Republicans discuss foreign policy, something miraculous happens: America’s economic constraints disappear. Oh, sure, Rick Perry and Newt Gingrich called for slashing foreign aid, the foreign-policy equivalent of Amtrak. But when it comes to defense spending, which costs nearly 20 times as much, and the overseas commitments that have sent that spending skyrocketing since Sept. 11, you would have thought America was flush with cash. Perry and Herman Cain criticized Obama’s timetable for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan; Michele Bachmann said Obama had sent too few to begin with; Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich ruled out negotiations with the Taliban; Romney and Rick Santorum declared themselves willing to bomb Iran.


How might war with Tehran—and the resulting disruption of the world’s oil supply—affect America’s economy? Who knows? The question never came up. What are the budgetary implications of revoking Obama’s timetable for Afghan troop withdrawal and refusing to negotiate a political settlement with the Taliban, thus closing off the only plausible avenue for ending the war? Why should the U.S. continue to spend $100 billion a year to fight a war in one of the poorest and weakest nations on earth when mammoth, prosperous nations increasingly threaten our preeminence? And how might it affect our chances of victory in Afghanistan if we go to war with Iran, its powerful neighbor to the east? Neither the moderators nor the candidates thought any of these questions important enough to even raise.

To listen to all the GOP presidential candidates—except Huntsman and Ron Paul—was to witness the power of inertia. When George W. Bush laid out his “war on terror” strategy after 9/11, he built it upon two premises. First, that “radical Islam” was as great a threat as Nazi Germany and the U.S.S.R. had been. Second, that by overthrowing Iraq and Afghanistan and pressuring authoritarian U.S. allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the U.S. could bring liberty to the Middle East, thus sapping militant Islam’s support.

Saturday night, the Republican candidates barely even bothered to rehearse Bush’s arguments about the extent of the Islamist threat. None of the Republican candidates embraced Bush’s democracy-promotion agenda, and Cain and Gingrich denounced Obama for helping oust Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, thus repudiating Bush’s democratization policies in the process. And yet the top-tier candidates largely embraced the policies—in favor of an open-ended commitment in Afghanistan, in favor of war to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and in favor of waterboarding and Guantánamo Bay—from which Bush’s “war on terror” derived. Why? Because it’s a dangerous world and America must always lead. It was the right-wing foreign-policy equivalent of Muzak.

Even many of the Republican Party’s most loyal supporters don’t find the candidates’ neoconservative belligerence convincing.
The debate contained only three interesting features. First, Huntsman, whose substantive, thoughtful, honest answers to the few questions the moderators threw his way made him look like Yo-Yo Ma at an audition for America’s Got Talent. Second, Paul, who, regardless of whether you agree with all his policy views, at least tried to reconcile his foreign-policy perspective with his support for limited government at home. And third, the audience, which, for the most part, remained mum when candidates waxed hawkish on Afghanistan and Iran and clapped wildly when Paul said the U.S. should go not to war without congressional approval, when Huntsman said the U.S. should do its nation-building here at home, when Perry and Gingrich denounced foreign aid, when Gingrich threatened to reduce U.S. funding for the U.N., when Paul rejected U.S. intervention in Syria, and when Romney proposed tariffs against China.

Some of this simply may have been Paul’s powerful-lunged backers. But listening to the entire debate, it was hard to escape the sense that in the struggle to determine whether Barack Obama is destroying America by engaging too much in the world or too little, grassroots conservatives increasingly want less commitment. According to the Pew Research Center, in fact, the percentage of Republicans who think scaling back U.S. military commitments should be a top priority has risen from 29 percent in 2008 to 44 percent today. Even many of the Republican Party’s most loyal supporters, in other words, don’t find the candidates’ neoconservative belligerence convincing. Too bad they weren’t moderating the debate last Saturday night.