Are Conservatives Dead or Resting?

The problem of conservatives it they are typicaly busy productive people who only have a little time for politics and social enterprises. They squeeze in time for such things in between keeping this country and the world moving in a positive forward direction.Liberal/progressive/marxist folk typicaly spend their time being busybodies sticking their noses in the work of those productive conservatives and making sure they can leach whatever they need to continue their existance.In my mind this always explains why it is rare that the conservative mindset is rarely in the forefront of governmental solutions to anything as they usually are busy contributing to society instead of mooching off of it.

Conservatives appear disjointed because ideas that advance civilisation are successfully being marketed by MSM as backward thinking.

When the air you breathe out gets classified as a pollutant, i have to think we're near the breaking point of this insanity.

"...So Republican primary voters sensibly nominated John McCain, a man to fight the war on Islamic extremism while holding the line on domestic issues...." Yes. But McCain really must pick someone as VP who can excite the right and center by explaining the why of policies of "a hand up" and personal responsibility that reflect a true compassion versus left's position of merely trying to create dependence on government through entitlements which cannot be sustained economically and do not better people's self-esteem or their futures. What they do is put the government and politicians in the position of not being able to act in the country's best interest. They (the same politicians that created the mess) are scared to take away a perceived entitlement because they would lose votes and power.

It is similar to doing development work overseas. For the great majority of village projects, the only ones that really work are the ones that the people have input, ownership of and a stake in. Most handout programs all fail because they are not sustainable and people are not invested in the outcomes nor motivated to envision and create their own outcomes. The handout programs do more harm by not empowering people to inventory the resources available and mobilizing themselves.

Sen. McCain also needs someone who can inspire confidence in the economy by explaining it and how to take part in it. Really explaining it and not trying to mischaracterize it in order to get votes. Not by doing what the extreme left does by vilifying nearly all corporations, profits, etc. and inciting the mob mentality to control those evil people involved in business. This only winds up with the mob shooting themselves in the foot. It is the corporations and businesses that create jobs and make the benefits possible. (Reasonable regulation is necessary, but not choking regulations inspired by vilification.)

I hope he will choose someone like either Gov. Jindal or Gov. Palin.

The things I desire as a conservative are some changes from the domination of the liberal point of view.
How much longer and for what practical reason do we maintain a defunct and worthless organization like the UN ?
What can we do to stop the deliberate destruction of our identity and sovereignty by illegal immigration ?
When will we be allowed to deal with the energy shortage realistically without the fairy farts and moonbeam approach?
Can we slow or stop the constant and ever growing attack on our sensibilities through electronic media ?
What happened to freedom?
We are under attack from the moment we open our eyes in the morning till close them at night. Is the impulse among my neighbors ,to control each other, so strong that every waking moment I am being warned , cautioned , urged ,threatened and taught to avoid some unforseen menace?
I created a pithy tagline ( I thought) a few years ago to describe my frustration with the liberal viewpoint; and I still believe it to my core.
The first impulse of every utopian is to make the people obey the government.It is truer now than ever before.

You are correct in indicating that conservatives come to power when there is a crisis brought on by liberal mismanaqement. Without Jimmy Carter's display of arrogance combined joined with incompetence, I doubt that Reagam would have made it in 1980. It is worth noting, however, that Paul Volcker and the Fed had started moving to straighten things out in 1979.

Unfortunately, we are now in a crisis that many in the public will blame on Bush and the Republicans. The result is likely to be Democratic gains in Congress in the fall and a consequent deepening of the crisis. The political task that confronts the Republicans is to get the public to put the blame where it belongs.

Conservatism died a number of years ago with the swearing in of President Bush, H.W.. Gingrich attempted to resusitate it with the "Contract" and had ephemeral success.
Bush,Clinton,Clinton,W,W, finished the conservative movement.

Americans want a nanny state because the day to day problems they now face are too big for them to handle individually. The average American is a hyphenated American or a gun toting and Bible hugging maniac, and the hyphens are gaining rapidly. depending on how dumbed down one is, and there are are more and more needy.And we are way way dumbed down. Our school children no longer compete in international competitions because of fear of embarassment.

The needy don't need the nesessities. They "need" the big screen TV, SUV, and all the Jones'n they can go into debt for. Self sufficiency is only a phrase. The real juice is "from each acording to his abilities to each according to his debt level".

Strangely enough debt is the one thing the individual seems to control, witness by the financial worlds collapse, giving more and more credit to those who only ten years ago would have been turned down. The financial world discovered CMO's and unregulated derivatives. Shortly derivatives will begin to buy up banks and then the fun will really accelerate. CMO's and derivatives is all it took for their greed to run wild.

The "needy" knowing now that the nanny state will bail them out because everything now falls under the unbrella of "too big to fail"
So in the span of a generation we've gone from a creditor nation to the worlds largest debtor nation.

The old conservatives should just sit back and enjoy the destruction of the country because the road to serfdom now has no speed bumps or speed limits, and will soon have the guiding hand of an all Marxist socialist government. Enjoy the ride to third world status, or revolution.

After we've had a little more Democratic control,Conservatism will find its way back, believe me.

Conservatism died a number of years ago with the swearing in of President Bush, H.W.. Gingrich attempted to resusitate it with the "Contract" and had ephemeral success.
Bush,Clinton,Clinton,W,W, finished the conservative movement.

Americans want a nanny state because the day to day problems they now face are too big for them to handle individually. The average American is a hyphenated American or a gun toting and Bible hugging maniac, and the hyphens are gaining rapidly. depending on how dumbed down one is, and there are are more and more needy.And we are way way dumbed down. Our school children no longer compete in international competitions because of fear of embarassment.

The needy don't need the nesessities. They "need" the big screen TV, SUV, and all the Jones'n they can go into debt for. Self sufficiency is only a phrase. The real juice is "from each acording to his abilities to each according to his debt level".

Strangely enough debt is the one thing the individual seems to control, witness by the financial worlds collapse, giving more and more credit to those who only ten years ago would have been turned down. The financial world discovered CMO's and unregulated derivatives. Shortly derivatives will begin to buy up banks and then the fun will really accelerate. CMO's and derivatives is all it took for their greed to run wild.

The "needy" knowing now that the nanny state will bail them out because everything now falls under the unbrella of "too big to fail"
So in the span of a generation we've gone from a creditor nation to the worlds largest debtor nation.

The old conservatives should just sit back and enjoy the destruction of the country because the road to serfdom now has no speed bumps or speed limits, and will soon have the guiding hand of an all Marxist socialist government. Enjoy the ride to third world status, or revolution.

Gov. Jindal is needed to rebuild the City of Jazz, but the present Governor of Alaska or defeated primary rival, Huckabee, would be smart choices.

The new home of all this leftist radicalism is the green movement. I just saw a ad for me to wear less clothes to reduce my AC usage and save the planet. Listen up lefties; nobody is going to tell me how to live my life. I am sick of all this. The solution is more nuclear power, not me running around the house naked.
There is one solution. We must become the radicals of today. We must become the pain in the rear the left is to us. Until we adopt the forceful tactics of the left we will lose.
We must stop playing Mr. Nice and sell our ideals to the people.

The problem with doctrinal politics is the concept of "right" or "left" when the country is slightly right of center. Democrats are winning the propaganda war and Republicans cannot seem to articulate ideas an concepts well. I love Bush and think as a leader has set priorities well, as a speaker he has not been able to connect with the English language.
McCain has long been one of my favorites, (a caveat being no one can be all things to all people on all issues.) The secret to a McCain win is to be able to articulate that message. If he needs to be skilled in that art, hire the people who can improve his skills. Actors can play at being president, presidents make poor actors in most cases - the exception of course was Ronald Reagan. Obama was not born with a golden tongue he acquired it - more so than the knowledge to back it up. McCain acquired vast experience which is strong point. If he can convey that to the American public he should win a landslide election. The two candidates have been well defined in the primaries. McCain is the clear winner for all except the radical left which is defined by Obama.

IMHO, given that Marxism has thoroughly corrupted the Roman church, throughly penetrated every form of Christianity, thoroughly penetrated and inhabits boldly every niche of educational system worldwide, let alone here ... and that raw, naked Marxism has utterly corrupted our economic process and our media ... I don't see any possibe way that 'conservatism' - meaning, to me, the traditional values of the Boy Scouts, our Founding Fathers and our Christian heritage in this nation - have any hope of being anything anymore in America unless we have another Great Revival. Shy of God's Mighty Hand in our affairs, my opinion is we're headed merrily to being just another empty silhouette of Europe.

Look at Great Britain. God has obviously taken his protective hand off them for the unspeakable crimes committed against Israel and the children of Israel by a small cabal of English upper class. Take a good look, the United Kingdom is a foretaste of where we're going in about a decade.

Ayn Rand was wrong about a few things and right about a lot of things. One thing she was right about is that certain philosophies work while others, "all forms of Collectivism" in particular, do not work.

They MUST fail just as a aircraft made of rock simply won't fly, no matter how earnestly its designers believe, "yes we can."

A Space-Faring People would learn and adopt, as earlier Americans did, that failure costs lives, perhaps the lives of one's most beloved, or one's self.

The dominant anti-philosophy of Hegel's Synthesis, as opposed to Plato's logic, simply MUST eventually fail.

The attack on Truth as an a priori assumption underlying reality will fail, just as a spacesuit with only a small leak will demonstrate how impersonal a Hard Vacuum can be.

It is amazing how far we seem to have slipped that a man with such little experience of life can be allowed to work out his deep psychological confusion using the Democrat Party, and perhaps the nation for Encounter Therapy.

The cost for those of us standing "athwart history yelling, 'stop' may be high enough soon that revolution becomes a necessity.

Conservative thought is currently dominated by big government conservatives...those interested in capital formation, banking and big business.
Unfortunately, these people form a natural interest with government agencies, and a lot of the policies of the left. And they alienate the party base.
The majority of Republican votes are held by small government conservatives. The erosion of this base has been constant since the Bush I era. The era of Bush II spending and the war on terrorism exposed this weakness and has led to the current political collapse.
The big government conservatives have reverted to the policy prescriptions of the 50's...democrat-lite. Some of us remember how well that worked.

I think that Christopher Chantrill is overstating the case when it comes to David Cameron and England's Conservative Party. Voters may be up in arms over Labour's free-spending habits, but when the time comes to actually trim government programs I predict that many will shy away from it. "Don't cut me - cut that fella behind the tree" is the biggest obstacle any Conservative government has to overcome.

Part of the problem is many that used to be on the left only bumped slightly to the right on account of the WOT. Otherwise many that call themselves conservatives are not in any way, shape or form conservative. A true conservative cannot have a surrogate fake conservative as their mouthpiece. And I am not just talking about McCain. Many of the so-called conservative websites trash many ideas of their conservative readers, yet they stay there and legitamize the views that the website's owners have due to continuing to patronize them by their presence. Conservatives need to get a clue and figure out whose side they're own.

Sen. McCain is incapable of leading the conservative mantra because his instincts are to compromise for the reward of getting something done. Immigration reform is a prime example of this behavior. That he claims to have seen the light of conservative thought is a sham. Even his possible Supreme Court nominations would be, at best, centrist.

Conservatism requires a good deal more understanding than all other underlying philosophies of republics or other forms of governments.

Our general population, now either working or entertaining themselves do not have any idea or understanding of the great works that contributed to conservative ideology, whereas having a government based simply on redistributing wealth is easily understood and easily accepted. I see no change in this political-sociological paradigm.

With a Democratic Party takeover of government, including a supermajority in the Senate, an enlargement and stuffing of SCOTUS and all lower courts with Marxists is a given. That alone will guarnatee a perpetuation of Marxist-socialism for another fifty years no matter who controls the other two branches. It also consigns conservatism to a slow political anorexic demise.

And make no mistake, the Democrats will immediately go for "restructuring" of the courts.

I'm neither disoriented nor confused. I'm irate that this party can't seem to find any leaders who speak up for conservative causes. Bush thinks that would undignify the office of the Presidency. Instead a silent President has done that by doing nothing.
The only we can find are political clones who want to achieve a consensus, now lets go out and earmark something. There doesn't seem to anyone in power who has a conservative voice and vision. It's too bad that the grassroots isn't allowed to cast votes of confidence in our leadership instead of the permanent power arrangement that the current structure calls for.
There ain't no problems that a leader or two can't solve!

Denigration of Nixon's so-called southern strategy is an implicit argument that enemies of liberals and the left shouldn't have the right to vote. The southern strategy was put into play by the Kennedy administration, which according to Francis D. Adams and Barry Sanders' "Alienable Rights" (New York: HarperCollins, 2003) decided to make Democrats the party of blacks in the South circa 1962. The "best and brightest" didn't understand that by doing so they would replace the Republicans as the party of south-hating northern radicals, and they certainly didn't tell Southerners about this in 1960. James Piereson's "Camelot and the Cultural Revolution" (New York: Encounter Books, 2007) discusses how twentieth century liberalism had been perverted by the belief that the Constitution is an impediment to reform [p. 81] and were informed by Charles Beard's belief that the Constitution wasn't binding because it had been implemented to protect the Founders' property rights [p. 81]. They also believed that they were the "vital center" between troglodytes who believed in constitutional governance and the Left and that the belief in constitutional governance was a form of mental illness [pp. 7-8]. This was the mentality that lay behind Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, first proposed by Kennedy, and explains why it was a monumental failure. In less than a decade after Kennedy's election they had not only lost the White House by abandoning Southerners but had also left the extreme left, led by the allegedly anti-Communist John Kennedy's brothers, hijack their party.

The left-liberals despised the principles of federalism enshrined in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments and commonly called "states rights" because they were one of the impediments to left-liberal notions of "reform," which involved the establishment of the omnipotent central government required by the socialist state.

Contempt for "law and order" obviously stems from the left-liberal belief that crime is caused by social conditions which their enlightened policies will reverse and thus eliminate crime. This is obviously borrowed from Marx and has led to similar results as in the marxist states.

Rick Pearlstein's "Nixonland" turns this history on its head. The division of American society is the product of the ascendancy of perverted twentieth century liberalism that rejects the Constitution and its usurpation by the extreme Left. By 1964 the "cause of civil rights" had been suborned by the extreme Left, led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and perverted into an ethnic special interest movement to promote socialism. After all, King saw his movement as a "class struggle" [David Garrow, "The FBI and Martin Luther King, Jr." (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), p. 214]. The "best and brightest" were too dim to understand that the radicals who formed the heart of the so-called civil rights movement were leftists who saw liberalism as a form of fascism ("Amerika") and would go on to undermine the defense of South Vietnam. Barack Obama, Jeremiah Wright, and Father Pfleger are the natural consequence of the perversion of the civil rights movement.

I agree with WR Jonas on the issues to be considered. I don't agree that they are not bad enough for most Americans to sit up and pay attention. I just think we have too many people who vote and yet have no idea what they are voting for and what's at stake. You should hear what is happening at the polling places where uneducated people who have never voted before are appearing in droves. The only ones who should be allowed to vote are: land-owners, tax-payers, and educated people because they are the only ones who are putting something in the pot. Everyone else is just taking out.

Limited government is not an outdated concept. Mathematically speaking, it is practically axiomatic: Liberty goes to zero as government power goes to infinity.

Without any practical limit to how big government can get, and how many laws congress can pass, infinity is the only limit.

Republicans and conservatives need to be willing to poke liberals right back. For starters, the lie that: After 1964, the Democrats embraced, and the Republicans rejected, the cause of civil rights. The new conservative movement took root in opposition to the federal civil rights acts of 1964 and 1965."
LBJ's civil rights legislation never would have passed without the support of Republicans. Southern Democrats were firmly opposed to it. Those liberal Democrats that were so offended by southern Democrats never suggested they leave the party. Strom Thurmond, John Stennis, Al Gore Sr. and many others remained in Congress and Thurmond remained a Democrat long after that legislation was passed. Nothing drove southern Democrats to Richard Nixon and the Republicans more than the Democratic Left's positions on the Vietnam War, Communism and military spending. Nixon's "southern strategy" wasn't all that successful. It didn't increase GOP seats in Congress. The House remained firmly in Democratic hands for another quarter century, and the Senate was in GOP hands for just six of those years.
Conservatives aren't dead and they aren't resting. They're wandering in the wilderness.

There is nothing sensible about nominating McCain. With his track record, he is the best thing the democrats could ever wish for!

Look at the pork. If there are any conservatives left, they don't live in Congress. Farm Bill: $1000 per man, woman and child in America. Mortgage bailout: $1000 per man, woman and child in America. Katrina: a lifetime of government subsidies. Conservatives? No longer endangered . . . now extinct.

Conservatives are alive and well, and will be fighting for this country until the bitter end.

The intellectually honest ones are moving to 3rd parties.

The Republicans are now the socialists, taking the spot abandoned by the now communist Democrats.

Look at the two Big Party candidates for president! Either a revolution or the meek walk to the killing fields is right around the corner.

Whichever party wins the presidency this November will likely lose big for several elections afterwards. The massive debts that cannot be paid are bringing on economic conditions resembling the Great Depression, and that would sink any presidency. Whoever gets into power next January will have the big blow-up occurring on his watch, and almost surely have the public blame him for it. It's almost tempting to hope that the Democrats take the White House this time, so they rightly get the blame for exacerbating an economic crisis, if not causing it outright, and get rejected for the following 20 years or more when they mess things up so badly that the public realizes it's once again time for conservative solutions. I just hope that if Obama does win, the Democrats will not be able to inflict too much damage on the courts, the economy, global stability, and the country's reputation, before they are thrown out on their ears for a long time.

What you all are over-looking is that the GOP has become as much a party of big government and favor-selling as the Dems.

It is time to effectively smash the present two-party system and birth a dramatic realignment in American politics. For that reason I support and will vote for Bobb Barr in November.

Blood shoots out of my eyes when I continuously read comments that support Jindall or Palin as VP for McCain. The comments always include the need to have someone who understands the economy and can explain it, etc. There is NO OTHER person who has proven he can do that as well as Mitt Romney. Jindall is too young and only just now Governor and Palin will NEVER be emotionally or physically able to meet the demands of the VP or Presidency should anything happen to McCain. Five young children and one an infant with special needs will always bring her down - not that she would not want to do a good job but America needs and deserves someone ready to meet the 24/7 challenges without the emotional burden of five young children - and do not tell me she can do it - I am a woman professional who had only 2 children and you simply cannot give what the job demands when they are so young. America let the best candidate go when Mitt Romney left the race. We need him as VP and then President in 2012 - he has proven himself time and again and will be an excellent leader in all respects.

President Jindall 2016, Louisiana needs him until then.
Phil Gram and Dick Armtage, both PhDs in economics, have both been targeted by the MSM with lies and gossip and shoved out of the public square. Can you imagine a more ringing endorsement to head a VP search committee?