The Four Pillars of Conservatism

Author’s note: This is an update of a post I published last winter on several blogs (now closed) that I was maintaining in support of Fred Thompson’s candidacy for the GOP Presidential nomination.

Mitt Romney, in his speech to the Family Research Council’s Values Voters summit last October, told the assembled faithful:

I want to build a stronger military, a stronger economy, and stronger families. I call these the three legs of the Republican stool. These three unite the coalition of conservatives that Ronald Reagan championed—defense conservatives, economic conservatives, and social conservatives.

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We won’t win the White House with only 2 out of 3 or 1 out of 3. Republicans win the White House by motivating all 3 parts of our coalition to carry us to victory.

Close, Guv’nor, but no cigar. The cigar goes to Fred Thompson. Buy him a box of  La Gloria Cubanas. The three-legged stool is an unfortunate choice of metaphor for conservatives. It tips and falls over when its occupant leans too far in any one direction. That’s why the great majority of stools, chairs, tables, etc. have four legs, not three. It makes for a more stable platform. The three-legged stool also becomes much more unsteady if one of the legs is cut even a little shorter than the other two. This renders it just about useless.

In Mitt’s defense, he’s not the only one who doesn’t understand the underpinnings of conservatism. After Ronald Reagan, many conservatives thought that there were indeed only three legs underneath their movement, but along came the big government, big-spending “conservatives” who had lost their sense of balance somewhere along the way. At first they cut just a little off of the economic leg of the stool. Then they cut a little more, until the stool was left so tilted that it could no longer support anything of substance. The two pieces that were sawed off of the fiscal leg were lower spending and smaller government. Virtually all that remains of that orginal economic leg is lower taxes. What are conservatives to do about this? Should we try to pick up the pieces and glue them back on the leg?

Perhaps it would be a better not to use the milking stool as an allegory for the principles underlying conservatism. I prefer the sumbolism of a solid building built on a strong foundation of four substantial pillars, not three. The fiscal column which helps support the edifice needs to be the same length as the others, with more emphasis on lower spending. And we can invite libertarian conservatives back into the fold to help us raise the fourth buttress. Call it federalism, small government or whatever you want to, but it’s an underpinning which is about more than just fiscal matters and should not be lumped in with economic issues. Libertarian conservatives and federalists have for too long been given the short leg of the old three-legged Republican stool, and the coalition needs both of these essential parts to strengthen the whole.

Big government and big spending in the guise of conservatism and a myopic focus on social concerns have made a mess out of Ronald Reagan’s coalition of conservatives. By focusing only on narrow views of what conservatism should mean, some erstwhile conservatives have failed to show due respect for the other essential parts of the coalition. Big governmentalism has done this by attempting to redefine economic conservatism, ignoring the need to reduce government spending at the federal level. Some interpretations of social conservatism have led to the snubbing of economic and small government conservatives altogether. The emphasis on social conservatism at the expense of other essential conservative principles has chased away many of the libertarian conservatives, while federalists have, since Reagan’s death, been put away in the attic like some crazy aunt or uncle.

Ronald Wilson Reagan considered federalism to be a bedrock “first principle”, and he committed himself to revitalizing that principle:

Of all his accomplishments, perhaps the most profound part of the Reagan legacy — and we hope the most enduring — was President Reagan’s commitment to our nation’s Constitution and its explication of federalism, though that foundation had been neglected for most of the 20th century. With the constitutional aberrations of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society well-embedded in the nation’s collective consciousness, Reagan’s commitment to constitutionally limited government and the pre-eminence of the states in the American system envisioned by the Founders came as a much-needed shock to the system.

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Issued on 26 October 1987, President Reagan’s Executive Order 12612 on federalism speaks directly to the point. Indicating federalism’s “fundamental principles,” Reagan wrote as crisply and cogently as Madison, Hamilton or Jay ever did: “Federalism is rooted in the knowledge that our political liberties are best assured by limiting the size and scope of the national government. … The people of the States created the national government when they delegated to it those enumerated governmental powers relating to matters beyond the competence of the individual States. … All other sovereign powers, save those expressly prohibited the States by the Constitution, are reserved to the States or to the people.”

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Unlike many of his political contemporaries, Reagan understood that the fundamental premise of American society, and that society’s greatness, did not reside in, nor was it regulated by, Washington. Instead, he understood that “The people of the States are free, subject only to restrictions in the Constitution itself or in constitutionally authorized Acts of Congress, to define the moral, political, and legal character of their lives.”

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Likewise, the President wrote, “In most areas of governmental concern, the States uniquely possess the constitutional authority, the resources, and the competence to discern the sentiments of the people and to govern accordingly.” Quoting Thomas Jefferson, Reagan added that the States are “the most competent administrations for our domestic concerns and the surest bulwarks against antirepublican tendencies.”

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Never known for his integrity, constitutional or otherwise, Bill Clinton revoked EO 12612 in 1998 and replaced it with EO 13083, which largely re-justified the excessive unconstitutional role the federal government has assumed since the time of Franklin Roosevelt.

Although Reagan’s executive order was re-established under the Bush administration, the President has mostly ignored it, allowing the federal leviathan to grow even larger than it did under Clinton.

Conservatives need to honor President Reagan by putting federalism back on the front burner. It should be one of our first principles, just as it was for Reagan.

Though his presidential campaign started late and never caught up, It was Fred Thompson who offered the best balance for movement conservatives. On economic and small government issues, he is still regarded favorably. Like John McCain amd most of his former rivals for the GOP presidential nomination, Fred’s strong on security matters. On social issues he’s pro-life, but his prosposal for a consitutional amendment to prevent state judges from altering the definition of marriage without the direction of their states’ legislatures falls short of the federal amendment banning gay marriage that most social conservatives favor.

Fred’s federalist principles have clearly put him at odds with many social conservatives on this one issue. Which begs the question of which tradeoffs are some social conservatives willing to cointinue to make? Was rejecting Thompson on this one issue a matter of cutting off noses to spite faces? The bar for getting any amendment incorporated into our constitution was intentionally set very high by the founders, who were so dedicated to the constitution they bequeathed us that they wanted us to think long and hard before we attempt to change it. If conservatives sacrifice security in exchange for promises of a federal amendment banning gay marriage, we could be making a deal which may not deliver the goods and could weaken our nation, especially at its borders. If we trade federalist principles for the same promises, there’s still have no guarantee of getting such an amendment, and the federal government will keep on growing, perhaps to the point where it can’t be stopped.

In addition, we will betray one of those first principles which Ronald Reagan stood for. As J.B. Williams has pointed out:

Reagan was most conservative in the arena of national security and firm foreign policy. Reagan understood that America was the only nation in the world with the power and moral authority to defend freedom and liberty around the globe, in defense of freedom and liberty here. Reagan commanded respect across the political aisle at home and abroad and remains one of the most loved US Presidents in US history even today.

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But he was somewhat liberal on social issues. Or, like Thompson, he was at least an anti-federalist who sought to return private assets and personal liberty to the states and the people at every chance.

Some conservatives need to sit down and think carefully about how John McCain came to be the 2008 nominee of the Republican Party. There’s a lesson all conservatives should take to heart. We need leadership which can bring economic, security and small government conservatives together with social conservatives to defeat the Democrats, dust off Ronald Reagan’s blueprints and rebuild the Republican party and the nation. Fred Thompson is no longer a presidential candidate for 2008, but he is a leader who can teach us a few things about balancing our conservative principles.

And who knows? Some conservatives are already drawing up their checklists for 2012.

- JP

‘The Axis of Idiots’ by J. D. Pendry - Sergeant Major, USMC, Retired

‘The Axis of Idiots’

 
Jimmy Carter, you are the father of the Islamic Nazi movement.  You threw the Shah under the bus, welcomed the Ayatollah home, and then lacked the spine to confront the terrorists when they took our embassy and our people hostage.  You’re the runner-in-chief. 
 
Bill Clinton, you played ring around the Lewinsky while the terrorists were at war with us.  You got us into a fight with them in Somalia and then you ran from it.  Your weak-willed responses to the U.S.S. Cole and the First Trade Center Bombing and Our Embassy Bombings emboldened the killers.  Each time you failed to respond adequately, they grew bolder, until 9/11/2001. 
 
John Kerry, dishonesty is your most prominent attribute.  You lied about American Soldiers in Vietnam ..  Your military service, like your life, is more fiction than fact.  You’ve accused our military of terrorizing women and children in  Iraq ..  You called Iraq   the wrong war, wrong place, wrong time, the same words you used to describe Vietnam ..  You’re a fake.  You want to run from Iraq and abandon the Iraqis to murderers just as you did the Vietnamese.   Iraq , like Vietnam , is another war that you were for, before you were against it. 
 
John Murtha, you said our military was broken.  You said we can’t win militarily in Iraq ..  You accused United States Marines of cold-blooded murder without proof and said we should redeploy to Okinawa .   Okinawa, John?   And the Democrats call you their military ex pert!   Are you sure you didn’t suffer a traumatic brain injury while you were off building your war hero resume?   You’re a sad, pitiable, corrupt and washed up politician.  You’re not a Marine, sir.  You wouldn’t amount to a good pimple on a real Marine’s backside.  You’re a phony and a disgrace.  Run away, John. 
 
Dick Durbin, you accused our Soldiers at Guantanamo of being Nazis, tenders of Soviet style gulags and as bad as the regime of Pol Pot, who murdered two million of his own people after your party abandoned Southeast Asia to the Communists.  Now you want to abandon the Iraqis to the same fate.  History was not a good teacher for you, was it?  Lord help us!  See Dick run.. 
 
Ted Kennedy, for days on end you held poster-sized pictures from Abu Ghraib in front of any available television camera.  Al Jazeera  quoted you saying that Iraqi’s torture chambers were open under new management.  Did you see the news, Teddy?   The Islamic Nazis demonstrated another beheading for you.  If you truly supported our troops, you’d show the world poster-sized pictures of that atrocity and demand the annihilation of it.  Your legislation stripping support from the South Vietnamese led to a communist victory there.  You’re a bloated, drunken fool bent on repeating the same historical blunder that turned freedom-seeking people over to homicidal, genocidal maniacs.  To paraphrase John Murtha, all while sitting on your wide, gin-soaked rear-end in  Washington … 
 
Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Carl Levine, Barbara Boxer, Diane Feinstein, Russ Feingold, Hillary Clinton, Pat Leahy, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, the Holly wood Leftist morons, et al, ad nauseam; Every time you stand in front of television cameras and broadcast to the Islamic Nazis that we went to war because our President lied, that the war is wrong and our Soldiers are torturers, that we should leave Iraq, you give the Islamic butchers - the same ones that tortured and mutilated American Soldiers - cause to think that we’ll run away again, and all they have to do is hang on a little longer. It is inevitable that we, the infidels, will have to defeat the Islamic jihadists. Better to do it now on their turf, than later on ours after they have gained both strength and momentum. 
 
American news media, the New York Times particularly:  Each time you publish stories about national defense secrets and our intelligence gathering methods, you become one united with the sub-human pieces of camel dung that torture and mutilate the bodies of American Soldiers.  You can’t strike up the courage to publish cartoons, but you can help Al Qaeda destroy my country.  Actually, you are more dangerous to us than Al Qaeda is.  Think about that each time you face Mecca to admire your Pulitzer.
 
You are America ’s ‘AXIS OF IDIOTS.’  Your Collective Stupidity will destroy us.  Self-serving politics and terrorist-abetting news scoops are more important to you than our national security or the lives of innocent civilians and Soldiers.  It bothers you that defending ourselves gets in the way of your elitist sport of politics and your ignorant editorializing.  There is as much blood on your hands as is on the hands of murdering terrorists.  Don’t ever doubt that.  Your frolics will only serve to extend this war as they extended Vietnam …  If you want our Soldiers home as you claim, knock off the crap and try supporting your country ahead of supporting your silly political aims and aiding our enemies.
 
Yes, I’m questioning your patriotism.  Your loyalty ends with self.  I’m also questioning why you’re stealing air that decent Americans could be breathing.  You don’t deserve the protection of our men and women in uniform.  You need to run away from this war, this country.   Leave the war to the people who have the will to see it through and the country to people who are willing to defend it. 
 
No, Mr. President, you don’t get off the hook, either.  Our country has two enemies: Those who want to destroy us from the outside and those who attempt it from within.  Your Soldiers are dealing with the outside force.  It’s your obligation to support them by confronting the AXIS OF IDIOTS.
 
America must hear it from you that these self-centered people are harming our country, abetting the enemy and endangering our safety.  Well up a little anger, please, and channel it toward the appropriate target.  You must prosecute those who leak national security secrets to the media.  You must prosecute those in the media who knowingly publish those secrets.
 
Our Soldiers need you to confront the enemy that they cannot.  They need you to do it now.

Hillary’s Great Plan to Raise Taxes!

To further play off JP’s post yesterday we look at Hillary’s plan for the gas tax holiday for the summer.  She is proposing to temporarily lift the federal gas tax for the summer and in classic socialist spirit thinks that this tax break must be "paid for".  Once again government never does with less it’s always the people who must do with less and you will be doing with less of your money if this plan goes through.

Hillary wants a windfall profits tax on the oil companies to "pay for" the loss in revenue that government would have lost.  The problem is that this tax will not be paid for by the oil companies it will be paid for by consumers at the pump.  Yes the price would go down because the federal tax being removed but would be replaced by a price increase of at least the same amount so the oil companies could pay the tax.  This windfall profits tax also wouldn’t expire at the end of the summer so the price increase would be permanent.

Last but not least the expiration of the gas tax holiday would come around labor day and prices would shoot up 18.4 cents per gallon just in time for the election.

There are plenty of people that thing Hillary’s idea is a good one.  Obama is much more brash, he wants the windfall profits tax but doesn’t want the gas tax holiday.  Just like all libs he wants all the power and all the money.

How about we remove all federal taxes on oil companies, gas purchases, etc.  That should drop the price 50 or 60 cents.  While we’re at it let’s start drilling for oil everywhere, Alaska, off the coast of California, the Gulf of Mexico, etc. 

And while we’re at it why do we have legislation mandating basic economics education to run for congress or the White House!

How about a windbag prophets tax?

The Democrats are a political party so devoid of ideas that they can’t even come up with new bad proposals and are reduced to simply reinventing their old terrible ideas. A case in point is the so-called windfall tax on oil company profits. Both Dem contenders for the presidency favor a version of this old turkey.

Here’s the Barack Obama flavor:

Obama proposes oil companies be taxed on windfall profits from oil sold at or above 80 dollars a barrel, and the revenue be used to help relieve the burden of rising prices on working people, according to his campaign.

Hillary Clinton has gone past the proposal stage and has actually introduced a windfall tax measure:

Mrs. Clinton introduced legislation in the Senate today proposing [a] gas tax holiday and covering the cost of it through a “windfall profits” tax on oil companies, a campaign spokesman said.

Wait just a sec… Haven’t we been down this rocky road before? In the words of one of major league basesball’s most colorful characters, former Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, “This is like deja vu all over again.” The AP’s Daniel Sorid writes:

…even liberals would have a hard time defending the country’s last experience with a windfall tax, in 1980.

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What began as a compromise by the Carter administration to lift ceilings on oil prices grew into a bureaucratic nightmare that Congress in 1984 called the “largest and most complex tax ever levied on a U.S. industry.” The law produced nowhere near the revenue it promised, made the country more reliant on foreign oil, and generated reams of red tape, according to a 2006 report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service.

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The law was put out of its misery in 1988, two-and-a-half years before it would have automatically expired.

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“It’s a terrible idea today,” said Phil Verleger, who helped design the windfall tax policy as the Treasury Department’s director of domestic energy policy from 1977 to 1979. “The windfall profit tax was a quo for a quid; the quid was price decontrol. There’s no quid right now.”

Well, Mr. Verleger, it was a bad idea then, too. According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), the 1980s windfall profits tax depressed the domestic production and extraction industry and furthered our dependence on foreign sources of oil.

Let me repeat that for those you on drugs or afflicted with terminal liberalism. Ver. 1.0 of the windfall oil profit tax was a disaster for the nation from which it has never recovered. Domestic oil producers found it unprofitable to produce, and the United States became even more dependent on foreign oil than it had been. It  is a major contributing factor to the situation we find ourselves in today: between Iraq and a hard place.

Why, then, in the name of all that makes sense, should this nation go back to doing something that not only did not work the first time, but was a major source of many of the energy woes we are experiencing today? Cynical conservatives are tempted to say that it is because socialists, despite the nearly universal failures of socialism throughout history, just can’t resist trying it again, hoping the results will be different this time.

The real answer is just as cynical. The oil companies are simply too inviting a target for the political left. They are fond of repeating that the oil companies are making billions of dollars of profit. Never mind that Exxon-Mobil’s profit margin of 10.7% pales in copmparison to some other well-know American corporations:

If you’re after really big earners… check out Yahoo (a 45.5 percent profit margin), Citigroup (33.4 percent), Intel (24 percent), and Apple (22.7 percent).

Never mind that Exxon-Mobil paid nearly $3 in taxes for every $1 in income. The company’s first quarter tax bill was $30 Billion.

Never mind that among Exxon-Mobil’s larest stockholders are not just individual fat cat shareholders such as the the Rockerfeller family, but many pension funds and mutual funds as well. Penalizing the big oil companies will simply force them to protect their shareholders by passing along the tax increases to consumers, who always pay the ultimate price for the left’s attacks on capitalism.

Those of us who take the time and trouble to study history do so because it is such an excellent teacher. It was the American-born philosopher George Santayana who is credited with the quote which would seem to explain the Democrats’ myopia on oil company profits:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

But it is another one of his quotes, and from the same source, which puts that first quote in context and best describe’s the Dems’ obsession with meddling in the affairs of the corporations they love to attack:

Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

These liberal Democats and their two favorite candidates for the leadership of the free world are fanatics. As a conservative, I can think of one tax which I would support - a tax not on windfall profits, but rather one on windbag prophets.

- JP

Calibrate your BS detectors!

From motortrend.com:

SIOUX FALLS, S.D., Dec. 5 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Research findings released today show that mid-range ethanol blends–fuel mixtures with more ethanol than E10 but less than E85–can in some cases provide better fuel economy than regular unleaded gasoline, even in standard, non-flex-fuel vehicles.

Previous assumptions held that ethanol’s lower energy content directly correlates with lower fuel economy for drivers. Those assumptions were found to be incorrect. Instead, the new research strongly suggests that there is an “optimal blend level” of ethanol and gasoline–most likely E20 or E30–at which cars will get better mileage than predicted based strictly on the fuel’s per-gallon Btu content. The new study, cosponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy and the American Coalition for Ethanol (ACE), also found that mid-range ethanol blends reduce harmful tailpipe emissions.

Whoa, time out! The American Coalition for what? For Ethanol? What a relief to find that one of the co-sponsors of the study has no axe to grind. As for the other co-sponsor, DOE, wasn’t that the agency of the federal government that has been hyping the use of ethanol as a motor fuel for years?

Excuse me, my BS detector is in the red zone…

You don’t have to be a node on the Psychic Friends Network to see what’s behind this new PR offensive by the ethanol lobby and its bought-and-paid-for politicians. Recent news reports of the spike in food prices and the rising number of the world’s hungry have put Big Ethanol in a bad light. The short-sightedness of the rush to use ethanol as a motor fuel is being exposed, and the folks who were making out like bandits over the diversion of corn from food crop to fuel crop are worried - very worried.

Notice that the news release pushes the idea of E20 and E30 as “optimal” blends of ethanol and gasoline. This is important for several reasons. First and formost among them is the fact that Big Ethanol has taken a fallback position. Things are looking so bleak for them that they are no longer touting E85 as the energy savior of the world. They are seriously trying to cut their future losses here. They realize that the amount of ethanol in a gallon of gasoline needed to replace MTBE as an additive to oxygenate gasoline (as mandated by Congress) is less than 4% or 5%. E10 is the traditional “gasohol” mixure of 10% ethanol in every gallon of gasoline, and they are afraid that when E85 is abandoned - and it will be abandoned soon - we will settle on E10 as the standard blend. So now they are promoting stronger doses of their bad medicine - two times and three times the amound of ethanol than in E10 as that which is “optimal” for todays cars. Their proof? Read on…

The University of North Dakota Energy & Environmental Research Center (EERC) and the Minnesota Center for Automotive Research (MnCAR) conducted the research using four 2007 model vehicles: a Toyota Camry, a Ford Fusion and two Chevrolet Impalas, one flex-fuel and one non-flex-fuel. Researchers used the EPA Highway Fuel Economy Test (HWFET) to examine a range of ethanol-gasoline blends from straight Tier 2 gasoline up to 85 percent ethanol. All of the vehicles got better mileage with ethanol blends than the ethanol’s energy content would predict, and three out of four actually traveled farther on a mid-level ethanol blend than on unleaded gasoline.

So, “researchers” at state universities in two of the corn-growingest states in the union found that cars which are specifically tuned for ethanol perform better in economy tests on ethanol than they do on gasoline. Well, duh! Cars actually perform better on the fuel they are tuned for than on the fuel they are not tuned for. What a shocker!

Expect much more of the same kind of bogus “studies” like this one in the near future. Meanwhile, real research is showing some promising new technologies are moving forward which can, among other things, lead to producing “green” gasoline directly from cellulose. No conversion to ethanol needed, thank you very much. This has Big Ag beside itself. After all, states where food crops don’t grow without intensive inputs of fertilizers, pesticides and, yes, energy, can grow switchgrass without much trouble. Along with weeds, chips from scrap wood and other cellulosic “wastes” are perfect feedstocks for these emerging processes.

Big Ag is afraid that it will soon be reduced to doing what it has bragged about doing in its past TV commercials - feeding a hungry world. There’s not as much quick profit to be made there than in producing a fuel feedstock which is an inefficient use of time, land, chemicals and farm fuel. Especially if ADM and other big farmers have to go back to producing more food, thus increasing the supply and driving down prices.

Big Ag is even more afraid of losing its generous federal government subsidies for growing corn for fuel. Many are now questioning the “wisdom” of such a counterproductive waste of the taxpayers’ money. They are also questioning the practice of such protectionist measures as high tariffs on the importation of ethanol from Brazil and other parts of the world.

E10 solves the MTBE problem with more ethanol than is needed for the task. Fine. Let them have their 10%, but this and no more.

- JP

Fred Thompson Tells It Like It Is…As Always.

There are certain truths that we can’t afford to forget or allow to be swept aside in concentrating on some side-show subject as we’ve done in the recent past. If we’re going to maintain our liberty we’ld better start demonstrating we’re capable;

THOMPSON: “Well, the question is whether or not we’ve kind of learned our lesson. You know, we — as the old saying goes, you know, we came to town to drain the swamp, and we — instead of that we made partners with the alligators. And now we’ve become, you know, big spenders ourselves and engaged in the same kind of stuff the Democrats have been engaged in. Have we learned our lesson? We got our clocks cleaned last time.

We need to reform ourselves. We need to learn our lesson. We need to get back to basic fundamental conservative principals. The things that we are supposed to believe in, which should guide us through all these issues that come down the pipe.

The problem is, as we sit here today, very few people on Capitol Hill have any credibility. Saying it is one thing. Saying a, you know, death- bed confession or conversion is one thing, but having a track record and standing tall when times are tough is another thing…”

“…We can’t run a typical campaign with typical kind of promises and so forth in light of what’s happened, in light of the unpopularity that so many Republicans have nowadays. And some of it’s deserved. Some of it’s not. We’ve got to have a different kind of approach, different kind of campaign and a different kind of man…”

 Sean Hannity Interview On FOX News on 4/24/08    http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,352582,00.html

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