Right Wing Nut House

We are in a full fledged Indian Summer here in central Illinois - or, for those sensitive folk who believe it a sin to invoke any racial references even if they are positive, let’s call the 70 degree weather, gorgeous sunny sky, and the light wind sweetly scented with the smell of burning leaves “false” summer.

False, or Indian, it doesn’t matter. It is the last gasp of the seductress Summer, her last shimmy, her last provocative wiggle before her father, Old Man Winter comes barging into the room to check and see if we’re necking.

Nature is doing her yearly Technicolor thing - the autumn raiment covering the trees is really striking; spectacular deep reds on the maple across the street, elegant yellow-orange on the oaks lining the block, somber burnt umber covering the hickory. Is autumn a melancholy time for everyone? Perhaps it’s knowing what’s ahead that depresses me; the annual struggle with snow blowers, biting cold, dark skies, short days, and the lonely winds that whip across the prairie sod seeking a way through the weatherproofing to chill our bones.

Election day in America is held in November with a bow toward our yeoman farmers who would be too busy with the harvest to have time for politicking. Any later in the year and the roads would be impassable due to snowfall. So the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November seemed about right. Farmers could make the long, arduous journey to town and cast their ballot for the state’s electors. Back in the day, the presidential candidate’s name appeared nowhere on the ballot. Citizens elected people to represent them in the electoral college. Of course, everyone knew which candidate the elector was supporting so it felt almost like they were voting directly for Washington, or Adams, or Jefferson.

Eventually, states put the name of the candidate on the ballot, usually alongside that of the elector supporting him. It is an imperfect system and no doubt many Democrats wish to do away with it. But I sincerely hope they don’t if for no other reason than many of the arguments made at the Constitutional Convention in favor of the Electoral College still pass muster with me today. (I make many of those arguments here).

All of that is in the past and today, we find ourselves on the cusp of history. An African American may very well win an historic victory while the Reagan revolution - a cause for which I worked directly or indirectly for almost 30 years - is being swept away. As I have noted, change is part of the bargain if you want to be an American and accepting change is the key to thriving in this country. But I have an old man’s attachment to the causes of my youth and it will be difficult to see something that began with so much promise swept away due to the negligence, the cynicism, and the incompetence of the inheritors of it.

I read Ross Douthat’s melancholy post this morning and found myself nodding in agreement all the way through it. Now, Ross is one of them “elitist” conservatives in that he has more than two brain cells working at the same time and has actually written a book with big words in it - not like conservative hero Sean Hannity who makes it easy for us common folk to read by never using a word with more than 4 syllables in it. “Cotton candy conservatism” I call Hannity’s pablum. And that’s insulting cotton candy.

Here, he articulates my exact feelings about Bush and McCain:

I had a succession of meals last week with smart conservative friends, and I found them all relatively sanguine about the defeat that’s almost certainly about to be inflicted on the American Right. Each of them, in different ways, express a mix of enthusiasm for the “whither conservatism” battles ahead and relief at the prospect of finally closing the books on the Bush years. This has been an exhausting Presidency for conservatives as well as liberals, and for many people on the Right the prospect of being out of power has obvious upsides: No longer will every foul-up and blunder in Washington be treated as an indictment of Conservatism with a capital C; no longer will right-wingers feel obliged to carry water, whether in small or large amounts, for a government that’s widely perceived as a failure; and no longer will the Right have the dead weight of an unpopular president dragging it down and down and down. Defeat will be depressing, of course - none of my friends were Obamacons by any stretch - but it could be liberating as well.

This was how I expected to feel about a McCain defeat, too, and I’ve been trying to figure out why I don’t - why I feel instead so grouchy and embittered (clinging to my guns and my religion, and all that), and more dispirited than liberated. I didn’t have particularly high hopes for a McCain-led ticket in the first place: I never went in for the Mac-worship many journalists have practiced over the years, and part of me was dreading having to spend four years trying to explain that yes, I want a reformed conservatism, but no, I don’t like the kind of reform-ish quasi-conservatism that the McCain Administration is advancing. And then there were all the other reasons to think that a GOP defeat might not be so bad: You can’t win every election; it’s hard for a political party to change its ways without the clarifying effects of a devastating defeat; Obama’s a smart guy who’ll probably make at least some policy choices I support; the election of a black President will be a great day for America; etc.

I stopped “carrying water” for Bush a couple of years ago but I know exactly what Ross is talking about. He has exhausted himself having to defend some basic conservative tenets that, however imperfectly were advanced by the Bush Administration, nevertheless many of us felt obliged to point out the danger of the alternative. That and the constant drone of hyperbolic, rabidly partisan dissent left one feeling as if wrung through a wringer.

Tired, a little dispirited, Douthat takes the words out of my head and puts them on paper:

But I think the deeper reason for my political gloom has to do with something that Jonah Goldberg raised in our bloggingheads chat about conservatism - namely, the sense that the era now passing represented a great opportunity to put into practice the sort of center-right politics that I’d like to see from the Republican Party, and that by failing the way it did the Bush Administration may have cut the ground out from under my own ideas before I’d even figured out exactly what they were. As I said to Jonah. I have all sorts of disagreements with the specific ways President Bush attempted to renovate the GOP, on the level of policy and philosophy alike. But the fact remains that the renovation Bush attempted was an effort to respond to some of the political, social and economic trends that Reihan and I discuss in Grand New Party - and those of us who want a reformed conservatism have to recognize Bush’s attempt, and reckon with his failure.

This is by no means a new insight, but it’s one that’s been brought home to me by the looming end of the Bush Era and the struggles of the McCain campaign. Conservatism in the United States faces a series of extremely knotty problems at the moment. How do you restrain the welfare state at a time when the entitlements we have are broadly popular, and yet their design puts them on a glide path to insolvency? How do you respond to the socioeconomic trends - wage stagnation, social immobility, rising health care costs, family breakdown, and so forth - that are slowly undermining support for the Reaganite model of low-tax capitalism? How do you sell socially-conservative ideas to a moderate middle that often perceives social conservatism as intolerant? How do you transform an increasingly white party with a history of benefiting from racially-charged issues into a party that can win majorities in an increasingly multiracial America? etc.

Here are my own thoughts from a post I wrote after the 2006 mid term debacle:

The disconnect I speak of above arises from the cage that Republican candidates have been placed in by the various factions of conservatism that makes them slaves to an agenda that is out of date, out of touch, and after 2008, there’s a good chance that it will lead to Republicans being out of luck.

Breaking out of that cage will be difficult unless the party continues to lose at the polls. And part of that breaking free will be making the Reagan legacy a part of history and not a part of contemporary Republican orthodoxy. The world that Reagan helped remake is radically different than the one we inhabit today and yet, GOP candidates insist on invoking his name as if it is a talisman to be stroked and fondled, hoping that the magic will rub off on them. Reagan is gone and so is the world where his ideas resonated so strongly with the voters.

But Reagan’s principles remain with us. Free markets, free nations, and free men is just as powerful a tocsin today as it was a quarter century ago. The challenge is to remake a party and the conservative movement into a vessel by which new ideas about governing a 21st century industrialized democracy can be debated, adopted, and enacted. Without abandoning our core beliefs while redefining or perhaps re-imagining what those beliefs represent as a practical matter, conservatism could recharge itself and define a new relationship between the governed and the government.

But before reform comes the fall. And even if, as Yglesias believes is possible, the party and the movement are able to limp along for a few years with a cobbled together coalition, eventually the piper must be paid and the wages earned. It won’t be a quick or easy process. But it will happen nonetheless.

Ross and I are on the same wavelength although he has obviously given a lot more thought to the nuts and bolts of refashioning the conservative movement. But we both crave big answers to the big questions. How can small government conservatism be relevant in an era (probably permanent) where the people demand more and more from government? What role can conservatism play in a modern, 21st century industrialized democracy? What is the conservative answer to the nationalizing of health insurance or education policy? Is simple opposition all we are capable of?

The old truisms and bromides just don’t work anymore. The context has changed but we are still trying to squeeze the old verities into the framework of people’s expectations and desires with regard to government. There is, as I said, a “disconnect” that is so obvious, the American voter no longer sees conservatism as being relevant to their own lives.

I am not a believer in predestination. I do not think the future is set by any means. The future will be what we make of it - no more, no less. It is this hope that I cling to as I watch with sorrow the beliefs and work of my adult lifetime rejected en masse by the voters.

So be it.

If there has been one constant throughout American history, it has been that this is a nation that stands still for nothing or no one, that our gaze has always been locked on some distant horizon, leaving the present to take care of itself while caring little for our past.

This has led to some truly remarkable - dare I say “exceptional” - qualities in the American character. Some of these attributes have allowed us to perform almost magical feats of transformative metamorphosis, turning disadvantages into virtues while finding the good in the worst of situations. This kind of optimism is not unique to America. But we are the only nation that makes a civic virtue of it. As our ancestors hacked a civilization out the wilderness with nothing more than a few crude tools and a boundless hope for the future, something took hold in the spirit of those pioneers and settlers that allowed them to live in what can only be described as primitive conditions.

Always on the edge of starvation and with little coin or currency in their possession that would mitigate their hardscrabble existence, it was the realization that what they were doing was for their children and grandchildren that gave them the grim determination to tough it out and brave the dangers from man and beast in order to build something permanent out of what previously had been wild and untamed.

These people were hoping for change - they were counting on it. They were praying for it. And as the years passed and the land turned over, the future arrived with all the promise and hope for which our ancestors worked, bled, wept, fought, and died to effect. It was their vision, their expectations for the future that we build on today.

We are standing on the shoulders of giants as we look to the future in these uncertain times. We too, have a vision of America that we hope that someday will be realized. It is nothing like the America envisioned by our ancestors and this is how it should be. It is how it was with them as they helped create an America not as their grandfathers saw it but as they were able to imagine it.

The beauty of America is that each generation, each incarnation of Americans has the freedom, the ability, and the right to see an America they wish their children and grandchildren to live in and then try and shape their individual present and future to fit that notion. We practically invented the idea of the common man as an important player in history. And each succeeding epoch proves that the real catalyst for change is not politicians mouthing platitudes but ordinary people moving mountains - one rock at a time.

Many of us are fearful of the future if Barack Obama wins the presidency and the liberals dominate the Congress. All manner of evils are imagined. “America won’t be the same,” is the cry most often heard on the right. Some even go so far as to say the America we live in now will be no more and a new America will supplant the old one.

I have rejected that notion as totally unrealistic. But there is absolutely no doubt that change is coming. This would be true whether McCain or Obama were to be elected. This change has been happening right under our noses for decades and is only now being brought out in bas relief as a result of the election where conservatives have awakened with a start and realized that the American people are not responding the way they once did to our ideas, our beliefs, our issues.

Yes, a large part of that is the damage done to the conservative cause by Republicans claiming to be conservative but who betrayed everything that conservatism stands for. But, if you care to look beneath the surface of the voter’s anger, what you see are changed attitudes toward America, altered perceptions of the country as our citizens wrestle with change.

The changes wrought by war, by globalization, by a slowly evolving realization that our national identity itself is changing are merely catalysts that people can put their finger on to describe their unease. In truth, none of these things affect people where they live except in the grossest, macro sense that filters down through the media.

Consider:

* Our industrial sector has been shrinking for more than 35 years. We are no longer the “workshop of the world” and the high paying, comfortable middle class wages paid for those jobs are gone as well. The rapid pace of change has made the American worker expendable - unless he adapts to the new paradigm and adopts a skill that is in demand in this new world.

* While still the world’s leading economic and military superpower, we have discovered that nobody wants to fight us in the traditional ways of war and instead, our enemies prefer to engage in “asymmetrical warfare” where the odds are evened out and our will is tested more than our equipment or men.

* Demographically, the US is becoming less white, less suburban, more secular, and more educated.

These world-historic forces that are driving these change are bubbling up from the bottom - largely because of our influence on the world. It is the true Age of the Common Man and it will present enormous challenges for our economic livelihood and our security.

Yes, this is all rather frightening. Some take refuge in the past, demanding a return of the factories and the jobs that brought life to so many towns and cities across the nation. Others take refuge in religion, demanding a return to an America where belief in God animated the law and brought communities together. And still others - a few others - demand a wholesale destruction of the past and a different America built upon alien foundations.

To all those there is a common denominator - a palpable, unreasoning fear of the unknown - Shakespear’s “undiscovered country” of the future. Obama may tell the unions he will bring back jobs from overseas but it is an empty, worthless promise. You can’t get in a time machine, go back and bring forward conditions and realities that don’t exist today and haven’t existed for decades. Sarah Palin and the social conservatives will not be able to wipe out 34 years of privacy law by banning abortion, preventing gay people from joining in a legal contract denoting togetherness, or enforcing standards in our media against sex and violence.

Nor is it possible to dismember our past wholesale and substitute a new template over which America can be remade. It would take more than a few kooks and liberals to have that kind of influence on 380 years of history and more than 300 million citizens. It is a pipe dream and to those who fear such change, I would say that you are battling invisible demons.

Either Obama or McCain will usher in an era where the relationship between the citizen and the government will change. What kind of change is entirely up to us. That’s why I think it a good thing to embrace change and rather than trying to keep it from happening, work like the devil to make it yours and have it fit in to your concept, your belief in the future. Work to create a country where your children and grandchildren will be happy, free, and at peace.

This is what our grandfathers and their grandfathers imagined and fought for. Can we do any less?

Change we can freeze to death by:

Let me sort of describe my overall policy.

What I’ve said is that we would put a cap and trade system in place that is as aggressive, if not more aggressive, than anybody else’s out there.

I was the first to call for a 100% auction on the cap and trade system, which means that every unit of carbon or greenhouse gases emitted would be charged to the polluter. That will create a market in which whatever technologies are out there that are being presented, whatever power plants that are being built, that they would have to meet the rigors of that market and the ratcheted down caps that are being placed, imposed every year.

So if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can; it’s just that it will bankrupt them because they’re going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that’s being emitted.

These remarks were made by Obama on January 17 of this year. Not surprisingly this audio was hidden until now because the interview was with the far left San Francisco Chronicle.

Here’s the entire audio clip:

This illustrates better than anything the folly of “cap and trade” proposals. Obama plans to use his C&T plan as a gigantic club to beat up on power companies and coal companies (and the miners) if they don’t meet his arbitrary and capricious “targets” that drop every year regardless of any progress technologically in finding ways to mitigate the carbon output of power plants.

It will almost certainly cause a lot of smaller coal companies to either cut their work force as the demand for coal - our most abundant energy source - shrinks and probably drive a lot of these smaller concerns out of business.

And what about his gloating about driving businesses to bankruptcy? Has there ever been a presidential candidate who looked forward to the prospect of destroying someone’s life’s work and costing thousands of people their jobs?

But at least the Euro-twits pushing Global Warming won’t be mad at us anymore.

This blog post originally appears in the American Thinker.

I like to think one of the reasons for the modest success I’ve enjoyed from this site is that my writing reflects many of the values, the thoughts, the dreams and hopes of Middle America. My heart is connected to the Heartland in ways I never understood until I returned from my life’s travels 15 years ago and settled in the Fox Valley in Northern Illinois. A distance of about 30 miles from where I grew up in suburban Chicago, it was a lifetime removed from Washington, D.C. and St. Louis where I spent my professional career. The pace and rhythm of life in Algonquin was slower, more deliberate, more conducive to reflection and introspection. I enjoyed it immensely and realized that here was where I was happiest, where I was most content.

Now, comfortably ensconced in Streator, IL, I am finding that the people and place are, if anything, more in tune with what is truly important in life; family, friends, God, and country. To a large degree this is a reflection of something that many in the political class either ignore or denigrate; that Americans are free to know exactly as much about politics and elections that they feel they must - no more, no less - and that this does not make them stupid, or unworthy, or sheep-like.

For Heartland voters, the big issues are subsumed and the election becomes quite personal. Who can I trust? Who do I like? Which candidate makes sense to me? And in these perilous times, perhaps the biggest question is which candidate can keep me and my family safe from the ravages of a dangerous world and unpredictable economy.

This back and forth about McCain’s fascism or Obama’s socialism is largely ignored in the Heartland. As is William Ayers and Obama’s strange and radical associates. As too McCain’s gaffes, Biden’s inanities, and Palin’s alleged unreadiness for office. The reams of paper and giga-bytes of bandwidth expended in promoting, defending, attacking, parrying, lying, smearing, and waxing poetic reaches the Heartland voter, if it ever does, as a confused jumble of noise. It is largely ignored.

Instead, voters out here depend on a well developed sense of being able to judge a candidate as a person - the famous formulation “Would you want to have a beer with this guy?” And surprisingly, a high standard of fairness is employed as part of that character judgement. Which candidate is playing by the rules? Which candidate is delivering low blows? Negative campaigning might “work” in the sense it pulls down the other guy. But it is done at a cost to the attacker.

All of the particulars of the race aside, my friends and neighbors are much too busy working, raising their families, volunteering at the local hospital or Salvation Army, and living simple, meaningful lives to embroil themselves in the issue of the day, the gaffe of the week, or the smears, lies, exaggerations, and deliberate obfuscations of the truth for which this campaign is known to those of us who follow it closely.

They might have a bare bones idea of Obama’s health insurance plan. The same for McCain’s education policy. But it comes to them as an echo from a far distant speaker. This disconnect from the “issues” of campaigns has driven liberals to distraction as they accuse Heartland voters of “not voting their interests.” Conservatives have lately - to their shame - been getting on Middle America for not caring about Obama’s anti-American and terrorist connections, accusing them of being deliberately unaware.

Both sides are laughably off base. Of course Heartland voters vote their interests. It’s just that their “interests” are not the same as liberals. And I have found a superficial knowledge of Ayers et al among my friends who, as they do with other attacks, tune out these matters as irrelevant to their vote. What they’ve heard of Obama - during the debates and some of his speeches - they like. But closing the deal with Middle America has proven to be a problem for Obama. Three days out from the election and I would say that Obama could win in a landslide - if Heartland voters could be sure of him.

It isn’t Ayers and Wright that appear to trouble my friends and neighbors. It’s that Obama is just not enough of a known quantity. But it appears to me that a majority of them - even some who claim to support McCain at this point - are willing to make a leap of faith and cast their vote for the Democrat.

Take my neighbors from across the street. Dana and Curt are about as typically Middle American as you can get. Married for 20+ years, two great kids, a dog, a comfortable house. Hardworking, God fearing, country loving Heartland voters living smack dab in the middle of Middle America. The campaigns have spent the equivalent of the Gross Domestic Product of some African countries trying to sway the Danas and Curts of America to vote for them.

How are they doing?

Three days before the election and Dana is leaning toward McCain but might vote for Obama. She is upset at what she sees as the unfair treatment of Palin. She hates being vilified for whatever her choice is going to be. And she wishes that no matter who is elected, that Americans support the new president.

I think that sums up perfectly where much of Middle America is at the moment. Not confusion, but uncertainty. Obama hasn’t yet closed the sale but the voters are unhappy with McCain as the alternative. And I sense the number of undecideds even at this late date to be larger - perhaps much larger - than is reflected in poll numbers.

I have gotten a lot of grief for my posts about the state of the race these last couple of weeks. I still believe that Obama will win rather comfortably - more than 320 EV’s and 5% popular vote victory.

But there is more than just a hope for McCain - more than perhaps I have vouchsafed his campaign these last weeks. If something happens these last 72 hours - if something is revealed or if Obama says something stupid - it could go south in a big way very, very quickly for the Democrat in the Heartland and the biggest surprise in the history of American politics might occur. Something similar could happen to McCain in that a 5 point margin could become a landslide of epic proportions for Obama. That might occur anyway if Obama’s support were to firm up - a distinct possibility.

I would give that scenario about a 30% chance while a McCain surprise comes in at less than 10% - diminishing the closer we get to the election. (Nate Silver gives the Obama blowout scenario a 38% chance of happening while a McCain victory of any kind tops out at almost 4%).

The election will be decided by Middle America. And I can’t think of any group to which I would prefer entrusting our country’s future.

This will be the 12th presidential election that I have followed closely in my lifetime. As a 10 year old growing up in suburban Chicago, I got hooked on politics watching the conventions that summer - two of the most dramatic party conclaves of the 20th century. For Republicans, there was the utter bewilderment and anger as the establishment couldn’t understand what was happening when Barry Goldwater’s insurgency overwhelmed the Rockefeller wing of the party and began the long slide of GOP liberals and moderates into oblivion.

For you younger folk, yes indeed there was such an animal as a “liberal” Republican. And to their eternal credit, they sided with LBJ and the Democrats in passing the two most important pieces of legislation of the era - the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. They also were solid internationalists, beating back the challenge of the remnants of the isolationist Taft faction who would have turned the United States inward at a time of maximum risk to what freedom existed around the world at the time.

Goldwater was right otherwise, of course. The GOP liberals sided with Johnson in his overreach in creating a welfare state that has now handed their ancestors tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities coming due in a few decades. The cry today of “We didn’t know” echoes hollowly. Of course we “knew.” Goldwater told us. Even liberal lion Daniel Patrick Moynihan warned that the way the welfare state was set up, it would create a dependency among African Americans and destroy the black family.

As clearly as many conservatives saw the way that the welfare state was designed would lead to eventual catastrophe, I will base the following on my life experience and more than 40 years observation of politics and government; a Barack Obama presidency will result in a radical diminution of American wealth, American power and prestige, and inevitably, a loss of liberty.

Barack Obama is not qualified to be president of the United States. He has little interest in the nuts and bolts of how government works (yes, one can say the same of George Bush and look at us now). Unlike a Clinton or Bush #41 who enjoyed fiddling with the levers of government, enjoining the bureaucracy and Congress to bend to their wills, Obama literally doesn’t have a clue. He will be eaten alive by the striped pants set in the State Department. He will be gobbled up whole by the poverty lobby. And since he has little or no ideology or principles, he will sway with the political winds tacking hard left and then hard right until he angers everybody.

Oh, he will have a “plan” when he comes into office. The first 100 days will be a liberal paradise thanks to an increased and more leftist Democratic majority in the Congress. We will bail out homeowners, his buddies in the unions, finish the job of nationalizing most of our financial industry if not in name then certainly in the practice of it. He will set ambitious targets for carbon reduction. He will nationalize the health insurance industry. He will begin to raise taxes on the rich (a process that any first year government student could inform him will result in eventual tax hikes for all). He will begin to “re-regulate” - a process that will take many years but will eventually lead to where we were at the end of the 1970’s; strangulation and reduced competition in industries affected.

These are all things he has promised to do - and they will get done. But then what? After absorbing the idiotic, slavish, and nauseating comparisons to the greatest presidents in history, just what will this neophyte do?

Well, maybe he’ll start consolidating his power by moving to cut off opposition to what he plans to do:

he Obama campaign has decided to heave out three newspapers from its plane for the final days of its blitz across battleground states — and all three endorsed Sen. John McCain for president!

The NY POST, WASHINGTON TIMES and DALLAS MORNING NEWS have all been told to move out by Sunday to make room for network bigwigs — and possibly for the inclusion of reporters from two black magazines, ESSENCE and JET, the DRUDGE REPORT has learned.

Despite pleas from top editors of the three newspapers that have covered the campaign for months at extraordinary cost, the Obama campaign says their reporters — and possibly others — will have to vacate their coveted seats so more power players can document the final days of Sen. Barack Obama’s historic campaign to become the first black American president.

MORE

Some told the DRUDGE REPORT that the reporters are being ousted to bring on documentary film-makers to record the final days; others expect to see on board more sympathetic members of the media, including the NY TIMES’ Maureen Dowd, who once complained that she was barred from McCain’s Straight Talk Express airplane.

After a week of quiet but desperate behind-the-scenes negotiations, the reporters of the three papers heard last night that they were definitely off for the final swing. They are already planning how to cover the final days by flying commercial or driving from event to event.

Do you also feel the hairs on the back of your head pricking up in reaction to this move? A portend of what’s to come in Obama’s America?

Of course, we’re being silly our liberal betters tell us. No doubt the New York Times and Washington Post will have examples in their columns tomorrow of previous candidates who booted newspapers off their plane. It will be sold as just something that everyone does and there’s nothing to get alarmed about America. Just go back to sleep and don’t forget to wake up long enough to go to the polls on Tuesday and elect our Messiah.

Except this isn’t the Podunk Tribune we’re talking about here. These are three respected newspapers who happen to have critical coverage of a candidate who now deems it necessary to toss them off his campaign plane. No connection?

A sizable number of residents in Virginia buy and subscribe to the Washington Times. Obama is limiting a point of view that residents in perhaps the most vital swing state in America will be getting. Are we to believe that this is an accident? Are we to seriously consider that Obama isn’t trying to affect how reporters cover his campaign?

I would say to the Washington Post and New York Times there will come a day when you too will feel this rope around your neck and your freedom is affected because you are not behind The One 100%. Your cries of “We didn’t know” at that point will be ignored by a public who will wonder where were you when it started?

There’s always energy policy. As long as our economy is sluggish (thus dragging down the economies of most of the planet), oil prices could remain fairly steady, at or near where they are now.

Except they won’t. The Israel-Iran showdown is coming - probably sooner than anyone realizes. Simply put, the Israelis cannot afford to take Iran’s word - or the word of the IAEA - that Iran is not in the process of building a bomb. With their survival at stake, Israel will act pre-emptively and seek to take out or slow down the Iranian program. The resulting spike in oil prices will be a catalyst for Obama to push through a massive energy bill, the end result being anyone’s guess.

The foreign policy ramifications could be Obama’s first real “test” - Biden’s nightmare. Will Obama lead the charge in the UN to censure Israel? Would he cut off military aid? Don’t put it past him. Given his advisors and their views on our relationship with the Jewish state, anything is possible.

“We didn’t know” that he would sacrifice the safety and security of an ally will be the cry.

Meanwhile, less energy means less economic growth - or worse. Obama’s energy schemes alone could hamper the American economy for a generation.

“How could we have guessed?” will be the refrain.

Education reform will no doubt occupy an Obama Administration’s time. What kind of mischief could it cause if this beginner gave the education bureaucrats (no doubt staffed with Ayers-trained acolytes) their heads?

I am not necessarily worried about Obama’s cabinet appointments. It is the 3,000 or so other presidential appointments within his power that scares the beejeebes out of me. Coming as they will from academia and liberal think tanks, here is where the real radicalism of an Obama Administration would manifest itself. The cabinet secretaries are figureheads, chosen as much for how they come off on the Sunday news programs as how knowledgeable and competent they are.

The real power in these departments devolve to the under secretaries and assistant secretaries who are charged with implementing any decisions made by the president. “The devil is in the details” is a literalness I care not to discover when it comes to “school reform” or Obama’s health insurance plan. Unless someone is watching these underlings, the chances are good that they will interpret their mandate to act through their own ideological prism rather than any good intentions of Obama or their cabinet secretary bosses.

“Nobody told us” will be the excuse.

We saw some of this in the Bush Administration with science policy and other areas where lobbyists who had worked for one industry were then named to oversee that same industry in a federal department. This may be good for business but it is bad government. And Obama will probably not want to go to war with a lot of these folks since they will have been put in those positions by his far left base.

Finally, what will the world say when we sell out Lebanon in order to get Syria to play ball with the Israelis on a peace deal? There is only one thing we have that Syria wants - and wants more than anything; our continuing support for a free and independent Lebanon. They don’t want our money or our “good will.” They don’t want any trade agreements or trade goods. They want us to adopt a “hands off” policy on Lebanon so that when Syria moves back in (or their terrorist proxies in Hezballah engineer a takeover of some kind), we do nothing.

Obama wants to talk with Assad. Fine. His no preconditions pledge will come back to bite him in the ass - and not only in Syria. What possible advantage is there to the United States to have the American president meet President Ahmadinejad? “Good will?” Or the world will fall in love with us again?

Whatever small step made in service to internationalism a presidential meet with the Iranians would bring would be dwarfed by the mammoth propaganda coup that would accrue to the Iranians, granting them a legitimacy and stature far beyond anything they have had previously. A similar situation would present itself in Venezuela with a grip and grin with Chavez.

“Well whaddya know, who would have thunk it?” the voters will say.

But we know all this. The world knows it too which is why France’s President Sarkozy is so peeved at Obama. It isn’t meeting with an enemy that is at issue. It is the simple formulation that presupposes a huge advantage being given an enemy for absolutely nothing in return.

But at least we’ll all feel good about ourselves for being so “civilized.”

Obama will not sell us out to the UN. But I have little doubt that we will subsume our national interests in order to curry favor with the lickspittles there. This will result in an erosion of our position in the world and a loss of prestige - and worse. Nation’s that fear us now will not fear us under Obama. They won’t like us any more. They won’t be any more cooperative in keeping the peace. The difference will be that they will be able to cause trouble wherever they wish with no worries that the US would try and stop them - except at the UN. And we know how effective the UN is at dealing with the thugs, the miscreants, and the lunatics of the world.

So sometime in the near future - perhaps within a couple of years or more likely before Obama leaves office - people will wake up one morning and say to themselves, “How did this happen? How could we have known?”

It won’t be an acceptable question to ask then because everything that happens in the next few years will have been predicted by someone based on all the crap that the press either refused to cover or glossed over, denigrated, or called a “distraction” today.

The prospect of being slaughtered next Tuesday is concentrating the minds of some prominent conservatives wonderfully.

Patrick Ruffini, Jon Henke, and John Hawkins are beginning to flesh out their thoughts on what a post election conservative on line community might want to accomplish in the future. Let’s take the meat of their arguments one at a time.

Henke:

Actually, I don’t think it’s ironic at all that the analysis of problems on the Right is similar to the arguments made by the Netroots Left. For one thing, the “claims made by Markos Moulitsas” are in many ways intentional recycling of the movement on the Right.

The underlying systemic inputs are very similar. The political/electoral culture and incentives, and the emergence of the internet as an important social and technological phenomenon impacted both the Left and Right at approximately the same time.

The difference in uptake and evolution is predominantly due to the political cycle. Democrats went through the wilderness from 1995 to 2003; they found their way from 2003 to 2008. Republicans entered their wilderness in 2007, though I would argue that the Right has been in the wilderness for longer. How long the Right wanders in the wilderness depends, in large part, on how seriously they take the lessons they can learn from the Left.

***********

Will the Right’s netroots movement look like that of the Left? To the extent that the tools, and the social/political dynamics, are similar, I’d say the Right’s netroots movement will look a great deal like that of the Left. The question is not what tools are available, but how they are relevant to the surrounding environment. The components will not be identical, but the basic concepts they represent should be very much the same. Or rather, they will be when the Right regains its footing.

Jon also notes that “the surrounding political environment” i.e., the conservative on line community’s relationship with the Republican party, has to change before much progress can be made.

Hawkins makes somewhat the same point and amplifies the idea of using the netroots model for the rightysphere:

Why has the left side of the blogosphere grown so much faster?

Personally, I think there are two reasons for it. The first is that the Right has a large talk radio presence while the Left doesn’t. That means on the left, strongly motivated partisans have little choice other than to flock to the blogosphere while on the right, they can simply opt to listen to Rush Limbaugh or Laura Ingraham to get their daily fill of conservatism.

The other more salient reason for the Left’s growth is simply that they’ve been out of power and that has produced an anger and an energy that has driven them online. There was similar growth on the right during the nineties when websites like Townhall and Free Republic rose to prominence as a response to the Clinton years. If Obama gets into the White House, it will be terrible for America, but my guess is that the right side of the blogosphere will grow like a weed for the next 2-4 years.

The bad news is that the Republican Party looks at bloggers solely as an alternative means to get their message out. In other words, there’s a completely non-functional top down organizational structure. It’s non-functional because the Republican Party organizations and pols issue talking points and press releases, most of which are of no interest to bloggers, and they are largely ignored. In other words, they spend most of their time issuing unheeded orders to people who, by and large, think they’re incompetent and aren’t inclined to pay much attention to what they say.

There are exceptions: Jim DeMint, Tom Coburn, Thaddeus McCotter and a few others — but most of the Republican Party doesn’t really understand the blogosphere or know how to communicate with bloggers.

I would add to Hawkins excellent analysis that the GOP doesn’t want to understand blogs or communicate with bloggers because, in my opinion, they want to maintain control of the message. Not only, as John points out, does the GOP treat bloggers as an appendage of the Republican PR machine, but at bottom, there is a profound disrespect for the blogosphere (except for a select few who have proven useful to them) and they despise the independence of most conservative bloggers.

How many GOP functions will Michelle Malkin be invited to after skewering the party 6 ways from Sunday for immigration, corruption, and incompetence?

Finally, Patrick Ruffini riffs off of both men’s analysis and offers a challenge:

What will it take to turn this around? If you’re a conservative blogger, the question you need to ask yourself is this. Is the main purpose of your blog to express your personal opinion? Or is its primary purpose to build political power for a cause? If you cannot answer yes to the latter, you’re probably not going to be comfortable with making the changes necessary to make online conservatism a political force to be reckoned with.

This is not a criticism, but an observation. Most conservative blogs are still stuck in 2003 — both in terms of the overwhelming focus on media criticism and punditry, and the tendency to outsource electoral politics to the Republican Party. This was in some ways legitimate response to what was happening in 2003-4, when media surrender-monkeys were undermining the War on Terror, Republicans had a kick-butt political operation, and Kos was going 0 for 16.

I don’t fault bloggers for holding on to this point of view in 2003 and 2004. What is unfortunate is that they clinged to it in 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2008 and failed to pivot to the new reality, leaving the Republican Party without a powerful enough force to rein in the self-destructive tendencies of its elite.

Sadly, it’s human nature to cling to the frame in which you came up — traditional media people will never fully reconcile themselves to the blogosphere, talk radio people will always tend to view it as the center of the universe, and even denizens of the “new media” can become easily set in their ways. This is not unlike people who got rich on the housing bubble thinking it could never end. When things first start going wrong, it’s always just a momentary blip, not a sign of an impending crash. Only a catastrophic collapse is usually enough to make people rethink matters.

Building critical mass behind an independent online movement on the right will probably require new people. The old blogs that have been with us since 2003 will not go away. But they’ll need to be joined by people who care more about Indiana’s 8th district than Islamofascism, and MN-SEN more than the MSM.

Allow me to give the perspective of a blogger who has been online for 4 years and may have some unique insights into these matters as a result of my building a modest success of this site and my equally modest success at making a living as a blogger/writer/editor on the net.

All three gentlemen make excellent points about what needs to be done to improve the effectiveness of conservative blogs in making an impact on the political process. Certainly there are things we can learn from the left while at the same time, it is important to recognize that some specific tactics and structural components of the netroots simply aren’t transferable to the rightysphere.

Ruffini and Henke write for The Next Right, an online conservative community. This is the template used by the netroots to organize - large communities of online posters who rail against conservatives, exchange ideas, reinforce their own views on issues, and generally offer a comfortable, enjoyable place to belong.

That is the key - the need to be part of something greater than yourself - that drives the netroots and allows them to connect via these huge communities. The question is, can this model be duplicated by conservatives and further, is it desirable to do so?

Ruffini nails it with his description of conservative blogs being outlets mostly for punditocracy. My one foray into the real world of politics was my advocacy for Fred Thompson’s presidential campaign. This website alone raised more than $10,000 for the candidate in two blog blegs I organized and my efforts to unite conservatives behind Thompson’s fund raising activities in December and January were modestly successful. (I really can’t take much credit when Glenn Reynolds and other large bloggers linked and helped promote both fundraising efforts).

That part of it I didn’t mind. It was burying my native skepticism and critical eye in service to the candidate that discomfited me. In the end, I just couldn’t help myself and wrote critically of the campaign and candidate. But for a while, I was 100% with the program - and I hated every minute, every blog post and article I wrote in service to the cause.

Don’t get me wrong. I actually think Thompson would have been a decent president. He had certainly thought longer and more deeply about many issues than either McCain or Obama and his conservatism was informed by both a love of country and a deep, abiding respect for the Constitution and its principles. But he proved a weak, ineffectual candidate and it was a chore trying to defend him.

Ruffini seems to be saying that he wants bloggers who will shill for the cause. He appears to want bloggers who would subsume their independence and buy into the notion that the “primary purpose” of an individual’s blog is “to build political power for a cause.” That “cause” would be backing specific conservative candidates and issues.

One assumes this would be accomplished by adopting some of the online activist model created by the netroots - the most important in my opinion being the creation of online communities that I mention above. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this idea and I hope it is realized.

The problem, as Patrick mentions, is that many of us old mossbacks are stuck in 2003 and our blogging is unrelated to political activism, except in a roundabout way that presupposes our readers are forced to think about what we write and whose opinion might be altered because of the scintillating brilliance of our logic and reasoning.

Or not.

I am not so full of myself that I actually believe my writing makes a difference. But it is mine, my own, and not beholden to a group, a party, or a cause. I suppose that means I will be left behind when this new conservative on line community begins to take shape. That will be my choice and I will harbor little bitterness towards those who choose another path.

But is it the best way for conservatives to achieve power? Is it a way at all?

There is a definite push back on the right these days against the “elites” who make their living inside the Washington-New York axis; where conservative media and commentators exist side by side with their liberal counterparts and it is believed - wrongly in my opinion - that criticism directed at conservatives in flyover country for their passionate embrace of Sarah Palin and the emphasis placed on social issues like abortion is an attack on “ordinary folk” and indicative of the elites’ desire to be accepted at liberal cocktail parties as well as a lack of ideological purity.

I have written that this smacks of a nascent anti-intellectualism (to go along with the anti-science notions pushed by some of the social cons) and that this is an argument as old as the republic itself (populists vs. elites). Questioning the conservative bona fides of Peggy Noonan or David Brooks - two conservatives who have done more to promote conservative ideas than all of their critics combined - doesn’t make sense in any other context except as an indication that many on the right prefer purges to debate and the guillotine to reasoned discussion.

For their part, the elites are, well, acting like elites - seeking a top down, “Live from Mount Olympus” here it is, rubes, take it or leave it analysis that inherently questions the ability of “ordinary folk” to think and act in their own interest and march to their own drummer. The fact that the conservative movement needs both sides to reinvent itself and thrive is lost in recrimination and threats of excommunication.

I have taken my own shots at the anti-intellectuals because I think their take no prisoners attitude is destructive. And if Ruffini et al believes that these purists will be able to see beyond the end of their own nose and participate in any community or movement that isn’t in absolute lock step with their precious notions of who and what a conservative is, they have a lot to learn. Perhaps, as Hawkins points out, the netroots coalesced because they were in the wilderness for so long and that maybe a few years on the back benches in Congress will bring some sobriety to “the base.” I am not confident that will occur.

Last year, I was one of the few conservatives who attended the Yearly Kos convention at McCormick Place in Chicago. What I saw was startling and, for a conservative, not a little frightening. At the time, I was laughed at and roundly criticized for seeing more into what the netroots were up to than was possible. I don’t think too many conservatives are laughing now:

In the summer of 1980, I was a volunteer for the Reagan campaign in Northern Virginia. There were many of us who had come to Washington to work in Congressional offices or fill positions in the burgeoning conservative lobbying industry and “idea factories” that were popping up every other week, contributing to the intellectual ferment that made conservatism so dynamic. It was pretty heady stuff for a 26 year old political neophyte whose bookish ideas of government and the people who ran it was largely shaped by narrative historians and political philosophers.

What was striking at the time was how confident everyone was and how determined people were to bring about a conservative revolution that would sweep the old order away and bring to power those who truly believed in conservative principles. The ideas themselves were important but only as a means to an end. Shaping the ideas, framing them, and packaging them to move the voting public to cast ballots for conservatives was the subject of much discussion in memoranda, position papers, editorials and articles from the few conservative publications at the time.

Anyone who lived through those times and experienced the feeling that ideology and politics had merged so that the ends and means were exactly the same would recognize what is happening at YearlyKos. Top to bottom, inside and out this movement is first and foremost nothing less than revolution. The ideas driving that revolution are pretty standard liberal fare; anti-war, health insurance, environmental protection, education, and jobs top the agenda here at the netroots convention. But the way the issues are being framed by participants in the dozens of panel discussions, workshops, and forums is where the action is. The nuts and bolts savvy of the political activists fuses with the wonks and wise men of the left’s intellectual brain trust to turn out a brand new way to showcase these ideas to the public.

And the netroots are even farther ahead now. They are organizing not just at the state level but all the way down to the precinct level to make the gains they made in 2006 and are going to make next Tuesday into a permanent, liberal majority. This will drive the Republican party to the left - much as conservative success eventually drove the Democrats to the right - and make conservatism an ideology that will be on the outside looking in.

Unless our online conservative wise men like Ruffini, Hawkins, and Henke can figure out a way to tap the enormous potential of the rightosphere and turn its energies toward creating a network of conservatives that can challenge the left at every digital turn.

Every time I do a “Dead Parrot” post, loyal Republicans take me to task for believing the polls in the first place. They claim that the evil MSM is conspiring to dispirit GOP voters and force them to either put a gun to their heads or stay home on election day watching reruns of CSI: Miami.. I am told “McCain’s not dead, he’s closing.”

Of course, the evidence cited in defense of that notion is … the polls. So much for the the logic of the desperate.

Indeed, if you read what McCain’s pollster Bill McInturff says in this Hill piece, we see the perfect rationale for hope; everyone else is wrong but me:

Despite widespread polling to the contrary, McInturff wrote that “the campaign is functionally tied across the battleground states … with our numbers improving sharply over the last four tracks.”

The pollster said that the number the campaign is watching is “Sen. Obama’s level of support and the margin difference between the two candidates.”

“As other public polls begin to show Sen. Obama dropping below 50 percent and the margin over McCain beginning to approach margin of error with a week left, all signs say we are headed to an election that may easily be too close to call by next Tuesday,” he said.

McInturff noted that he is seeing “significant shifts in battleground states,” with “gains” that are sustainable with “non-college men,” rural voters of both genders, anti-abortion voters and “most encouragingly…we are beginning to once again get over a 20 percent chunk of the vote among soft Democrats.”

The pollster said a subgroup the campaign has long targeted, known to them as “Walmart women” and identified as not having a college degree and residing in households that make less than $60,000 a year, “are also swinging back solidly in our direction.”

He added that the campaign is “witnessing an impressive ‘pop’ with Independent voters.”

That “pop” you hear from the Indies is the bubble of hope that McCain can grab enough of them to overcome Obama’s lead among party registrants. The Democrat holds a 8 point advantage with self-identified Democrats over Republicans which would mean McCain would need at least 54% of independent voters (who make up about 27% of the electorate) to win the popular vote.

Throwing out the strange numbers offered up by Pew Research which show McCain trailing Obama 52-36 among all groups, their projection of the independent vote is in line with other pollsters. Pew has Obama ahead by 17 with this group, Zogby 15, Gallup 13. That’s an awful lot of ground to make up in a week in what all pollsters are saying is a pretty static race that hasn’t changed much in 3 weeks..

As for the rest of McInturff’s fantasy, did anyone else note that those voters are supposed to be the base of the Republican party? If John McCain is doing nothing more than solidifying his base with a week to go in the election, stick a fork in him.

Some of the state polls are just terrible for McCain. Obama is virtually tied in Montana. Montana? Good God! I remember when Republicans used to rack up 65% of the vote or more in Big Sky Country. On my radio show last night, American Thinker’s excellent political correspondent Rich Baehr pointed out that a lot of disgruntled Californians have been moving to Montana in recent years. These Democrats are taking advantage of the low tax, limited government, and low population density found in Montana the same way they filled up some of the open spaces in Colorado and are now making that state competitive.

And speaking of Colorado, the McCain campaign has basically conceded that state to Obama with even the RNC pulling out. Obama has a 7-10 point lead in the most recent polls and along with his overwhelming lead in neighboring New Mexico and a slight but significant lead in Nevada, it appears that a significant part of the Mountain West - as solid a GOP bastion since Goldwater as anywhere in the country - is about to topple to the Dems.

Elsewhere, Obama is tied in North Dakota, virtually tied in Georgia and Indiana, and ahead in North Carolina. These states are historically Republican - even in Democratic years. The fact that McCain doesn’t have the time or money to spend shoring up his support in these states is worrisome but not hopeless. If McCain can pull his national numbers up a couple of points, those states should be his by narrow margins (possible exception; North Carolina where African Americans are voting early in huge numbers). The same holds true in Arizona where some polls have it within 4 points but which should be safely red by election day.

But none of these states mean as much to McCain as the Big Three; Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania. Nate Silver’s 538 blog has no scenario where McCain can win if he loses Ohio and Florida and only a very slight chance if he loses Florida or Ohio.

McCain trails narrowly in OH and FL and there are some indications that PA is tightening up thanks to some good work by Palin who seems to be connecting with the rural/small town Pennsylvanians in the southeast and northwest corners of the state. These are conservative Democrats by nature and gave Hillary Clinton a huge boost in her primary win over Obama. They are older, Catholic, and socially conservative. If McCain can get some Hillary-like majorities in those counties (60-65%), it will offset Obama strength in Philadelphia and some of the industrial towns where unions are strong.

But Ed Rendell, Pennsylvania’s best politician, has proved in the past he can get his voters to the polls as well as anyone in the country. The PUMA’s are saying that Rendell, who supported Clinton in the primary, is going to mail it in on election day rather than go all out for Obama. Don’t believe it. Rendell is a party pro, one of the canniest. All Democratic governors want to deliver their states for Obama if for no other reason than it helps turn on the federal spigot for state funds. Rendell would be a fool to tank it just to slight Obama and give Hillary a chance in 2012. The risk is just too great.

But even if McCain can eke out a win in PA, there remains the problems of OH and FL to overcome. When all is said and done, Obama will have spent an incredible $40 million in FL alone. McCain has $86 million to spend on his entire campaign. That kind of money advantage simply cannot be dismissed. As for Ohio, Joe the Plumber has apparently helped there but the economy is going south very quickly in the Buckeye state with hundreds of employers shuttering their doors just since the financial meltdown began. Joe might be good for a couple of points but at this point, it doesn’t appear to be enough.

So it would appear that McCain still has an uphill climb in the Keystone state. Not impossible but with a week to go and constrained as he is financially (having to spend in Ohio and Florida as well), it will be a very difficult proposition to overcome Obama’s advantages.

During my show last night, I asked Rich the question you probably have about the polls; is it possible all of them are wrong? Have pollsters got it so wrong this time out that McCain is actually in better shape than he’s showing? Their numbers are, after all, based on turnout models that give the Democrats a decided advantage in party affiliation. What would happen if those 17 million evangelicals who came out and voted for Bush in 2004 did the same for McCain? What if the pollsters are overstating the total African American vote or the total vote of young people?

I know how tempting it is to believe that the polls are all deliberately biased against McCain and that he is really ahead. Or to believe that the numbers are so far off because of the uncertainty regarding turnout that they are totally useless.

But as a clincher as to how bad things are for McCain and how little chance he really has, his own campaign has seen the writing on the wall and has begun the process of absolving themselves from blame for the coming defeat. Campaigns who believe they can win or still have a chance don’t fire off salvos explaining their defeat one week before the election. While the numbers tell one story, the underlying trends regarding how people feel about the candidates, how people see their own future and what the future of the country looks like are most likely moving away from McCain. And judging by the amount of backbiting, it appears the campaign has determined that those trend lines may be very hard to reverse.

Obama gives his monarchical address tonight to the masses. We will probably have a much better handle on how big his margin of victory will be by Friday when the first results are factored into the daily tracking polls.

I am not optimistic that this address will hurt him in any way and could end up giving him a final boost toward a landslide win next Tuesday.

You won’t want to miss tonight’s Rick Moran Show,, one of the most popular conservative talk shows on Blog Talk Radio.

Tonight, Rich Baehr is back in the second chair, giving us the bad news on the polls and his expert if depressing analysis of who the race is shaping up.

The show will air from 7:00 - 8:00 PM Central time. You can access the live stream here. A podcast will be available for streaming or download shortly after the end of the broadcast.

Click on the stream below and join in on what one wag called a “Wayne’s World for adults.”

The Chat Room will open around 15 minutes before the show opens,

Also, if you’d like to call in and put your two cents in, you can dial (718) 664-9764.

John Hawkins of Right Wing News has conducted one of his famous blogger polls of the rightosphere, asking the top 240 conservatives their thoughts on the election.

Now, I have been blogging 4 years and John has been asking the top 240 conservatives their thoughts on everything from politics to culture during most of that time but somehow, my invitation to participate in his surveys has either been captured by my spam filter and devoured or was lost in the ether between John’s computer and mine.

Being the sensitive, modest, and retiring sort of fellow that I am, I have never said anything about it until now. Perhaps I am ranked 241 or 242, or, God help us, 243 in which case I should probably adjust my ego-o-meter and remove myself from the lofty perch upon which I have sat lo these many years, surveying the political landscape, all the time believing I was some kind of conservative sage - or some frothing at the mouth, fire breathing, rip snorting, bug-eyed, right wing nut.

Evidently not.

Now it could also be that John Hawkins doesn’t know me from Adam and could care less about my opinion. In that, he would be no different than the 99.8% of conservatives who surf the blogosphere. All bloggers have their groupies and since mine tend more toward the fat, middle aged, male and balding variety, I can’t say that I blame Hawkins for giving me a pass on his list of conservatives who are chosen to participate in his survey.

There is a third possibility, one that I am loathe to contemplate. In fact, the chasm that opens beneath my feet just thinking about the potentially life altering realization inherent in Mr. Hawkins’ failure to include me on his list of conservative bloggers is almost more than I can bear.

Perhaps there are some of you out there who don’t think of me as a “conservative.”

(Note: I’m sure Hawkins has his reasons for not including me and the following is in no way directed toward him)

And that got me to thinking. Since the right appears about ready to suffer a stinging defeat at the polls a week from today - an event that will result in civil war between various factions of conservatism - perhaps one way I can improve my position in the rightosphere would be by helping to define just what is a conservative? What do we believe? Should we give everyone a test and have them answer 20 questions on the nature of conservative thought? Or do we just let a bunch of ignoramuses who wouldn’t know Burke from Burger King inform us who is and who isn’t a person of the right based on their own narrow, illogical, and emotional criteria?

(How’s that for a “shot heard round the blogosphere” my knuckledragging friends?)

For it appears to me from my vantage point that we are entering a period where someone’s conservative bona fides will not depend on what he believes as an intellectual frame of reference that informs his stand on issues as much as how much he agrees with Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, or Ann Coulter (I would include Michael Savage in that bunch but really now, doesn’t one have to be a human being to be a conservative?)

If it were just the titans of talk radio that most people who believe themselves to be conservative look to as a yardstick to measure one’s ideological purity, I could probably live with that. Hannity and Limbaugh are great entertainers and Coulter has a wickedly sharp pen that she employs against the left to great effect.

But beyond the marshmallow conservatism of Hannity and the more substantiative but graceless conservative pop served up by Limbaugh, there lies a whole slew of litmus tests where many of these conservabots will brook no opposition, no nuance, no independent thinking whatsoever.

A partial listing:

If you are pro-choice to one degree or another, you are not a conservative.

If you criticize the war or the military, you are not a conservative and unpatriotic to boot.

If you say anything nice about a liberal anytime, anywhere - if you agree with a liberal on anything or praise a liberal past, present, or future - you are not a conservative.

If you don’t agree that torturing the enemy is necessary and/or good, you are not a conservative.

If you say anything nice about any media besides conservative mags, talk radio and Fox News, you are not a conservative.

If you believe in evolution, you are not a conservative and are probably going to hell.

If you believe that there is a possibility of man made global warming based on scientific evidence collected so far, you are not a conservative and should probably be committed.

If you believe that Barack Obama is just a stupid liberal and not a clone of Karl Marx, Adolf Hitler, and Osama Bin Laden all rolled into one, you are not a conservative.

If you believe that Democrats don’t have horns, a tail, and a pitchfork, you are not a conservative.

And most of all, unless you believe Sarah Palin is the second coming of Ronald Reagan, the bees knees, the cat’s meow, the apple of our eye, and the greatest thing to hit the conservative movement and the Republican party since Robert Taft first uttered the immortal words “US out of the UN” - you are not a conservative.

For my stands on any one of these litmus test issues, I have been branded a “liberal,” and a “moderate” and even worse “an elitist.”

So just what is it, as a conservative, that I believe?

I believe first and foremost in American exceptionalism - the idea that we are a different country and people from any other nation on earth.

I believe the free market economic system is the fairest, the most productive, and the greatest engine for human liberty ever conceived.

I believe that American defenses must be second to none - conventional and strategic.

I believe in a robust, forward thinking, “America first” foreign policy.

I believe in a strict constructionist interpretation of the Constitution and that a president should appoint judges to the federal courts who reflect that view.

I believe in the inviolable rights of private property as the guarantor of American liberty.

I believe in equality of opportunity for all Americans regardless of color, ethnic heritage, or national origin.

I believe America should strive to create the smallest government realistically possible, possessing the lightest touch imaginable on the individual citizen.

I believe in a just and moral society with a as clear a sense of right and wrong as is consistent with reality.

I believe that all of these things should be taught in American schools and that an appreciation of these values and qualities should be encouraged.

And I believe we should have the freedom to say what we think, write what we want, worship however the hell we please, do anything, go anywhere, and enjoy life according to our own lights - as long as we do no harm to anyone’s person or property.

I have written passionately in support of each and every one of these subjects over the last 4 years and have believed in them most of my adult life. And I refuse to be catalogued, pigeonholed, and denigrated as anything other than what I am - a strong, principled conservative who doesn’t care what the kewl kids are thinking and instead, bases his informed opinion on the specifics of an issue and how it fits (or doesn’t) into a logical, coherent set of moral and intellectual precepts.

The mindless barbarism of some conservatives (or more accurately, people who believe themselves to be “conservative”) who deign to sit in judgement on my core beliefs and determine, by the use of some completely arbitrary and idiotic litmus tests, whether they are “conservative enough” is symptomatic of a sickness of thought and reason that appears to me to be sweeping the right the closer we get to this election Armageddon. I don’t know whether it is simple hysteria that has clouded their judgement or whether they’ve come down with a permanent case of the intellectual runs. All I know is they are wrong - totally, completely, now and forever, 100%, fatally and tragically wrong.

So, I would say to my knuckledragging friends; you can take your litmus tests, your conservative measuring stick to determine the “purity” of my conservatism, your crazy conspiracy theories, your anti-science, anti-intellectual, anti-elitist bullsh*t and stick it up your ass.

Don’t you know there’s a war on?

Stanley Kurtz of NRO gets it.

I have been waiting for someone in the media to lay Obama low with the correct interpretation of the candidate’s radical associations. Many on the right have made the mistake of pegging Obama himself as a wild eyed radical determined to create some kind of Marxist state out of America. I believe this wildly overstates the case. The danger of Obama is in his “soft” radicalism - a squishy new leftism where he doesn’t have the political courage to annunciate his true agenda while hiding behind banal platitudes and sugary rhetoric.

Kurtz, in going after Ben Smith of Politico who quoted one of the co-founders of the New Party Joel Rogers saying that NP had “no members,” and subsequently was forced to retract based on Kurtz’s brilliant brief on Obama’s ties to the radical Maoist party, shows the true nature of Obama’s radical associations and how they informed and affected his political life:

The larger point is that the very existence of so many of these radical political partnerships (and that is what they are, significant political partnerships, not mere “marginal relationships,” as Smith would have it) reveals a systematic pattern–a pattern that shows Obama to be a man of the left–so far left that he long had one foot out of (but also one foot in) the conventional Democratic mainstream. It’s true that the McCain campaign has not effectively made this point. Yet my Corner colleague Andy McCarthy has eloquently complained about that. The most important point is what Obama’s many radical political partnerships reveal about his overall perspective, and how his radicalism ties in to, and helps explain, even his more conventional-seeming Democratic liberalism. I have written extensively about all of this.

Radical or liberal? It’s not an either/or. What’s certain is that Obama is not the post-ideological, post-partisan pragmatist he presents himself as. The press has shamefully colluded in that false presentation.

“[O]ne foot out of (but also one foot in) the conventional Democratic mainstream…” describes Obama to a “T.” I don’t think there is any doubt now, with the discovery of this tape of Obama from 2001 (soon, no doubt, coming to a McCain campaign commercial near you), that as a young politician, Obama flirted with radical ideas including a transformative “redistribution” of wealth that would radically alter the American economy and society.

Courtesy of STACLU, here’s a partial transcript:

If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court. I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order as long as I could pay for it I’d be o.k. But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that. (HT: Michelle Malkin)

Huey Newton (or Jeremiah Wright for that matter) couldn’t have said it better.

Newton and Bobby Seale created the Black Panthers first as a self-defense organization concerned with stopping police brutality in black neighborhoods. But it wasn’t long before militant blacks, rejecting the mainstream civil rights approach of Dr. King and others, began to agitate for more direct political action, believing socialism and redistributive policies would do more for “equality” than the incremental changes sought by SCLC and NAACP.

Obama’s criticism of the mainstream civil rights movement echoes that of later day activists who believe the movement isn’t doing enough about Black poverty and economic “injustice.” This is the legacy of the Panthers and the “Black Power” movement of the 1970’s. In this way, Obama’s friendship with Wright and Father Pfleger (a great admirer of the Black Panthers), makes perfect sense. As does his association with William Ayers whose SDS leadership made him an ally with Newton and the Black Panthers back in the 70’s.

We know now that as late as 2001, Obama was flirting with radical redistribution as an engine of gaining Black equality. So the question is, when did Obama change his spots - or has he?

Obama was attracted to Wright, Pfleger, Ayers and the rest initially because of his flirtation with radicalism as a way to change the economic and social structure of the United States. It was why he became a community organizer. Changing the country one neighborhood at a time is straight out of the New Left playbook.

But it is equally apparent that there came a point where Obama rejected radicalism as a solution and thought to remake the Democratic party - to mainstream some of his ideas - by adopting the tactics of the New Left (framing social change and economic redistribution as questions of “fairness”). This is exactly what the New Party was attempting to do; pull the Democratic party further left by offering up candidates who believed not in Marxism but New Left ideas of “social justice.”

Contrary to what some believe, the New Left is not specifically a “socialist” movement although it has many members who are open socialists. The idea is not to have the “people” take over the means of production or to outlaw profit but rather use the government to enforce utilitarian and Utopian schemes of “fairness” and “equality.” They seek the Leveling” of America - with them at the top of the economic and political heap as sages who know what is best for the rest of us. This is evident in the left’s constant caterwauling about ordinary Americans “voting against their own interests” in electing Republicans. Well, if people aren’t smart enough to know what they want, Obama and the liberals will tell them.

Even Obama haters out there have to admire the way he has obscured this message with a combination of liberal boilerplate and soothing nostrums about an American paradise where there is no argument, no bitter partisanship, only peace and harmony.

Steve Chapman correctly understands that this is a message that cuts across religious, racial, and even party lines. But he misses the big picture by failing to see beyond the pretty words and banal solipsisms to discover the hard edge of New Left advocacy.

The America Obama wishes to recreate - even revolutionize - is not based on Constitutional principles or even tradition (which classical liberals like Hubert Humphrey always acknowledged as a source for change) but rather on the far more problematic ideas of social democracy espoused by late-19th and early 20th century “progressives” who believed that government could be “perfected” using scientific principles found in sociology and psychology.

One foot in and one foot out of the Democratic mainstream - that’s Obama. And he has used his associations with radicals his entire political life as stepping stones in his very liberal district. He may not have entirely abandoned his flirtation with these radicals. Indeed, he appears to have used some of their ideas to flesh out his squishy ideology. But does he share the “communist” (small “c” he calls it) views of Ayers or the radical black theology and political ideas of the Black Panthers with Wright-Pfleger?

I think clearly he does not. Obama does not seek to overturn America as much as he wants to alter the parameters of the social contract between the people and the government. He doesn’t want to do away with this compact and replace it with something else. He wants to nibble around the edges and “reform” the way that the American people interact with their government. This means more dependence, less freedom of action for the individual, an imposed sense of “community,” more strictures on the economy, and a war against “greed.”

This may seem radical enough to many. And indeed, with a Democratic Congress more ideologically in tune with the radicals, it is possible that they will push him further to the left than he wishes to go. But whatever occurs, there is little doubt that if he wins, it will be a triumph for the New Left and a reward for their patient undermining of the American experiment for more than 40 years.