The American Spectator

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Sunk Costs

6.11.08 @ 12:01AM

(Page 2 of 4)

Hal Colebatch has told a fascinating and oft overlooked story of American merchant navy heoism. However, the Stephen Hopkins sinking of the Steir was not the only American sinking of a German surface warship. On October 18, 1943 the American submarine Tarpon sank another merchant ship raider, Michel, 60 miles off the coast of Japan.
-- Edward Finglas
Marblehead, Massachusetts

MAKING LISTS
Re: Jeffrey Lord's LBJ's List and the Conservative Challenge:

Jeffrey Lord overlooked the contribution of Lord's old boss, Ronald Reagan, as well as that of the Georges Bush to the Great Society. None of them, especially Reagan, made any attempt to repeal or to even reduce the Great Society programs. George F. Will wrote a metaphysical truth in 1986 after Reagan bragged at the Illinois State Fair about his increase in farm subsidies: Reagan is not recognizably conservative.

Will is absolutely correct about something else. Americans are philosophically conservative and operationally liberal. In plain English that means that a liberal is a conservative who is talking about his government benefits-such as the ones Lord listed.
-- Dick Graham

Mr. Lord is correct in saying that conservatives must illuminate as much as possible the failure of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs -- and the fallacy of expanding them. But we must not lose sight of the fact that with Obama, substance means little. We can tear apart each policy or talking point, yet the masses will continue to swoon.

And that leads me to question Lord's assertion that elections are not about candidates. One of the primary rules of electoral politics is "make your opponent the issue." While Ronald Reagan certainly ran on a solid platform, his painting of Jimmy Carter as a nincompoop was a major factor in his landslide victory. The same with Dukakis, Gore and Kerry. Once they became the issue and had to run defensive campaigns, the battle was all but won (for the GOP). And right now Democrats are putting far more emphasis into linking John McCain to "a third Bush term" than they are in attacking the Republican's platform. The GOP, of course, will hope to get traction in branding Obama a left-wing kook (not hard to do, but a strategy that begs the question, "will anybody really care?").
-- Dennis Bergendorf

Jeffry Lord's "LBJ's List" and its effect on a populous struck home as a conservative living in southeast Michigan in a Detroit suburb. Here we have a liberal to leftist assortment of Governor, both U.S. Senators, U.S. House member, Mayor and State and local congressmen. If any area of the nation should be wondrous uptopia to live in, it should be the Democrat-controlled Detroit area, right?

Wrong. Just the opposite. From poor roads and infrastructure and high taxes to failing schools and inner-city poverty, Detroit and some suburbs are in bad shape. And even though entire State and local government is firmly in Democrat control, the answer to any problem is always: it's "Bush's fault"!
-- Tom Van Eck
Riverview, Michigan

I just finished reading Jeffrey Lord's piece (linked from Rush) on what an Obama presidency might mean for a future "golden age of conservatism." I agree for the most part with his analysis but I have one problem. Even with the Reagan presidency and congressional control by supposedly conservative Republicans NONE of the legacy of LBJ is gone. With all the folks who were "appalled at the cost, the bureaucracy, the extravagance and the incompetence," the rebellion was stunted and only slowed the growth of government.

A bureaucracy created is a bureaucracy propagated. Even though Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are bloated and bankrupt (or headed that way) they are still around, through and beyond Reagan. The real problem with an Obama presidency will be the further siphoning of my money from my family to others and the sure knowledge that the Universal Healthcare bureaucracy he creates will survive us all and drag our children into the gutter. He must be stopped, now.
-- Bill Vick

If you give a man a fish, he will eat for a day. If you teach a man to fish he will eat for a lifetime. If you create a program that costs millions upon millions of tax payer dollars with no accountability that produces neither fish nor fisherman, then you bankrupt the working class to feed a bureaucracy that shall not vanish from the from the face of this earth.
-- Ira M. Kessel
Rochester, New York

So what's new?

When Jesse Jackson was running for President, someone asked why he didn't start with something more appropriate to his experience, like being mayor of a city.

The answer, attributed to one of his aides, was something like this, "Jesse Jackson doesn't do potholes."

Neither does Obama, apparently.
-- A.C. Santore

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Taxes, John McCain, Harry Reid, Economics, Social Security, Medicaid, Environment, Global Warming, Law, Iran, NATO, Conservatism, Alaska, Medicare