The American Spectator

Spicy Joker| 5.14.09 @ 4:38PM

I'm sorry you had to write an article for that creep Pat Pukecannon's magazine.

MattSwartz| 5.14.09 @ 6:46PM

Stay (?) classy, Spicy.

Buchanan's magazine is worth two newsstand buys a month from me. I don't agree with everything inside (especially not the stuff on trade), but I have yet to pick up a single issue that didn't make me think.

That magazine is now what NR used to be back when my dad was my age: a forum for all sorts of conservatives to look at all sorts of things and ballyhoo all sorts of conventional wisdom.

If that isn't worth three dollars of your money every two weeks, then I don't know what would be.

JA3's articles are especially good. I think they give him a little more editorial freedom there than here, although he brings it regardless. There, it just feels like they aren't tamping down the reading level and skimming off the biggest words.

Mary| 5.14.09 @ 7:35PM

Mr. Antle, your AC piece is well thought out, and well written.

I’m not sorry that Arlen Specter is gone and while he may have been a reliable ally against card check, he promised (during the stimulus brouhaha) to strip the bill of the provision that laid the groundwork for the establishment of a healthcare advisory board, easily converted into a governmental body deciding for or against medical treatment for patients. To the best of my knowledge, that provision remained intact.

You’re spot on about keeping social conservatism but dispensing with peachiness. Peachiness is never a winning formula, but it becomes a tremendous disadvantage when disinterested onlookers view the disparity between what a Christian preaches and how he lives. It matters, no matter how much that fact is denied.

The spectacle surrounding Carrie Prajean is a perfect example. However vicious her critics are, it’s hard to take her seriously when at her first press conference she speaks of her opinion as standing up for her Lord. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t hawk T&A (plastic to boot) and expect anyone to look at that and not see something diametrically opposed to the teachings of Christ. The whole enterprise is plastic and Christ’s Name should be left out of it.

Another one of Amspec’s contributors wrote recently that he doubted Christianity was dying. I don’t disagree with him on the whole, but Christianity is not vibrant in the US. Confessing Christians can hawk T&A on their blog on Easter Sunday and think nothing of it. Easter Sunday! Can you imagine a confessing Jew hawking same on Yom Kippur? So much of Christianity in North America amounts to little more than what Bonhoeffer referred to as cheap grace. A Calvinism stripped of the rigor and vigor that built the Country. I think it was Friedman -though I can’t locate the piece- who wrote that during the very early years of the Country and in some parts, laws were enacted to force Christians to attend worship. Apparently, too many of them were sleeping in on Sundays and “having a good time.” It’s best to remember the words of St. Francis: Preach the Gospel; use words if you must.

I’m a big fan of Mark Sanford and I agree with your take on him. I would just add a couple of things. Even though he is not a charismatic man; he has other advantages. On the physical side he’s presidential looking. Tall, slim and he carries himself well. He also has a pleasant voice. Some of McCain’s problems were physical and I’m not talking about the disabilities resulting from his torture. His voice wasn’t that good or convincing, and he acted erratic. His yellow teeth were not very attractive and his smile was always a little disconcerting because it was so ill-timed so much of the time. The degree to which he was not suited for the presidency is best illustrated by his refusal to even tentatively endorse a Palin presidency. He threw her at conservatives like a last minute javelin and now doesn’t seem to think she’s suited for the presidency. That’s not putting Country First, no matter how one tries to finesse it. In fact, it could easily be classified as dishonorable.

Lastly, conservatism can’t be left in the hands of the crunchy-cons either because they’re autocrats deep-down. Maybe even theocrats. The only one I exempt from that conclusion is Caleb Stegall. He’s a very smart guy, and I don’t see him as an autocrat. He’s much too expansive for that.

I want an open society, and I think it’s possible to have one if good and intelligent men are willing to risk speaking frankly about who we are now as Americans, where we all came from and where we should be hoping to be in future. Keeping Chesterton’s quote on Christianity in mind; when has frankness ever really been tried?

Machiavelli is portrayed in my neck of the Italian woods using a twin-faced coin, but I think he’s vastly misunderstood. Of course I say the same thing about Nietzsche. :) But Machiavelli was right when he taught us that peaceful times bring insubstantial leaders and all of their paltry offerings to the fore.

Tom Paine| 5.14.09 @ 10:22PM

I thought it was Grand Old Potatoes.

Mary| 5.14.09 @ 10:47PM

A while back I read the following somewhere: "the North saved America the first time
and the South will save her the second time."

Stranger things have happened, you know.

Tom Paine| 5.14.09 @ 11:16PM

Mary --

I think you'd be surprised how many people around here disagree on your assessment of what happened "the first time," and they cannot forgive the "War of Northern Aggression."

Eric Dondero| 5.15.09 @ 8:18AM

The opportunity for future GOP outreach is with strong fiscally conservative, anti-Nanny-state, and Pro-Defense libertarians, not with the Paleos.

Their anti-Military views, and apologetic stance for Islamo-Fascism, is a deal killer for most libertarian-leaning Republicans.

The GOP needs to be consistent in support of freedom. Freedom from big government, and Freedom from Islamo-Fascism.

Mary| 5.15.09 @ 1:35PM

Jeremiah (nice name, by the way),

I’m not sure how many Amspec commenters are proponents of the view you note, but I do know there are quite a few other regular regulars who ascribe to the view that you and I hold. A thread dating back a few months had quite a few people commenting, who vigorously debated the subject. The poster who goes by the handle Teleprompter Messiah stands out the most in my mind, in terms of knowing the subject matter and effectively arguing it.

I do think that some of the issues raised by the “war of Northern aggression” view are worth debating. I do think the Civil War dealt a grave blow to federalism. I just don’t see how that could have been avoided. Lincoln, being also a man of his time, didn’t think the races equal but he thought a black man’s personhood, dignity and freedom were none the less a God-given possession. And he, like de Tocqueville, knew that slavery dishonored labor, and that no man had a right to the blood, sweat and labor of another man.

But the Civil War was genocide; Sherman very much intended “to make Georgia howl.”

From the Spengler link:

**So much for the birth of the modern state. By the same token, the birth of the modern democratic state, the United States of America, required another genocide, and I do not refer to the reduction of the native Americans, which may or may not have been a genocide or the unintentional result of epidemic smallpox. I refer to the American Civil War. As I wrote in the cited 2001 essay:

The great genocide of American history is not the destruction of the [aboriginals], but rather the slaughter of the manhood of the American south during the Civil War. One-quarter of all military-age males residing in the 11 states of the rebel Confederacy died in military action between 1861 and 1865. The south surrendered only when insufficient men could be found to fill the ranks.

In this case genocide was not a bad thing but, on the contrary, an act of moral splendor unequaled in recorded history, in which the Union made awful sacrifices to destroy the heinous institution of slavery. But that is an aside; what is important to accept is that the two decisive events of modern history, the foundation of the "modern" state and the foundation of the modern democratic state, were born of genocide. We know that genocide was normative in prehistoric society (in that regard I have referred on past occasions to research summarized in Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn).**

If I were a Black leader what I would make sure to do is to take a trip to the first tobacco plantation whose labor force was converted from indentured servitude to chattel slavery, and pick up the rich soil and look the camera in the eye and say to my people: this earth is ours! The shame of oppression doesn’t fall on the oppressed but on the oppressor. Let’s really love this land of ours because it belongs to us in a way it belongs to no one else. The history we make today cannot be had at the expense of those who had no hand in the oppression; we are not the first people history has exploited and left to their own devices once abandoned. America is our land; it’s our earth. Let’s never forget that!

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