Some People are Genuine & Thoughtful Conservatives (America needs them)

[Peter Frank]

Then there are others:

[NMMNG]

1. Ah yes, the original Freeper poster boy

:puke:

[Skittles]

2. BS

I don't know ANY conservatives who are "genuine" and "thoughtful"

[Peter Frank]

3. Make no mistake!

The Neo-Conservatives scare allot of the real Conservatives.

[Skittles]

4. "REAL CONSERVATIVES" suck too

absoLUTELY

[Name removed]

5. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Skittles]

6. WRONG

it's the MODERATES who tip the balance, not g.d. CONSERVATIVES....like it or not, "real conservatives" STILL BACK THAT PIECE OF SHIT BUSH.

[tsuki]

11. Those are conservative-leaning Moderates.

[MikeNY]

7. No there is a difference, BIG difference

"Real conservatives" don't like big, mismanaged, intrusive government. The breed of conservatives in power now were very much the architects and advisors of the men who got us involved in the Vietnam War. Also, their movement differs from traditional conservativism. The conservatives in charge now are from a school of thought that are the total anti-thesis of the 1960s era liberalism. Traditional conservatives would never have heard of the United States fighting a war of aggression without being attacked. While traditional conservatives occasionally sided with the working class and labor unions on principle, albeit rarely, neoconservatives resent the working class with a passion, and see them merely as a tool to be manipulated to further their own ends. Traditional conservatives typically opposed fair labor laws, women's suffrage, and civil rights out of a need to maintain tradition and uniformity. Although we know this to be wrong, their opinions were based on an adherence to laws they considered to be fair. Today's conservatives based their political careers on resenting the progress that liberals had made on these fronts and are actually radicals in the sense that they desire to change the law in order to restrict individual liberties and disable the checks and balances in the Constitution...

The "real", "true" conservative movement was misguided ideology that sometimes had its strong points, but still respected the law, and occasionally the opinions of liberals.

Neoconservativism of today is a pro-war movement that disregards the Constitution, the public at large, etc. Completely unaccountable and operating with the same secrecy you would expect from a neo-Nazi party.

I don't think people realize what a big change this is. Look at the form of FDR's liberalism and how it differed from the laissez-faire economic policies of the old democrats before him. A change in economic policy, granted. But what this administration has totally changed is our foreign policy (strike first, ask questions later), our privacy laws... "reform" not adequately describe the changes they have and are implementing... will have reprocussions decades from now..

[rox63]

14. I know what you mean

I've known (and been related to) several 'real conservatives'. Most of them are decent, intelligent people who I happen to disagree with politically. But they always treated me (and other liberals and moderates) with respect, and acknowledged that there was room for more than one point of view. They need to work on taking their party back from the neo-cons and theocrats. If they can manage to do that, I'll still disagree with them, and I'll still work for liberal goals. But there will once again be balance and sanity in our government.

[tsuki]

10. The NeoCons are the Conservatives. Last Conservative Cabal

we had was Joe McCarthy and the House on UAA.

[tsuki]

9. Neither do I. Conservatives are not what we need.

They stink of the fear of terra-ists, coloreds, wimmen, and furriners. I would like to see some Moderates.

[jonnyblitz]

21. THANK YOU!!

jesus christ. :crazy: RWers SUCK!! end of fucking story.

[Peter Frank]

27. Hmmmmmmmm...

How do your words fit your avatar?

[izzie]

8. Heck I am one of those if this is what you mean

Spend only what you have, leave people alone and do not waste money on wars.

[tsuki]

13. That is not a Conservative. Now if you stink of the fear of everything

non-white, non-Khristian, then you are a Conservative. Otherwise, you sound pretty Moderate to me.

[izzie]

16. Well it is how the GOP used to think or part of it

They have always been for lower taxes.

[tsuki]

29. Yes, they have. Fourty years ago, I was a liberal leaning moderate.

Paygo, Paygo, Paygo, but a social liberal. The left is always defined by the right (polsci 1960s.) At the present time, the conservatives are so far right that they are a throw back to the McCarthy years when Conservatives were a pejorative. Neo-conservatism is not a real position, just a made up word to keep from branding the Conservates like Joe McCarthy and the John Birchers did.

I have not moved in my political stance that much. But, I have been moved by the shift of the right. Most people have not moved. That is why I consider Neo-Conservatism the most dangerous word in the political lexicon today. It allows the RWers to co-op both the hard right as Neos and the Moderates as the Conservatives that they are not.

When the backlash occurred in the 1950s, we did not have that problem. But we do today.

[leeroysphitz]

17. The conservatives didn't invent the southern white bigot...

They coopted them. Try to remember that some democrats successfully courted that vote way back when...
Governer Dean had the right idea about these people. Was it Ted Kennedy that said "Most republicans are just a Democrats who don't know whats going on."?

[H2O Man]

12. I agree, strongly.

I spoke with a relative who is an intelligent, thoughtful conservative. He is a fiscal conservative: he recognizes that this administration is way out of control on spending and tax cuts for an elite few. He is a social conservative: he finds the administration's hysterics on gay marraige to be an obscene abuse of public trust .... because a conservative view of the constitution can NOT exclude the right to get married to adults. While he holds people like Hillary Clinton in near total contempt, he has come to believe that Nancy Pelosi is the single most honest politician in Washington today.

We need not embrace conservative views ourselves, but we do well to keep an open mind, and find comon ground with even those that we tend to think of as inhabiting the "enemy camp." Our country is in a strange position right now, and we can little afford the luxury of being closed-minded.

[tsuki]

15. He is not a conservative. He is a thinking Moderate with

conservative-leanings.

The enemy camp is the Joe McCarthy Conservative wing of the Republican Party. What we have to do is support the Moderate Wing of the Republican Party.

[H2O Man]

19. No, he is a conservative.

You choose to use an incorrect definition of the word conservative. It is difficult indeed to build a case for truth based on false definitions. While I agree in large part with what you are saying about the "Joe McCarthy wing," it is important that people use words correctly -- or they lose the power that words have when used correctly.

[Uncle Roy]

24. Garrison Keillor had a nice rant on this subject

Those of us "of a certain age" still remember the definition of conservative embodied in Keillor's first paragraph. But the current crop of right-wingers foul everything they touch: religion, patriotism, conservatism... A younger person might well come of age in this country and have no way of knowing what these terms mean, or used to mean. Now the bible and the flag are weapons, used by "conservatives" in their never-ending struggle for more power.

We’re Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore

How did the Party of Lincoln and Liberty transmogrify into the Party of Newt Gingrich’s Evil Spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch President, a Dull and Rigid Man, whose Philosophy is a Jumble of badly sutured Body Parts trying to Walk?

by

Garrison Keillor

Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party. Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity that raises all ships. They were good-hearted people who vanquished the gnarlier elements of their party, the paranoid Roosevelt-haters, the flat Earthers and Prohibitionists, the antipapist antiforeigner element. The genial Eisenhower was their man, a genuine American hero of D-Day, who made it OK for reasonable people to vote Republican. He brought the Korean War to a stalemate, produced the Interstate Highway System, declined to rescue the French colonial army in Vietnam, and gave us a period of peace and prosperity, in which (oddly) American arts and letters flourished and higher education burgeoned—and there was a degree of plain decency in the country. Fifties Republicans were giants compared to today’s. Richard Nixon was the last Republican leader to feel a Christian obligation toward the poor.

In the years between Nixon and Newt Gingrich, the party migrated southward down the Twisting Trail of Rhetoric and sneered at the idea of public service and became the Scourge of Liberalism, the Great Crusade Against the Sixties, the Death Star of Government, a gang of pirates that diverted and fascinated the media by their sheer chutzpah, such as the misty-eyed flag-waving of Ronald Reagan who, while George McGovern flew bombers in World War II, took a pass and made training films in Long Beach. The Nixon moderate vanished like the passenger pigeon, purged by a legion of angry white men who rose to power on pure punk politics. “Bipartisanship is another term of date rape,” says Grover Norquist, the Sid Vicious of the GOP. “I don’t want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” The boy has Oedipal problems and government is his daddy.

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we’re deaf, dumb and dangerous.

Rich ironies abound! Lies pop up like toadstools in the forest! Wild swine crowd round the public trough! Outrageous gerrymandering! Pocket lining on a massive scale! Paid lobbyists sit in committee rooms and write legislation to alleviate the suffering of billionaires! Hypocrisies shine like cat turds in the moonlight! O Mark Twain, where art thou at this hour? Arise and behold the Gilded Age reincarnated gaudier than ever, upholding great wealth as the sure sign of Divine Grace.

Full rant here: http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0831-02.htm

[Peter Frank]

25. Extremely well said, including reply #12...

Some of us have been around long enough to remember when the two party system didn't mean a divided America. There was a tacit respect between Democrats & Republicans because, at the end of the day, both were understood to be patriots.

Real Conservatives are by definition moderate where it comes to: growing federal power, deficit spending, foreign adventurism etc. McCarthy was a radical.

[Uncle Roy]

28. Finding common ground: Senator Kennedy (D-MA) used to co-sponsor

a lot of bills with Orrin Hatch (R-UT). Hatch was about as conservative as you could get, and he and Kennedy disagreed on many issues. But if a particular issue was one on which they could find common ground, then they would join forces on that one issue. They got a lot of legislation passed that way.

A political alliance doesn't necessarily have to be a marriage for life. There's much to be said for a one-night stand...

[datasuspect]

18. the mullet: it says "business" in the front and "party" in the back

the official hairstyle of freeperland.

[porphyrian]

20. Unless it's on a lesbian... - n/t

[Uncle Roy]

23. Nice! (nfm)

[Bosso 63]

22. Not all conservatives are stupid,

but most stupid people are conservative. To paraphrase John Stuart Mill.

[Jade Fox]

26. The term Conservative, like Liberal, no longer has a clear....

definition, if it ever did. Garrison Keillor's explanation above of how different Eisenhower Conservatives were from today's Neocons, is very good.

Any sane person, regardless of what they call their political persuasion, will condemn the Bush Administration. I am all for forging alliances with these folks.