It is with no pleasure that LITD acknowledges that it was exactly right about something crucial to the prospects for America and the West.
Mitt Romney was another awful Republican presdential candidate. If one goes back through the archives here, a softening of tone about the man and an increase in the tone of hope and confidence is discernible. Did I, in my heart, know it amounted to whistling past the graveyard?
The candidate who asserted that climate change was real and that human activity was a cause, the man who said he would allow automatic increases in the minimum wage, the man who said that the Most Equal Comrade was "a good guy" who was just "in over his head" was yet another terminal case of Reasonable Gentleman Syndrome - like John McCain, like both Bushes, like Bob Dole. Like Richard "We're-all-Keynsians-now" Nixon.
There are many in our party who say it's time to get over the obsession with Dutch, but a glaringly front-and-center question still hasn't been answered: How did the only real conservative president we've ever had win two landslides when the cultural and political landscape were already nearly as debased as they are now? The left hated him with at least as much vehemence as it has ginned up for subsequent presidential - and vice presidential - candidates. Cultural rot was well underway by the 1980s. His presidency coincided with the rise to stardom of Michale Jackson, Prince and Madonna - three of the most narcissistic, indeed, solipsistic, artistically derivative, aesthetically perverted figures American popular culture has ever produced. Reagan had a worldwide Communist empire breathing down his neck. Shortly after his first election, the economy went sharply from bad to worse for several months.
It's not rocket science. He stood for clarity. He had the three pillars of conservativism - free-market economics, a foreign policy based on what history tells us about human nature, and an understanding that Western civilization, with its Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman foundation, was a unique blessing to humankind - firmly in his mind.
Maybe the cultural climate now is such that it really would be impossible to do well in primaries let alone a general election if one spoke plain truths about taxes, government bloat and the actual definition of the term "family." Maybe proposing elimination of the capital-gains tax and the income tax, proposing elimination of the Departments of Education, Energy, Health and Human Services and Agriculture would be universally derided as crackpot. Maybe pointing out that maleness and femaleness are fundamentally different ways of being human (indeed, of being a member of any species) would get the same reaction as the ramblings of a psychotic with voices in his head.
But I don't think so. There are still plenty of us who understand all of the above to be true and right. We have been driven underground, but we're in touch with each other. I'm meeting one for coffee tomorrow morning, and a couple for wine tomorrow evening.
The value I place on clarity has taken a quantum leap recently. As with so many medicines, it's a little bitter going down, but it begins to alleviate the symptoms of civilizational death every time it's administered.
Ahh, the smell of freedom. Under the Reagan administration a get tough stance against all illegal drugs began, with over 600,000 arrests made in 1996 for violating marijuana laws. Longer sentences were given for selling marijuana than for murder, with blacks more likely to be incarcerated than any other race.
ReplyDeleteAmerica's war on drugs has put millions of people in jail, estimated at 760 prisoners per 100,000 citizens - predominantly blacks and minorities. With over 25% of the world's prisoners in the United States, it is one of the nation's greatest failures.
Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/321697#ixzz2C6JhK9VR
Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/321697#ixzz2C6J4QBOi
You - and here I mean collectively those who get all worked up about marijuana policy - have clearly not done an adequate job of pressing your case. (Believe me, I speak out of a sense of identification. We conservatives have clearly not done an adequate job of pressing ours.) The American public still does not consider it one of the top twenty issues facing the country and never has. You still have all kinds of medical-journal studies about long-term effects to refute. Then there is the cultural angle. The public tends to think of potheads as the slackers in the Big Lebowski movie. Or worse. And that translates to how the law-enforcement establishment at local, state and federal levels deal with it. They see pot dealers as part of the web of the generally sociopathic swath of society.
ReplyDeleteAll this may be hugely mistaken, but you are not doing enough to dispel the notion. Changing the subject on blog posts about other matters is probably not a very effective way to get started on addressing it adequately.
I was talking to a police officer the other day - right on my front porch, actually, since the situation was that we were filing a report after having our bicycles stolen from our storage shed. He said, "I can pretty much tell you what happened to your bicycles. Somebody hocked them for drug money." He said, "They're probably out of town by now, but I'll cruise the druggie neighborhoods I watch and see if I see anything noteworthy."
ReplyDeleteThis is the image among law-enforecement folks and society generally.