Conservatives Lost More Than An Election

Chuck Baldwin sounds off:

By Chuck Baldwin
November 7, 2008
NewsWithViews.com

That Barack Obama trounced John McCain last Tuesday should have surprised no one. In fact, in this column, weeks ago, I stated emphatically that John McCain could no more beat Barack Obama than Bob Dole could beat Bill Clinton. He didn't. (Hence a vote for John McCain was a "wasted" vote, was it not?) I also predicted that Obama would win with an electoral landslide. He did. The real story, however, is not how Barack Obama defeated John McCain. The real story is how John McCain defeated America's conservatives.

For all intents and purposes, conservatism--as a national movement--is completely and thoroughly dead. Barack Obama did not destroy it, however. It was George W. Bush and John McCain who destroyed conservatism in America.

Soon after G.W. Bush was elected, it quickly became obvious he was no conservative. On the contrary, George Bush has forever established himself as a Big-Government, warmongering, internationalist neocon. Making matters worse was the way Bush presented himself as a conservative Christian. In fact, Bush's portrayal of himself as a conservative Christian paved the way for the betrayal and ultimate destruction of conservatism (something I also predicted years ago). And the greatest tragedy of this deception is the way that Christian conservatives so thoroughly (and stupidly) swallowed the whole Bush/McCain neocon agenda.

For example, Bush and his fellow neocons like to categorize and promote themselves as being "pro-life," but they have no hesitation or reservation about killing hundreds of thousands of innocent people in reckless and unconstitutional foreign wars. By the same token, how many unborn babies were saved by six years of all three branches of the federal government being under the control of these "pro-life" neocons? Not one! Ask the more than eight million unborn babies who were killed in their mothers' wombs during the last eight years how "pro-life" George W. Bush and John McCain are.

As a result of this insanely inconsistent and pixilated punditry, millions of Americans now laugh at the very notion of "pro-life" conservatism. Bush and McCain have made a mockery of the very term.

Consider, too, the way Bush and McCain have allowed the international bankers on Wall Street to bilk America's taxpayers out of trillions of dollars. Yes, I know Obama also supported the Wall Street bailout, but it was the Republican Party that controlled the White House for the last eight years and the entire federal government for six out of the last eight years. In fact, the GOP has won seven out of the previous ten Presidential elections. They have controlled Supreme Court appointments for the past thirty-plus years. They have appointed the majority of Treasury secretaries and Federal Reserve chairmen. They have presided over the greatest trade imbalances, the biggest deficits, the biggest spending increases, and now the worst financial disaster since the Great Depression.

Again, the American people look at these so-called "conservatives" and laugh. No wonder such a sizeable majority of voters yawned when John McCain tried to scare them by accusing Barack Obama of being a "big taxer." How can one possibly scare people with a charge like that after the GOP has made a total mockery of fiscal conservatism? That's like trying to scare someone coming out from a swim in the Gulf of Mexico with a squirt gun.

Republicans in '08: A Stinking Cocktail of Failure

Cobb opines:

It occurs to me that what is going on in most of the Right blogosphere that I concern myself with is that opinion makers are beating the dead horse of Obama's perceived flaws not to win any more converts but to set the stage for what the Right is to believe about him should he win the Presidency.

...

What's sad and typical but hardly tragic is that Obama, who is capable of putting earnest passion into soundbites about unity, will be ill-suited to unite the nation. And this would be a good time for that sort of thing.

This disunity was wrought by the insipid antics of the Republican Party Establishment and the wholesale alienation of the million plus Ron Paul supporters who shouted from the rooftops in vain for the GOP to return to its roots and act like conservatives. This disunity was wrought by all the vapid and unthinking Party Men who shouted "socialist" and terrorist in public in spite of the fact that Congressional Republicans from Elite Team A voted in lockstep with Elite Team B to bail out corporate America on the backs of the American taxpayers.

This disunity is the direct result of the uncritical and unthinking Party Men and Party Women who were so concerned with procuring victory for their Party that they resorted to flinging the most vile and foul rhetoric imaginable in public for all to see and hear. Instead of posing the core question of "true" or "not true", they fell back to striking rhetorical conservative poses: "socialist", tax-and-spend, terrorist. Striking conservative "poses" instead of acting like actual conservatives; allowing so-called "conservatives" to sneak into power on a platform of a humble foreign policy only to have them behave as outright radicals; clinging to so-called "conservative" convictions that are functionally meaningless—a stinking cocktail of failure!