<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type">
</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
Ed,<br>
<br>
I've missed you!<br>
<br>
I no longer read the NYT daily from cover to cover, something I did for
50 years, in part due to your observations about its journalistic
quality, or lack thereof.<br>
<br>
I thought you might be interested to note that a left wing economist
agrees with much right wing opinion.<br>
<br>
What do you think of Pat Buchanan's protectionist views? He has been
both consistent and articulate in stating them. I don't know that he's
right, but I don't know that he's wrong, either.<br>
<br>
What's your take?<br>
<br>
B.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
tootle wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:70AE429D49A74E1DABC1FA7880461A83@YOURB88038198E"
type="cite">
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; ">
<meta content="MSHTML 6.00.6000.16788" name="GENERATOR">
<style></style>
<div><font face="Verdana">
<div><font face="Verdana">Bill,</font></div>
<div> </div>
<div><font face="Verdana">You continue to read the New York Times, a
great source of left wing opinion. Try other sources of information. </font></div>
<div> </div>
<div><font face="Verdana">Look and read some of the speeches and
articles at this site:</font></div>
<div> </div>
<div><font face="Verdana"><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis.asp">http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis.asp</a></font></div>
<div> </div>
<div><font face="Verdana">Read a right wing opinion blow:</font></div>
<div> </div>
<div>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">Rush Limbaugh</p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">Hillsdale Speech</p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">Do Conservatives
Need to Get Beyond Reagan?</p>
<p class="MsoNoSpacing" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span
style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Rush Limbaugh launched his
radio broadcast into national syndication on August 1, 1988, with 56
radio stations. Twenty years later it is heard on nearly 600 stations
by approximately 20 million people each week and is the highest rated
national radio talk show in America. Mr. Limbaugh also hosts "The Rush
Limbaugh Morning Update," writes "The Limbaugh Letter," and extends his
message to the Internet via RushLimbaugh.com. He received the Marconi
Award for Syndicated Radio Personality of the Year, given by the
National Association of Broadcasters, in 1992, 1995, 2000 and 2005. In
1993, he was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame and in 1998, into the
National Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span
style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">The following is adapted
from a speech delivered on December 4, 2008, at the Mayflower Hotel in
Washington, D.C., on the occasion of the ninth annual Hillsdale College
Churchill Dinner.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span
style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">THERE ARE ongoing
discussions and debates among conservatives about the kind of president
Barack Obama will prove to be, and about how they should react to him.
But there is a larger and more important debate going on within
conservatism-a debate about what conservatism is. Remarkably, we are
hearing from a lot of people who are thought to be conservatives that
conservatives need to "get beyond Reagan." After all, these people say,
"The Reagan era is over." And the liberal media love to print their
articles and broadcast their pronouncements to this effect. My response
is, well, yes, the Reagan era is over in the sense that it has been 20
years since Reagan was president. But the funny thing is, I never heard
the liberals saying that because the era of FDR was over—it ended in
1945—that they needed to "get beyond FDR." They didn't say that 35
years later when Reagan was first elected, or when he was reelected in
1984. They didn't say that when the liberals lost Congress in the 1994
election. Nor did they say it after the 2000 or 2004 elections.
Instead, they kept arguing and fighting for the ideas they believe in.
And now Mr. Obama is plausibly promising to revive the era of FDR.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span
style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">So why are some so-called
conservatives today arguing that we need to "get beyond Reagan," by
which they mean that we need to abandon the ideas that Reagan stood
for? To understand the roots of this argument, I think we only need to
look back to the years when Reagan first emerged onto the national
scene. <i style="">There was a lot of resentment at that time among
many of the elites in the Republican Party because Reagan hadn't gone
to the right schools, he didn't come from the right part of the
country, he had been an actor rather than a lawyer, he was a bumbling
dunce, he was an extremist who was too far outside the mainstream to
win, and so on. </i>People have been making these kinds of arguments
for a long time. They were saying that conservatives needed to get
beyond Reagan even before the Reagan era began. A few of them are the
same people. Many of them are new. But <u>what they have in common is
that none of them agree with the principles that Reagan stood for.</u>
And I would argue that this means that they are not conservatives.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span
style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Today the
get-beyond-Reagan arguments are often put in so-called pragmatic terms
of <i style="">needing to create blocs of voters who will support the
Republican Party. And in order to accomplish this, all that
conservatives have to do, these self-proclaimed smart people say, is
embrace the idea of big government, because that's what the American
people want and because only so-called big-government conservatives
will be able to create blocs of voters by spending money to do them
favors. </i>But in answer to this, one has to ask the question—and I'm
being a real pragmatist myself here—what's left for government to spend
these days? It's already bailing people out right and left with
taxpayer money that the government doesn't have. The spigot has been
turned on under President Bush. The Obama administration, we can
presume, is going to be even more generous in terms of bailouts. But
honestly, when we look at auto executives being grilled on TV by
liberal members of Congress about their irresponsibility, can we take
it seriously? Has anyone ever been as irresponsible with money—and in
their case other people's money—than these very same self-righteous
members of Congress?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><i style=""><span
style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">As history has amply
demonstrated, down the line the kind of central planning that Mr. Bush
has begun and that Mr. Obama plans to escalate isn't going to work. </span></i><span
style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">Although it may succeed in
increasing the control of government over people's lives—which is how
many liberals these days seem to define prosperity—it will fail
miserably in restoring economic health to America. So in fact, during a
time of economic trouble like this when liberals are in charge of both
elected branches of government, conservatives have a golden opportunity
to reintroduce to the American people the free market ideas and
policies that have made our country the greatest and most prosperous
country in human history.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span
style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">My first point, then, is
that there is no pragmatic reason today for conservatives to abandon
the ideas of Reagan. It is worth remembering, after all, that despite
the warnings of Republican "pragmatists" in the economically bleak
1970s that <i style="">Reagan was too far outside the mainstream ever
to be successful politically</i>, Reagan won the presidency in two
landslides—and that in 1994, his party took over the House of
Representatives, for the first time in 40 years, using Reagan-like
arguments.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span
style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">But there is a second and
more important point to be made in response to the argument that
conservatives should get beyond Reagan. <i style="">The main idea that
animated Reagan wasn't anti-communism or supply side economics.</i> <b
style="">Reagan's main idea was the main idea of the American
founding—the idea of individual liberty</b>—and the policies that he
supported, both internationally and domestically, grew from that. <i
style="">America was founded on the idea that our individual freedoms
derive from God, not from government, and that government should
protect those freedoms and never violate them. Reagan argued, and
history has shown, that America does best when it is true to its
original idea. <b style="">It does best when its people are left free
to work in their individual self-interest—not meant in the sense of
being selfish, but in the sense that they are left free to work to
improve their own lives and the lives of their families, and for the
good of their communities and of the nation at large.</b></i> The
biggest problem with the argument that conservatives should get beyond
Reagan, then, is that the idea of individual liberty will never go out
of style as long as America exists. To argue that the Reagan era is
over is to argue that the era of freedom is over. And to argue that
conservatives should abandon Reagan's principles is to argue that they
should stop being conservatives.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 10pt;"><span
style="font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%;">There is no such thing, at
least in America, as "big-government conservatism." A government that
abides by the Constitution and protects our God-given freedoms is by
definition limited. Rather than carving out blocs of voters by
surrendering their principles, conservatives need to continue to tell
the American people as a whole that the ideas of individual liberty and
limited government are right and that the policies that come from those
ideas work best to produce prosperity. <em>Conservatives don't need to
reinvent themselves. They need the courage to be once again who they
were.<o:p></o:p></em></span></p>
</div>
<div><font face="Verdana"><em></em></font> </div>
<div><font face="Verdana">Ed K</font></div>
</font></div>
<pre wrap="">
<hr size="4" width="90%">
_______________________________________________
SwiftwaterGazette mailing list
<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:SwiftwaterGazette@mailman.theswiftwatergazette.com">SwiftwaterGazette@mailman.theswiftwatergazette.com</a>
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://mailman.theswiftwatergazette.com/mailman/listinfo.cgi/swiftwatergazette">http://mailman.theswiftwatergazette.com/mailman/listinfo.cgi/swiftwatergazette</a>
</pre>
</blockquote>
</body>
</html>