Redstate

Posted at 10:11pm on Apr. 10, 2008 South Park on Abortion: "The Ultimate Cheat"

By Ben Domenech

I know not all of you are South Park fans. I'm a huge fan of their work, and as RS editors know, I try to force them all to watch the episodes and marvel at the phenomenal social commentary hidden behind a layer of the absurd and/or the obscene.

The South Park guys aren't conservatives - they're libertarians. But they're awesome libertarians. They hate the global warming preachers, NAMBLA, Jesse Jackson, Hillary Clinton, and save some of their strongest bile for the celebrity political activists - George Clooney, Rob Reiner, Rosie O'Donnell and Barbara Streisand. They can't stand politically correct authoritarians and they authored the definitive anti-9/11-truthers response (which actually ends up being kinda pro-W, believe it or not). They've made Al Gore into a walking joke among Comedy Central viewers. Yes, they bash the Catholic Church a lot and they have some cutting remarks about redneck Americans and country music...but their episodes bashing Richard Dawkins and atheism are far more vicious, and amazingly composed.

Posted in Abortion | Libertarians | Life Issues | South Park — Comments (38) / Email this page » / Read More »

Posted at 9:27pm on Jan. 23, 2008 Ideas Don't Run For President; People Do

A Timeless Truth. Repeat As Often As Needed.

By Dan McLaughlin

With the failure of the Fred Thompson campaign, there has been predictable and understandable wailing and gnashing of teeth in conservative quarters about the state of the GOP and what this all means for the future of conservative ideas. Fred ran as a full-scale, across-the-board movement conservative, and he went nowhere. Among the four remaining major candidates, we have two who are genuine conservatives on some core issues but basically apostates on others (Rudy and Huck), a moderate who is generally if not as dramatically out of step on a large number of issues (McCain), and one candidate (Romney) whose positions have changed so much from his past positions and record that nobody really knows for certain how trustworthy he might be if he actually won the general election. Conservatives are asking: has our party abandoned us? Have GOP voters rejected our ideas?

No, it has not, and they have not. Remember Article II, Section 1 of our Constitution: "The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America." President, singular, individual. Flesh-and-blood human. That's who holds the job, that's who gets elected to the job. No perfect vessel, no incarnation of ideas. And that fact must be repeated again and again until people understand that winning and losing elections and choosing leaders is about picking the right person from the available choices. Ideas don't run for president, people do.

We got the field we started with because these were the men who were willing to ask for the job and able to raise the minimum amount of money and signatures and staff to initiate a campaign. That limited our options to the people who had - or thought they had - the qualifications and the right political moment to run in 2008, not some other year. We got the field we have now because along the way, some of the contenders failed to promote themselves well, or made a bad impression, or ran out of money, or found better things to do with their time. That leaves the four men who remain, plus of course Ron Paul. We have no choice but to take each them as a whole - platform and record, experience and character, skills and resources. And it is just one of those remaining men, as a whole, with whom we will go forth to battle in November.

An awful lot of angst could be avoided by remembering this simple truth. And an awful lot can yet be spared if the folks who live in this big and querelous tent we call a political party - which we would all like and hope to see function as a majority party - would remind themselves of it: we have been asked to choose among men, not ideas. While our choices certainly reflect our view of the ideas each man champions, it is deeply mistaken to read the choice of one man over another as the final and definitive statement of what ideas we truly support. I, for one, as a Republican would like to know that the candidate we settle on - or settle for - has more people behind him than just the ones who agree with every one of his ideas.

Read On...

Posted in 2008 | 2008 Presidential Campaign | conservatism | Fred Thompson | Libertarians | Ron Paul | Schism — Comments (54)/ Email this page » / Read More »