A Thinking Reed

"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed" – Blaise Pascal

Rudy’s brain?

I’m not wild about anybody currently running for president next year, but I’ve been convinced for a while now that Rudy Giuliani is objectively the worst candidate of either party in the 2008 race. He appears to display all the authoritarianism and militarism of the GOP circa 2007 without any shred of pro-life restraint or traditional conservative prudence. Adding fuel to the crazy fire, I see that Rudy has enlisted “Stormin’” Norman “World War IV” Podhoretz as one of his foreign policy gurus. Now that’s scary.

As far as I’m concerned, organized conservatism has already sold its soul in tolerating the unitary executive, preventive war and the torture state. But if conservatives rally behind Giuliani, they’ll effectively have shown that a civilizational war against the Islamic world trumps every other possible conservative principle. Fortunately, a Giuliani candidacy also seems to stand the greatest chance of driving principled evangelicals and other conservatives to a third-party or even to the Dems, thus significantly reducing his chances of winning.

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5 responses to “Rudy’s brain?”

  1. Jeremy

    My thoughts exactly. I used to think John McCain would out-Bush Bush. Now, though, the thought of Giuliani winning the presidency fills me with dread. Seriously. I’d pass up my usual third-party symbolic vote and vote for the Democrat, no matter whom it is. Of course, if you’re looking for a candidate who will stop sending soldiers to die in the hellhole that is the Middle East you’re just SOL. I’ve asked Santa Claus to forgo all gifts for me and give Ron Paul the Republican nomination.

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  2. Lee

    I agree. My views are very different from McCain’s on most things, but he doesn’t scare me quite the way Rudy does.

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  3. Rick Ritchie

    Santa can do that? Oh, cool!

    Reply
  4. Gaius Sempronius Gracchus

    Nah.

    You are right that all that “unitary executive” stuff, along with the torture regime, the disregard for habeas corpus, and the general trampling on civil rights and civil liberties are worse than the conservatives and the GOP have done in living memory.

    But they have all the same been worse on most of those things than the liberals and the Democrats since the end of WW2 and the onset of the Cold War, the Red Scare, McCarthyism, the Blacklist, and the age of the loyalty oath and the Attorney General’s list of subversive organizations.

    And neither conservatives nor the GOP have been “prudent” in foreign policy since the McCarthy Era, when Nixon cut his teeth and the movement was taken over by the fusion guys at National Review.

    [Come to think of it, for some people the McCarthy Era and the Red Scare never ended. Ann and Michelle are both still shrieking about Democratic fellow travelers and liberals way too soft on Communism in those days, are they not?]

    When OPEC first tweaked oil prices WFB, himself, a great friend and supporter of Joe McCarthy, repeatedly publicly urged we invade Saudi Arabia and occupy the oil fields.

    That’s one sample of conservative foreign policy prudence.

    Others came when conservatives urged Kennedy to follow through on the Bay of Pigs invasion, and later when they told him to attack Cuba or the Russian ships during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

    As for prudence about money, that was always only a profound reluctance to tax the rich to pay for services or benefits for anybody else.

    Lately, it has mutated into a profound reluctance to tax the rich to pay for anything at all.

    If they dared, they would try to exempt all of the income and wealth of corporations and the rich from the annual April bite, and try to justify that by appeal to “trickle-down” economics and the pressures of the very globalization they themselves have done most to bring about and accelerate.

    And look how prudently they are everywhere converting taxpayer supported highways and bridges into privately owned, or at least managed, enterprises relying on user fees.

    Then there has been a long and continuing history of conservative prudence about the power of the government to regulate business and the market.

    The purpose of each and every intrusion on the market since the earliest progressive efforts to regulate meat packing has been to safeguard the public good from the devastating effects of unrestrained capitalist competition.

    But these selfsame interferences cut profits, often by increasing costs. So they, too, have always been opposed as “imprudent.”

    There has also been a long tradition of conservatism about the law, extending back, say, to the beginning of the 20th Century, frequently appealing to “strict construction” of the text and adherence to the “original intent” of the framers of any given provision.

    Conservatives have used the law, the theory of federalism, and a very odd idea of due process to cripple labor unions and reject state and federal efforts to restrain capitalism.

    In the name of loyalty to the Constitution they opposed the federal assault on the legal structure of segregation all across America in the mid-20th Century, and openly defended the right of white people to dominate other races and exclude them from political power.

    Again, I refer you to the National Review and its disgraceful record during the Civil Rights struggle.

    Conservatives have opposed requirements that indigents be given legal representation.

    They opposed Miranda rights and Miranda warnings, and the efforts of the courts to force the police agencies of the country to honor the rights of Americans falling into their hands or coming under investigation.

    Apart from the wealth and power of those who have so much of both, the only thing the contemporary movement can claim to be trying to conserve is the social power of religion and the moral outlook traditionally taught by the churches.

    When they are frank about it, they say they want to restore the law and society to its condition of the early 1950s as regards sex, marriage and divorce, and the related aspects of life, all of which have been so radically altered over the years under the heading, “sexual revolution.”

    And I think, from what I have read of your posts, that you are not entirely happy with such a full-bore, morally and religiously reactionary agenda.

    So I have to ask.

    In light of all this, what is there, or what has there been in the last few decades, in the positions of conservatives that strikes you as “prudent” in some praiseworthy sense?

    Just wondering.

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  5. Lee

    Wow, that’s a lot to read into one throwaway line!

    I was using “conservative prudence” in the much more generic tempermental sense as in: go-slow, don’t rush into things or embrace nutty utopian schemes.

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