This morning, The Wall Street Journal set out to say disparaging things about Arlen Specter in this editorial, but at the end turned and gave a slap to Jim DeMint (and, by implication, other impractical ideologues such as the Journal‘s own darling, Mark Sanford):
On the other hand, Republicans shouldn’t follow South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint and welcome Mr. Specter’s defection as an ideological cleansing. “I would rather have 30 Republicans in the Senate who really believe in principles of limited government, free markets, free people, than to have 60 that don’t have a set of beliefs,” Mr. DeMint said yesterday.
We believe in all of those things, but 30 Senate votes merely gets you the same fate as the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae, without the glory. A minority party that wants to become a majority needs convictions, but it also needs coalition builders.
It’s the old debate I’ve written about a number of times before, regarding Sanford and in other contexts: Should one strive to be right, or to be effective? For my part, I’ve always tried to dodge the question and insist one can be both. But Mark Sanford unhesitatingly chooses being “right,” by his lights, and doesn’t give a fig for being effective.
One big difference between the Journal and me, of course — aside from their admiring Sanford for all the wrong reasons — is that they actually CARE whether the Republicans hold power or not. For me, the only thing wrong with the GOP drying up and blowing away is that the Democratic Party shows no signs of doing the same.
But they are right about Sen. DeMint — he has become the zampolit of the Senate — it’s all about ideological purity for him. Maybe because that’s all he’s got left; I don’t know.
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Arlen Specter is, like most career politicians. not a party loyalist.
They are first and foremost about gaining and retaining personal power over other people.
Specter said he left the GOP because, “I don’t want to be judged by those people”, referring to the voters who reject him, because he long ago stopped representing them.
There is no ideological or moral purity about Arlen Specter. He is about pure ambition, and ramming his views down the throats of America. He will fit right in with Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama.
What is really sickening is the celebration of this craven ambition by the press pundits, who tell us how great it is that politicians are not bound by ideology. They don’t believe that. Barack Obama and other socialists now in power are Hell-bant on imposing their ideology. Moral weaklings like Arlen Specter are not leaders, just mules for the hard-core socialists.
There’s a difference between a run-of-the-mill ideologue and one who has been elected to office. The elected ideologue should be expected to be exactly the person he claimed to be when running for office. That’s Jim DeMint and Mark Sanford.
They were not elected to compromise their fundamental beliefs.
And let’s be real here — what compromise have you seen from the Leatherman/Harrell team to work with Sanford? I’ve seen nothing on that regard. So how is that any different?
Mark Sanford is certainly not a run-of-the-mill ideologue. He’s a run-amock ideologue who got elected in a terrorist-threat fueled Republican wave in a Republican-dominated state. He has been consistent in his advocacy for downsized government, skewing the tax burden farther away from wealthier citizens, and many other right-wing economic positions. His perception of the best interests of this state are as phony and contrived as his military career.
The top 10% of taxpayers pay almost all the taxes now.
They are already overtaxed, and it is killing the economy.
Obama and the Democrats know that. But they are stupid socialists, who will heap on more estate and income taxes to appease the hatred of the loser mentalities who voted for change, and “spreading the wealth.
Then the Democrats will tax the lower classes with a Carbon Tax that will add 20% to the price of everything. They are devaluing the dollar by printing worthless paper money, and that will be a tax on the poor, the retirees and wage slaves. The politicians will get automatic cost-of-living increases.
As their policies make unemployment and the economy worse, they will say, “We have tried everything. We need more power!” They will impose wage and price controls, like Carter did, with the same result of more economic ruin.
Lee speaks the usual undemocratic nonsense of the LOSER party. Republicans are going the way of the Whig Party before the Civil War. And it’s too bad. As I have argued in this space before, we need a vibrant conservative party to balance the liberal party in government. But it must be a conservatism devoid of religious fundamentalism and policies that favor the rich over the poor. Republicans used to be free soil, free labor, Reconstruction, civil rights, Freedmen’s Bureau unionists. Now they just want to make certain that the rich get richer and to hell with the rest of us!
Brad,
Why do you hyperlink words like zampolit and verklempt? Do you think that we don’t have “Right Click for Google Search” or even a dictionary?
It is distracting and condescending for you to pick out words which hyperlink to a definition. Don’t draw special attention to either your erudition or your pop culture knowledge.
I grew up reading William F. Buckley’s prose. I made it to the dictionary without him making a judgment about when I would and would not need it.
Rich, save your gratuitous hot air. No one believes you “want a vibrantn conservative opposition”.
If you do, write the authoritarian Democrats and tell them to hold open debates on all bills, and stop padding them in “reconciliation” committees.
Clean up your own corrupt party.
The Republican Party lost credibility only because they voted like Democrats, for more social welfare spending in the name of “compassionate Conservatism”, and for amnesty for illegal aliens, the Ethanol Scam, and other junk science.
Doug, Mark Sanford was elected governor the first time because we didn’t know he would be so different from other conservatives who did a fine job for this state. Sure, he did some quirky stuff in Congress (that should have told us), but maybe it’s ok to make an ideological point when it really doesn’t hurt anyone.
But plenty of former governors ran on the same platform — shrinking government, cutting taxes. Only they cared whether or not what they did would decimate the state. They were able to work with the General Assembly to get something done. They cared about other things that are important to the state, like economic development and education.
He was elected the second time because that’s what we do here, as long as God doesn’t speak to you about the Confederate flag, and you don’t roar into the House of Blues on a motorcycle with a do-rag on your head, and you have an R after your name.
And well, I like the hyperlink words.
Even without the federal “stimulus” money, the state expects to have as much money as it did last year. How will that “decimate the state”?
The federal money is more than the entire annual tax revenues.
Don’t you think the legislature will have to cook up unnecessary projects to burn up all that borrowed money?
How do you plan to repay this BORROWED money?
By huge cuts to existing programs in order to divert state tax revenues?
By huge tax increases?
KP,
Can you please provide information on Sanford’s policies that have or will “decimate the state”?
Is it your contention that the only thing holding back South Carolina from total economic collapse is Sanford’s position that 10% of the total stimulus money be used to pay off debts (which would free up interest payment money to be spent elsewhere)? Is it your belief that the state of the economy in South Carolina is a result of Mark Sanford’s ideology? If so, which specific Sanford policies have been enacted that created that environment?
It’s amazing the leaps of logic that people will take to go from the fact that very little in the way of Sanford’s ideology has ever been put to the test yet he is somehow responsible for the state of the state.
It’s my contention that:
— The $700 million in federal stimulus funding that Sanford wants to reject isn’t 10 percent of the total, it’s 25 percent of the cash portion available to save jobs.
— Even with the stimulus, the state will lose 1,600 jobs in education. Without it, we could lose as many as 5,200 jobs, including 2,700 teachers.
— South Carolina increased jobs by 47.4 percent between 1980 and 2000, an average of 2.37 percent per year. Job growth has averaged .31 percent per year under Sanford, and that was before times got tough.
— South Carolina’s unemployment rate ranked 32nd among the states in 2000. It’s 47th now.
— We ranked 40th among the states in per capita income in 2000 and we were 45th by 2006. Again, before the bottom fell out.
— Public education was improving rapidly until a few years ago, when progress stalled.
Mark Sanford’s ideology has everything to do with all of that, because it determines his incredibly screwed up priorities.
He’s spent nowhere near the time or energy working on economic development that previous governors spent — he’s far too busy trying to figure out whether it’s ideologically desirable to set fines for not using seat belts. Instead of working to improve public education, he’s wasted five years debating private school vouchers.
And now, instead of trying to figure out how to get our state back to work, he’s playing chicken with the General Assembly, to prove an ideological point.
His ideology has been put to the test, alright. By 2010, we’ll have eight wasted years to show for it.
Rich, as much as it pains me to agree with you, on some points you are right. However, you need to be reminded that on Wall Street, there are just as many greedy Democrats as Republicans, maybe more. There are just as many Democrats sitting in CEO and President chairs for those greedy corporations as Republicans, maybe more.
Those greedy capitalists on Main Street also comprise a cross section of Democrats and Republicans. I know several people who work for lending institutions who approved loans to those who should have never been approved. The majority are Democrats who thought they were doing the right thing and enjoyed making good money at the same time.
This crisis has been long coming and both parties share responsibility no matter how much you try to deny it and place all blame on Republicans. Bush did nothing when he had the opportunity and as we all know, he will be shouldered with the bulk of responsibility. However, he had no control over Frank, Dodd, Schumer, Pelosi, Reid, and a few others who were just as instrumental in this fiasco as Republicans, again, maybe even more so.
KP,
You didn’t mention a single Mark Sanford policy. Everything you talked about comes from the policies of Harrell and Leatherman.
Sanford has put forth budgets that have been rejected without debate.
He has offered all sorts of proposals which have been ignored. It isn’t his fault if the legislature takes a different path and drives the bus off the cliff.
There is not and has not been a single dollar spent on vouchers in Sanford’s tenure. Not a single moment of classroom time in public schools has been impacted by the discussion of vouchers. Public education spending has increased with no evidence of improvement in the worst districts. You can blame vouchers after vouchers are tried.
Since the state has as much money as it had last year, even without a dime of the Pelosi Pork money, and 40% more than it had in 2003, there is no reason to cut funding of education.
In fact, there are no spending cuts in education, unless Hugh Leatherman and Bobby Harrell just withold the funds, or divert it elsewhere, to cause fear among the ignorant, which they hope to direct as hatred against Mark Sanford.
Take it up with Leatherman and Harrell.
Sorry, Rex, but I love words, I love learning about words, I love sharing stuff I love with other people, and I’m just crazy about HTML — it’s probably my favorite thing about blogging. In newspaper writing, you have to stop to explain EVERYTHING (or so the conventional wisdom goes), which wastes precious space and destroys the flow of one’s prose — not to mention REALLY insulting your reader if they were hip to the word or reference to start with.
Also, I’m really into digression. It’s like a drug to me. It’s why I really got into Dostoevsky in my youth. Remember “The Grand Inquisitor” in Brothers Karamazov, probably the all-time greatest digression? Awesome. Or on a smaller scale, Lebezyatnikov’s digression about what he was thinking when he saw Luzhin slip the banknote into Sonia’s pocket:
Where was I? Oh, yes… So, if you don’t want HTML links on the fun words, go someplace else.
And besides, William F. Buckley never said verklempt, and never was verklempt, to my knowledge.
KP, thanks for liking my links.
Brad, you relate too much of real life to the B grade movies and TV shows.
The opportunity to acquire a little knowledge for a minimum of effort should be valued.
Brad,
I will give you a word. Pedant.