Quotes of the day

“If you want to get a sense of how unserious and ungrounded most Americans think the Republican Party is, look no further than how conservatives elevate Joe the Plumber as a spokesman. The movement has become so gimmick-driven that Wurzelbacher will be a conservative hero long after people have forgotten what his legitimate policy beef with Obama was.

Socialism and blatant, rampant abuse of government power for political ends. This will not be forgotten 200 years into the future, and, when the future history books are written and detail the fall of the greatest nation to have ever existed, Joe Wurzelbacher will figure prominently as the canary in the coal mine who almost saved America by doing what none of the “professionals” could – get the idiot messiah to speak plainly about the hell he planned on plunging America into. Anyone who thinks that Joe will be forgotten is a very poor student of history, or, at least, doesn’t understand how it unfolds.

A movement self-confident in its place in American society would not have made Joe the Plumber a bigger story than he actually was.

Quite the opposite, as regards the confidence of the movement – or self-confidence, if Ruffini prefers. And Joe’s story was one of the biggest of the campaign, without any doubt. The more that the Precedent, and his lunatic Congress, move to destroy this nation, the more salient Joe’s warnings from the campaign – the same warnings that many of us had been issuing for a long time.

Since its very beginnings as a movement, conservatism has bought into liberalism’s dominant place in the American political process. They controlled all the major institutions: the media, academia, Hollywood, the Democratic Party, large segments of the Republican Party, and consequently, the government.

“bought into”? So, what, are we delusional? Okay. I admit it. The media (MSM) is not dominated by libs. Academia (the soft and subjective parts) are not dominated by libs. Hollywood is a conservative bastion. … I admit it. Republicans (like the candidate) didn’t want amnesty for illegals (and to give them citizenship, too). And the GOP candidate didn’t want cap and trade, and he didn’t believe in global warming … I admit I was in a deluded state. Sheesh.

Liberalism’s image of conservatives in the ’50s and ’60s as paranoid Birchers gave birth to a conservative movement self-conscious of its minority status.

Uh … why does Ruffini assume this self-consciousness? Conservatives were a minority as represented in government and they were aware of that. But self-conscious?

As in any tribe that is small in number and can’t fully trust its most natural allies (i.e. the business community or the Republican Party),

Okay. Finally something reasonable.

the meta-debate of who is inside and outside the tribe is magnified exponentially.”

“meta-debate” … “magnified exponentially”? I don’t get this. First of all, the inside/out business is more of a straight debate. It is not a question of determining conservative foundations, so much, as determing whether someone is trustworthy and can be taken at his word – as Ruffini pointed out by saying that conservatives “can’t fully trust its most natural allies”. It is a debate about, “Can we trust this person?” I know that Ruffini probably thinks that the modifier, ‘meta’, makes his statement sound more intellectual, more mathematical, but it is really misapplied, here, by his own set-up. He should be self-conscious about that sort of stuff. It would serve him well.
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“Much as their blind loyalty discredited the Right, perhaps the worst effect of Limbaugh et al. has been their draining away of political energy from what might have been a much more worthwhile project: the fostering of a middlebrow conservatism. There is nothing wrong with lowbrow conservatism. It’s energizing and fun.

“blind loyalty”. Okay, there. If you say so. This is just obnoxious, as it was obviously meant to be. “Middlebrow writing” would be an apt description, in keeping with the author’s linguistic mediocrity.

What’s wrong is the impression fixed in the minds of too many Americans that conservatism is always lowbrow, an impression our enemies gleefully reinforce when the opportunity arises.

So there is lots of propaganda against conservatives. So what? And the left are a bunch of lying scum. You can’t change them. That’s what they are.

Thus a liberal like E.J. Dionne can write, ‘The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity.

Er … E.J. Drone can write whatever he wants to. Again, so what? Can we stop him from writing? Is that the point? Or is the author just embarrassed to be associated, in any way, with Rush and Sean? It must be tough being such a genius, surrounded by the unwashed and the illiterate. I offer my apologies. Can you ever forgive me for being such a barbarian?

… Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans.’ Talk radio has contributed mightily to this development…

Now, he’s just gone off the rails. The propaganda and the slogans are bastions of the left, as is cognitive dissonance. I can’t even think of a conservative slogan. We have easily enumerated principles, like the axioms of plane Euclidean geometry, but no real slogans. We are not a “Yes we can” screaming sort of group. We don’t faint at political rallies. I sense a lot of anger emanating from this author.

Conservatives have never had, and never should have, a problem with elitism.

I have no problem with elites. I love elites. It’s the pseudo-intellectuals who I can’t stand. I would say that these pseudo-intellectuals shouldn’t feel threatened by non-degreed, normal people.

Why have we allowed carny barkers to run away with the Right?”

Uh huh. *sigh* Pathetic.

progressoverpeace on February 27, 2009 at 12:40 AM

I’d like to know what Joe the Plumber has done to earn the distinction of a “political somebody” over people like Ruffini and Allahpundit. The only thing he did was ask a question and was lucky enough to have someone taping it. That’s it. Pure dumb luck.

SnarkVader on February 26, 2009 at 11:27 PM

I think it was far more than just “dumb luck”. Joe opened an issue up that no one was able to do before him. O’Reilly had tagged the “Socialist” label on the idiot messiah, in his interview. And BHO all but admitted to being a socialist, but it got no traction. I always thought that O’Reilly got the short end, by many of the conversative chattering class, on this one.

But, anyway, Joe was a very interesting case. He was confronted by the idiot messiah, out of the blue. It wasn’t that he went to a rally, or sought him out. BHO had started his moronic “home visiting campaign”, or whatever it was called (it was pathetic), where they showed him going up to little houses and knocking on the door, saying, “Hi there! How are you? ….”, reliving his halcion days of executive experience as a community organizer … and he stumbled into Joe’s neighborhood. BHO came upon Joe, and, thinking on his feet Joe presented a hypothetical to the idiot messiah that got him to admit to his strong socialist tendencies, and to use a phrase that could, finally, not be ignored – “spread the wealth”. It was taped and the story had legs. Then, Joe’s name just happens to erupt out of the debate the next night and … boom, Joe’s a household name. This was pretty amazing, when you look back on it, and Joe did not go with a prepared script, but gave a perfect question off the top of his head. That is not easy, and it’s not dumb luck, either.

Now, this would have been the end of Joe’s story, for the most part, but he went on and did a few interviews. I caught him on Huckabee. He did amazingly well. He was composed, well-spoken, had a good, solid understanding of, what I consider to be, the core of conservativism, and acknowledged when he thought issues were out of range of confidence. I was very impressed.

So, he moved on from there.

I think that he has found himself a nice little niche, and I have not yet heard him say anything that I disagreed with in any major way. I liked what he had said about the idiot messiah and the security of Israel, during the campaign. I was with him 100%. That seems to be when he first clashed with the “higher-ups” in the party machinery.

Anyway, I think it’s incorrect, in a big way, to say that he just got lucky once. He has certainly shown some talent and most of what I’ve heard him say I am in agreement with.

progressoverpeace on February 27, 2009 at 1:48 AM