What Madness Is This?!

Calvin Freiburger 2008, abortion, conservatism, GOP, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Mike Huckabee, moonbats, Norma McCorvey, pro-life, RINOs, Ron Paul, stupidity, War on Terror
“Am I hallucinating?” Allahpundit asks, and if so, then so am I. Y’see, Duncan Hunter has thrown his support behind Mike Huckabee, specifically citing the border fence, national security, and character. Yes, we have just crossed over into the Twilight Zone. So much for Hunter’s much-touted conservative judgment (which I admit, I believed in as much as anyone).
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Unfortunately, he’s not the only one. Norma “Jane Roe” McCorvey is endorsing Ron Paul. I understand that Paul is ostensibly pro-life, but that doesn’t change the fact that A.) he’s a senile crank who doesn’t understand that America has enemies, and B.) he’s not going to be the president, and everybody knows it. McCorvey is a major figure in the right to life, with a compelling story, but I hate to see her call her judgment into question and marginalize herself like this.

35 Years of Roe

Calvin Freiburger abortion, Church of Liberalism, conservatism, Duncan Hunter, evil, feminism, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, judicial activism, March for Life, pro-life
Today, March for Life 2008 remembers legal abortion’s nearly fifty-million victims, and rallies the abolitionists of today to stand against the premier human rights failure of our day. Mario Diaz of Concerned Women for America marks the occasion by dissecting the constitutional blunder that is Roe v. Wade, while Congressman Duncan Hunter calls on the United States to remember the victims—and to do something about it.

Fred Thompson

Calvin Freiburger 2008, Fred Thompson, GOP, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post
It’s official: Fred Thompson has dropped out of the presidential race, and word is that he’s neither interested in a VP slot nor a Cabinet post. On an apolitical note, my prayers go out to him and his mother, who is reportedly ill.
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Thompson’s campaign failed because of a couple factors, both within and beyond his control. To start with the latter, several of the early primary states simply were not looking for conservatism, as Mike Huckabee & John McCain’s victories have shown. While I must admit some measure of satisfaction at the ramifications this has for Mitt Romney’s chances, I would much rather have President Thompson than Huck, the Maverick, or Rudy Giuliani in the White House, and stronger support for him would have at least been reassuring that the Republican Party still takes the Reagan coalition seriously.
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Second, Thompson is a man with a reasonably conservative voting record, and a knack for articulating conservatism clearly and plainly, but in the run-up to his candidacy, the blogosphere built him up into so much more. He was the second coming of Ronald Reagan, we were told, the knight in shining armor who would ride in and save us from the three-headed RINO known as Rudy McRomney. No man could have lived up to such fire.
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On the flip side, he tried playing with that fire, and got burned in two ways. First, he milked the “consistent conservative” mantra for all he could…even though it wasn’t true. Abortion, immigration, McCain-Feingold, and No Child Left Behind—four separate issues on which he initially took liberal (and, in the case of NCLB, anti-federalism) positions, but later moved rightward. Granted, I welcome his changes of heart, just as I welcome Romney’s. But Thompson’s choice to compound his past errors with fresh lies, while compelling to the most ardent Fredheads, served instead to dull the man’s shine in the eyes of more critical observers. And even his current platform was found wanting in key areas. While positioning himself as a cultural conservative, he supported neither full legal protection for the unborn nor a national definition of marriage.
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Second, whether it was the hero-worship going to his head or natural arrogance, Thompson seemed to think the GOP nomination was his for the asking. I suspect he expected to ride the hype straight to the nomination. Since he’s obviously the base’s only choice, who needs a well-oiled organization? Fools who couldn’t see the obvious were dismissed as anti-Thompson conspirators.
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Now that he’s out, there’s speculation that Fred Thompson, just as his fellow ex-candidate Duncan Hunter has pledged to do, will take on a more active role for conservatism in other venues. I hope he does, and despite my criticism, I welcome his contributions to the fight for America, and thank him for making the attempt to give our nation a conservative president.
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The good news is, we still have a strong, full-spectrum conservative in the race, and he’s got the skills, organization, and funds necessary to go all the way…if we’re willing to unite behind him. Ladies & gentlemen, it’s never been clearer—Mitt Romney is the man for the job. Let’s give it our all to put him in the White House.

Three Strikes; You’re Out!

Calvin Freiburger fondy, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, liberalism, lying, me, public schools, reporter, stupidity
My latest in today’s paper:
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Last month, I noted that Glenn Perry’s letter highlighted a problem within our schools: political partisans who advance left-wing agendas in the classroom. Two educators and one student challenged me, yet they actually support my thesis, if unintentionally.
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First, none of them can get the basic facts straight. Local teacher Dan Sitter characterizes my objection as “there were some liberals…that felt the Iraq war was a big mistake.” UW Madison student Brent Schmitz suggests I characterized Fond du Lac High School as “full of” liberals. Professor Omer Durfee of Northern Michigan University writes, “since you supposedly received such a poor education.”
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All of this is wrong. I credited my “many outstanding teachers,” and noted there were “some” “liberal fanatics” and “hyper-partisans”—NOT teachers who simply held liberal views (Indeed, I’ll be the first to say several of my good teachers were liberal).
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Second, their own liberal prejudices inadvertently shine through in their writing. Mr. Sitter surmises that my “self-righteousness” must be caused by that predictable left-wing boogeyman: “radio hosts spewing hate.” Professor Durfee simply rails on that I’m a “neocon,” that “King George” Bush is a liar, and plays the Nazi card. Nope, no left-wing bias here…
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Lastly, Mr. Schmitz says I seem “to devalue debate and disagreement,” and imagines I propose some sort of ideological purity test for school employment. These are lies, and I believe he knows it.
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Three people may not make a pattern, but it doesn’t speak well of our educational system that it employs and churns out such intellectual laziness, bias, and dishonesty; and that theirs are the only voices we seem to hear from the educational community on the matter. Silence really is deafening.

Massachusetts Tested, Conservative Approved

Calvin Freiburger 2008, conservatism, Coulter, Giuliani, GOP, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, McCain, RINOs, romney
As if National Review, Robert Bork, Tom Tancredo, and the founder of National Right to Life weren’t enough right-wing bona fides, now Mitt Romney receives the Ann Coulter endorsement:
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Unluckily for McCain, snowstorms in Michigan suppressed the turnout among Democratic “Independents” who planned to screw up the Republican primary by voting for our worst candidate. Democrats are notoriously unreliable voters in bad weather. Instead of putting on galoshes and going to the polls, they sit on their porches waiting for FEMA to rescue them.
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In contrast to Michigan’s foul weather, New Hampshire was balmy on primary day, allowing McCain’s base — Democrats — to come out and vote for him.
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Assuming any actual Republicans are voting for McCain — or for liberals’ new favorite candidate for us, Mike Huckabee — this column is for you.
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I’ve been casually taking swipes at Mitt Romney for the past year based on the assumption that, in the end, Republicans would choose him as our nominee. My thinking was that Romney would be our nominee because he is manifestly the best candidate.
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I had no idea that Republican voters in Iowa and New Hampshire planned to do absolutely zero research on the candidates and vote on the basis of random impulses. Dear Republicans: Please do one-tenth as much research before casting a vote in a presidential election as you do before buying a new car.
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One clue that Romney is our strongest candidate is the fact that Democrats keep viciously attacking him while expressing their deep respect for Mike Huckabee and John McCain.
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This point was already extensively covered in Chapter 1 of “How To Talk to a Liberal (If You Must)”: Never take advice from your political enemies.
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Turn on any cable news show right now, and you will see Democratic pundits attacking Romney, calling him a “flip-flopper,” and heaping praise on McCain and Huckleberry — almost as if they were reading some sort of “talking points.”
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Doesn’t that raise the tiniest suspicions in any of you? Are you too busy boning up on Consumer Reports’ reviews of microwave ovens to spend one day thinking about who should be the next leader of the free world? Are you familiar with our “no exchange/no return” policy on presidential candidates? Voting for McCain because he was a POW a quarter-century ago or Huckabee because he was a Baptist preacher is like buying a new car because you like the color.
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The candidate Republicans should be clamoring for is the one liberals are feverishly denouncing. That is Mitt Romney by a landslide.
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New York Times columnist Frank Rich says Romney “is trying to sell himself as a leader,” but he “is actually a follower and a panderer, as confirmed by his flip-flops on nearly every issue.”
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But Rich is in a swoon over Huckabee. I haven’t seen Rich this excited since they announced “Hairspray” was coming to Broadway.
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Rich has continued to hyperventilate over “populist” charmer Huckabee even after it came to light that Huckabee had called homosexuality an “abomination.” Normally, any aspersions on sodomy or any favorable mentions of Christianity would lead to at least a dozen hysterical columns by Frank Rich.
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Rich treated Mel Gibson’s movie “The Passion of the Christ” as if it were a Leni Riefenstahl Nazi propaganda film. (On a whim, I checked to see if Rich had actually compared Gibson to Riefenstahl in one of his many “Passion” reviews and yes, of course he had.)
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Curiously, however, Huckabee’s Christianity doesn’t bother Rich. In column after column, Rich hails Huckabee as the only legitimate leader of the Republican Party. This is like a girl in high school who hates you telling you your hair looks great.
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Liberals claim to be enraged at Romney for being a “flip-flopper.” I’ve looked and looked, and the only issue I can find that Romney has “flipped” on is abortion. When running for office in Massachusetts — or, for short, “the Soviet Union” — Romney said that Massachusetts was a pro-choice state and that he would not seek to change laws on abortion.
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Romney’s first race was against Sen. Teddy Kennedy — whom he came closer to beating than any Republican ever had. If Romney needed to quote “The Communist Manifesto” to take out that corpulent drunk, all men of good will would owe him a debt of gratitude.
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Even when Romney was claiming to support Roe v. Wade, he won the endorsement of Massachusetts Citizens for Life — a group I trust more than the editorial board of The New York Times. Romney’s Democratic opponents always won the endorsements of the very same pro-choice groups now attacking him as a “flip-flopper.”
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After his term as governor, NARAL Pro-Choice America assailed Romney, saying: “(A)s governor he initially expressed pro-choice beliefs but had a generally anti-choice record. His position on choice has changed. His position is now anti-choice.”
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Pro-abortion groups like the Republican Majority for Choice — the evil doppelganger to my own group, Democratic Majority for Life — are now running videos attacking Romney for “flip-flopping” on abortion.
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Of all the Republican candidates for president, Romney and Rudy Giuliani are the only ones who had to be elected in pro-choice districts. Romney governed as a pro-lifer and has been viciously attacked by pro-abortion groups.
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By contrast, Giuliani cleverly avoids the heinous “flip-flopper” label by continuing to embrace baby-killing. (Rudy flip-flops only on trivial matters like illegal immigration and his own marital vows.)
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And, of course, Romney is a Mormon. Even a loser Mormon like Sen. Harry Reid claims to be pro-life. So having a candidate with a wacky religion isn’t all bad.
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At worst, Romney will turn out to be a moderate Republican — a high-IQ, articulate, moral, wildly successful, moderate Republican. Of the top five Republican candidates for president, Romney is the only one who hasn’t dumped his first wife (as well as the second, in the case of Giuliani) — except Huckabee. And unlike Huckabee, Romney doesn’t have a son who hanged a dog at summer camp. So there won’t be any intern issues and there won’t be any Billy Carter issues.
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It’s also possible that Romney will turn out to be a conservative Republican — at least more conservative than he was as governor of Massachusetts. Whatever problems Romney’s Mormonism gives voters, remember: Bill Clinton came in third in heavily Mormon Utah in 1992.

Big Government Watch

Calvin Freiburger big government, energy, environment, health care, liberalism, socialism
First, from CNSNews (hat tip to Ann Coulter), “The California Energy Commission has proposed requiring thermostats that allow the government to control the temperature of homes and businesses in case of high energy prices or shortages, a measure that some critics are calling “draconian.”
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Next, a couple stories from Hot Air: cause for concern with the Brits & organ donation, and a Boston lib is hoppin’ mad that the free market is taking a crack at health care.
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The Left’s worship of privacy and choice seems conspicuously absent, doesn’t it…

Liberal Fascism

Calvin Freiburger books, conservatism, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, Jonah Goldberg, liberalism, National Review
Unfortunately, I probably won’t be digging into Jonah Goldberg’s new book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning anytime soon (I’ve gotta read this, this, and this first, just to scratch the surface of my bookshelf backlog), but judging by the author’s evisceration of a critical review, it’s quite the read. A few excerpts:
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Judging from this, you’d think I just made-up the phrase from whole cloth. Nowhere does Neiwert mention that I get the phrase from H. G. Wells, quite possibly the most influential English-speaking public intellectual during the first third of the 20th century. It was H. G. Wells who sought to rechristen liberalism as “Liberal Fascism” or — again, his words — “Enlightened Nazism.”
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Then there’s the omnipresent canard that I must be wrong because of fascism’s “overwhelming anti-liberalism.” Neiwert is again displaying either his ignorance or his dishonesty. It is absolutely true that a great many academic definitions — Ernst Nolte’s “fascist negations” for example — cite fascism’s anti-liberalism. And it is true that Mussolini and Hitler spoke of their disdain for liberalism many times, and there are many quotes to that effect. But guess what? These two European statesmen were speaking in — wait for it! — a European context where liberalism generally means limited government: classical or “Manchester” liberalism. They were most emphatically not talking about progressivism or socialism, which are the correct label for American liberalism and/or the American left (as I demonstrate at length in my book).
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Secondly, the same sources Neiwert and others cite to cough up this anti-liberalism hairball also usually include another attribute of fascism: It was “anti-conservative” (also on Nolte’s, and many others’, lists). But here’s the fun part: American conservatism is a blend of European conservatism and European liberalism. In other words, the two halves of American conservatism — traditionalism plus classical liberalism — are both considered decidedly un-fascist by most academics who study the topic, as well as by the original fascists themselves.
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[…]
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This point about race that Neiwert brings up is an important one — and one that I anticipate and discuss in my book. Because he believes that racism is inherently right-wing, the fact that the Nazis were racists means they had to be right-wingers. I concede, and talk at length, about the fact that the Nazis were racists. But racism, I’m sorry to say, is not definitively right-wing in my book (literally and figuratively). Stalin’s Russia was replete with anti-Semitism. The American Progressives were astoundingly racist (as I show). The Communists in Germany competed with the National Socialists by trying to out-Jew-bait them. Are the American Progressives, Stalin, or the German Reds now all right-wingers? Moreover, are American conservatives somehow racists because a bunch of socialists in Europe were racists? These dots do not connect.
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One last point on this. The issue isn’t racism-as-bigotry. The point is racial essentialism, the idea that race matters (the title of a book by Cornel West, if memory serves). In America, conservatives argue for colorblindness; the Left does not. The Left believes in the iron cage of racial identity, the Right does not. The Left believes in a racial spoils system, the Right does not. And yet, we conservatives are kith and kin of the most intense racial essentialists of the 20th century? These dots, too, do not connect. (Note: As I say countless times in my book, today’s liberals are not Nazi-like bigots, but they are racial essentialists).
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[…]
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Very quickly: As I write in my book, the Nazis were determined to destroy their competition. That is why they hated the Communists. The propaganda that says the Nazis were the opposites of the Communists because they hated each other is idiotic. Hamas and Fatah hate each other deeply, Trotsky and Stalin battled for power, and left-wing academics get their panties in a bunch over where some fellow left-winger puts a comma in a sentence. In none of these cases does mutual hatred translate to ideological divergence. Please: Stalin was a genocidal dictator. Hitler was a genocidal dictator. They both ran totalitarian, militarized regimes of total war. But yes, Nazism and Communism are opposites. Riiiight.

Debate Reaction

Calvin Freiburger 2008, conservatism, Fred Thompson, Giuliani, GOP, http://schemas.google.com/blogger/2008/kind#post, McCain, RINOs, romney, Ron Paul
Didn’t we just do this?
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Deja vu aside, I’ve gotta admit that tonight was Fred Thompson’s night. Alert and on target, he stood out from the pack (plus, he gave Huck a much-deserved whuppin’). His performance didn’t by any means overcome his problems on the issues or his disingenuousness, so I still can’t support him in the primary. But the general? We could do far worse.
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My man Mitt did well tonight, and his suggestion that Ron Paul stop reading the Tyrant of Tehran’s press releases rocked. But he didn’t stand out, either. I think he’s trying to compete for the change banner a little too much (though, to be fair, it’s not a new thing for him – he’s always framed himself as the Mr. Fix-It candidate). Just show us the Mitt Romney that blew away CPAC 2006 and delivered “Faith in America,” and there’s no contest.
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John McCain and Rudy Giuliani gave passable, but unremarkable performances. Rudy’s lucky social issues weren’t on the docket, and McCain rightly noted that we don’t trust DC to solve immigration – leaving out the fact that he’s one of our main reasons, naturally.
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The knives were out for Mike Huckabee tonight, and he didn’t handle it well. Did he raise taxes? “What I raised was hope.” Bah. He’s a phony, and on stage he sounded like it. It’s telling that the only time he looked strong was in comparison to Ron Paul (on Israel).
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Speaking of Rabid Ron, why was he even invited (aside from his trademark court jester role)? Did he pout too much about the last one? His foreign policy is disastrous, he flirts with anti-America-ism, and he comes across as an unstable coot. Maybe he was just there to artificially raise everyone else’s stature by comparison. Lame.