The following is from Caffeinated Thoughts:
Ronald Reagan
What Does It Mean To “Conserve” ~ Conservatism and Gay Marriage
This is a really good article from The American Spectator, with thanks to Paul Kengor. He starts with a quote from Gutfeld:
- “Gay marriage, in my opinion, is a conservative idea.” ~ Greg Gutfeld
….With all respect to Greg Gutfeld, who I usually agree with, gay marriage is absolutely not a conservative idea. Not unless, as liberals do with marriage, one redefines conservatism.
How is that? What is conservatism? That itself can be problematic. If you ask 10 self-identified conservatives for a definition, you might get 10 different answers. This much, however, can be said:
Conservatism aims to conserve the time-tested values, ideas, and principles that have been sustained over time by previous generations and traditions. (Here, a crucial correction to Greg Gutfeld: gay marriage is not a tradition.) These are values, ideas, and principles—usually with a Judeo-Christian basis—that have endured for good reason and for the best of society, citizens, country, culture, and order. That’s a brief summation that the late Russell Kirk, probably conservatism’s preeminent philosophical spokesman, would endorse—as would Ronald Reagan, the face of modern conservatism.
In an important speech at CPAC in February 1977, Reagan stated this: “Conservative wisdom and principles are derived from willingness to learn, not just from what is going on now, but from what has happened before. The principles of conservatism are sound because they are based on what men and women have discovered through experience in not just one generation or a dozen, but in all the combined experience of mankind. When we conservatives say that we know something about political affairs, and that we know can be stated as principles, we are saying that the principles we hold dear are those that have been found, through experience, to be ultimately beneficial for individuals, for families, for communities and for nations—found through the often bitter testing of pain or sacrifice and sorrow.”
That’s a solid definition of conservatism. Gay marriage, merely by its total newness alone, fails that rudimentary definition. Gay marriage has never been done before. One would never expect a conservative to rush into something as utterly unprecedented—and that directly repudiates the laws of nature and nature’s God—as this completely novel concept called “gay marriage.” Same-sex marriage not only revolutionizes marriage but also human nature generally and family specifically, the latter of which conservatives have always understood as the fundamental building block of civilization.
One would expect a progressive to support redefining marriage, because for progressives, everything is always in a state of never-ending, always-evolving flux…. Redefine family, parenthood, motherhood, fatherhood, womanhood, manhood, gender? Sure, says the progressive.
For conservatives, however, this is unthinkable. Indeed, a conservative cannot even “conserve” when it comes to gay marriage, because gay marriage is an untried idea unimaginable by any people until only very recent days.
To be sure, conservatives, especially those whose conservatism springs from religious underpinnings, should recognize and respect the inherent human dignity of all gay people—being fellow human beings made in the image of God—and should not mistreat them. But those conservatives cannot, in turn, blatantly violate (if not blaspheme) the teachings of their faith and their God on the sanctity of male-female matrimony.
[….]
The point: a radical leftist is eagerly willing to remake marriage and family in his own image, but a conservative is not. To the contrary, the task of the conservative is to fight that rebellion, to affirm and defend and preserve and conserve the natural-traditional-biblical family—i.e., that time-tested institution that Reagan called “the most important unit in society,” “the most durable of all institutions,” “the nucleus of civilization,” “the cornerstone of American society.” And children, said Reagan, “belong in a family” with a mom and dad. In fact, Reagan maintained that it is in a family that children are not only cared for but “taught the moral values and traditions that give order and stability to our lives and to society as a whole.” America’s families must “preserve and pass on to each succeeding generation the values we share and cherish.” Above all, Reagan stated that our “concept of the family” “must withstand the trends of lifestyle and legislation.”
And yet, gay marriage is no mere trend of lifestyle and legislation. By breaking the ancient Western standard of marriage between one man and one woman, it will forever alter our concept of family that has formed the nucleus of civilization….
The 96th Congress Would Have Liked Jeb, the 114th? Not So Much
The above nugget comes by way of Dr. Thies (professor of statistics and econometrics at Shenandoah Univ. in VA.), and I will highlight what I thought was important within this important post via Libertarian Republican:
….Nate Silvers, the uber-geek of politics, amasses a lot of data: candidates’s voting records (if they served in Congress), their public positions on issues, and fundraising sources. Based on the average of the two or three scores he develops, Jeb Bush comes out like Mitt Romney, John McCain and Bob Dole, three fellows who did win the nomination of the party in open years, although less conservative than George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan.
The bad news for Jeb Bush is that the Republican Party has been shifting to the right and what might have been acceptable in the past may no longer be. Looking at where the average Republican in Congress stood immediately before Ronald Reagan became President, they pretty much lined up with Romney, McCain and Dole. Back then, Reagan was considerably to the right. But, today, the average Republican in Congress stands more or less where Reagan stood….
Democrats Rewriting History on Amnesty ~ Rush Deals with Reagan Comparison
(CNSNews.com) – Liberal supporters of President Obama’s executive amnesty claim that Obama is only doing what the conservative Ronald Reagan once did.
“Reagan never did this,” an indignant Rush Limbaugh told his listeners on Wednesday.
“If Reagan did this, then why did Obama once say he didn’t have the power to do this?” Limbaugh asked. (President Obama on numerous occasions has said he does not have the power to change immigration law without Congress. “I’m not the emperor of the United States,” he told Telemundo last year.)
“Well, why didn’t he say, ‘Wait a minute, yes, I can. I can be a dictator ’cause Ronald Reagan was, everybody knows.’ Why didn’t he cite Reagan back then?” Limbaugh asked on Wednesday. “Why didn’t he cite Reagan last week, last year? Why let this controversy gin up? If Reagan did it, why not say it at the outset and then shut up everybody?”
Limbaugh described himself as “almost speechless” as he prepared to explain to his audience “just how big the Left is distorting this.”
Far from issuing an executive order, Reagan in 1986 signed legislation passed by Congress — the Simpson-Mazzoli Act.
“Congress debated and passed a law to grant amnesty to three million illegal immigrants, and Reagan signed it. They are saying that’s exactly what Obama’s going to do. They are claiming that Reagan signing legislation, thereby making it legal, is the same thing as an Obama executive order. It’s breathtaking what they’re trying to say here.
“Reagan had a statute behind him,” Limbaugh continued. “The statute was called Simpson-Mazzoli. The very law that Reagan had signed was signed after it was passed by Congress. What Obama is about to do is write a law, or rewrite a statue all by himself.”
[….]
Writing in The Atlantic on Nov. 18, David Frum also said there are “huge differences” between Obama’s executive amnesty and the actions of Reagan did in 1986 and George H.W. Bush in 1990.
He gives the following four reasons:
1. “Reagan and Bush acted in conjunction with Congress and in furtherance of a congressional purpose, while Obama’s executive order would not further a congressional purpose.” In fact, Obama’s order “is intended to overpower and overmaster a recalcitrant Congress,” Frum said.
2. Reagan and Bush legalized far fewer people than Obama apparently plans to do. Obama’s two rounds of amnesty — first the young “Dreamers” and now their parents — could affect as many as 5 million people, Frum wrote, and thus “he would — acting on his own authority and in direct contravention of the wishes of Congress — have granted residency and work rights to more than double the number of people” who received amnesty under the 1986 Simpson-Mazzoli Act.
3. “The Reagan-Bush examples are not positive ones.” Frum says the 1986 amnesty did not work as promised, as illegal immigration actually increased in the years after the amnesty. “Let’s not repeat their mistake,” he wrote.
4. “The invocation of the Reagan and Bush cases exemplifies the bad tendency of political discussion to degenerate into an exchange of scripted talking points. ‘Oh yeah? Well, this guy you liked also did this thing you don’t like!’ Is that really supposed to convince anybody?” Frum asks. “What we have here is not a validation of the correctness of President Obama’s action. It’s…an effort to curtail argument rather than enlighten it.”
Dispelling The “CIA Trained-Funded Bin Laden/Taliban” Myth/Mantra
Politicians and leaders from both sides of the aisle make mention of this myth that we funded/created Al Qaeda via weapons, training, and money to the likes of Osama Bin Laden. The Daily Caller in 2013 notes:
…in just a one-month span, Sen. Paul has — not once, but twice — advanced a conspiracy theory that says that during the Reagan era, the U.S. funded Osama bin Laden.
During John Kerry’s secretary of state confirmation hearing, Paul said ”We funded bin Laden” — a statement that prompted Foreign Policy magazine’s managing editor, Blake Hounshell, to fire off a tweet saying: “Rand Paul tells a complete falsehood: ‘We funded Bin Laden.’ This man is on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.”
But that didn’t discourage Paul. During a much anticipated foreign policy speech at the Heritage Foundation today, Paul doubled down, saying: “In the 1980’s the war caucus in Congress armed bin Laden and the mujaheddin in their fight with the Soviet Union.”
The only problem is that this is, at best, highly speculative — and, at worst, the perpetuation of an outright myth.
This also puts Paul in the same camp as Michael Moore, who said: ““WE created the monster known as Osama bin Laden! Where did he go to terrorist school? At the CIA!”….
And this is the crux of the matter.
Truthers took Michael Moore’s non-evidential presentations and statements and ran with themAnother example that shows this myth isn’t necessarily one owned by strictly by politicians, as, this conversation on a friends FaceBook shows:
Antony: failed foreign policy means today’s buddies are tomorrows boogiemen.
Hunlsy: I just love the fact they’re fighting us with the weapons and training that we gave them.
Antony: Oh where oh where did Iran get those P3s and F-14 Tomcats?
Antony: it was the US – we used to be buddies with Iranians too. We played both sides of the Iran/Iraq war, which predicated Gulf I.
Hunsly: Likely from the Russians. Regardless, we’re fighting a group, not a country. This group makes all of its IEDs & buys all of their weapons with the money that we gave them.
Here is my short intercept of the above conversation. More info will follow it:
Weapons
This is somewhat of a myth — that we sold the majority of weapons to the Taliban, to Iraq, and the like. For instance, in the following graph you can see that (in the instance of Iraq, which I was told over-and-over-again was weaponized by the U.S.) you have to combine the U.K. and the U.S. to equal 1%.
Moral Position
Much like us supporting Stalin in defeating Hitler, we were aligned with people whom we didn’t see eye-to-eye with in order to beat the USSR during the Cold War (WWIII)… a war that was fought from 1947–1991.
History
And thirdly, the Taliban didn’t exist when Reagan said this:
Reagan didn’t say that about the Taliban because the Taliban didn’t exist yet. He said that of the Mujahedin, the same men who would later go on to fight the Taliban under the name “Northern Alliance”
The Afghan Northern Alliance, officially known as the United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan (Persian: جبهه متحد اسلامی ملی برای نجات افغانستان Jabha-yi Muttahid-i Islāmi-yi Millī barā-yi Nijāt-i Afghānistān), was a military front that came to formation in late 1996 after the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (Taliban) took over Kabul. The United Front was assembled by key leaders of the Islamic State of Afghanistan, particularly president in exile Burhanuddin Rabbani and former Defense Minister Ahmad Shah Massoud. Initially it included mostly Tajiks but by 2000, leaders of other ethnic groups had joined the Northern Alliance. This included Abdul Rashid Dostum, Mohammad Mohaqiq, Abdul Qadir, Sayed Hussein Anwari and others.
The Northern Alliance fought a defensive war against the Taliban government. They received support from Iran, Russia, India, Tajikistan and others, while the Taliban were backed by al-Qaeda. The Northern Alliance was mostly made up of ethnic Tajiks, but later included Uzbeks, Hazaras, and Pashtuns. The Taliban government was dominated by Pashtuns with other groups being the minority. After the US-led invasion and establishment of the Karzai administration in late 2001, the Northern Alliance broke apart and different political parties were formed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Alliance
The mujaheddin fighters who had previously defeated the communist government and formed the Islamic State of Afghanistan (ISA) came under attack and in 1996 lost the capital to the Taliban. At this juncture the Mujahedin resorted to the creation of UIF because Rashid Dostum and other warlords who belonged to various tribes but to no specific political party did not want to recognize the ISA as a legal entity, so the defeated government devised a military strategy to utilize these forces while not offending their political sensibilities.
In October 1996 in Khinjan, Ahmed Shah Massoud and Dostum came to an agreement to form the anti-Taliban coalition that outside Afghanistan became known as the Northern Alliance.
CNN was doing a special on Afghanistan and Peter Bergen asked for questions from viewers that he would answer. One of the questions is as follows: “If it’s true that bin Laden once worked for the CIA, what makes you so sure that he isn’t still?”~ Anne Busigin, Toronto, Canada
Peter Bergen responds:
This is one of those things where you cannot put it out of its misery.
The story about bin Laden and the CIA — that the CIA funded bin Laden or trained bin Laden — is simply a folk myth. There’s no evidence of this. In fact, there are very few things that bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the U.S. government agree on. They all agree that they didn’t have a relationship in the 1980s. And they wouldn’t have needed to. Bin Laden had his own money, he was anti-American and he was operating secretly and independently.
The real story here is the CIA didn’t really have a clue about who this guy was until 1996 when they set up a unit to really start tracking him.
One person in a forum that was similarly challenged pointed out that this surely wasn’t the Taliban because they hated women in any position of authority — look at the pic at the top again.
As you read on, keep in mind Mr. Bergen was not a fan of conservatives, or Republicans. With that in mind, enjoy the rest, it is posted here so it will never disappear on me:
And here is another great post responding to the non-evidential/conspiratorial [leftists] on the subject:
How Is Obama’s Economic Recession the Worst? Larry Elder Explains
Larry Elder weighs in with an older article from 2011: Economy: Reagan Gets No Credit, Obama Gets No Blame
(Below) The C.A.T.O. Institute has been proven correct in their warning!
What Real vs Faux Leadership Looks Like (UPDATED)
If you were President, would you not inform your State Department — at least! — to take this a bit more seriously??? What does a real President do during such an event? Lets see (Via HotAir):
What did our great and illustrious Obama do? Obama gives crash 40 seconds before telling jokes…
Even the State Department was soo feckless that even Shep Smith got frustrated:
HotAir noted the last Tweet from the State Dept. to end this eventful day:
For years, tweets from @BarackObama have popped up in my Twitter feed so often so very detached from the actual events of the day as to feel like some kind of non sequitur performance art. This outdoes all of them.
This tweet is from the official State Department account, from Jen Psaki, at 9:26 p.m.*, hours after two huge international stories have broken. Now, the administration perhaps can’t be expected to react to the actual events at issue seriously. Too much to ask. But what they do sometimes react to seriously is a p.r. issue, and they’ve had many hours to realize everyone thinks they’re muffing this. Would it be so much to ask to keep it relatively sober tonight?
And yet. And yet.
The Blaze has some great follow up Tweets on the above:
By the time of publication on Friday morning, Psaki sent out one more tweet, but it was about John Kerry’s trip to Afghanistan last weekend.
(H/T: Weasel Zippers)
McCain weighs in:
The “HAMMER” weighs in as well:
Making Reagan Look Anti-Semitic ~ Holocaust Hoax
I just came across this and wanted to know more about it and found Inconvenient History’s blog post on it. Thank you.
Here is the whole video:
Global Cooling Reaches Hell~ Maher Defends Rumsfeld (Video)
From The Daily Caller:
Donald Rumsfeld seems to have given access to the person who loathes him the most in the world to produce a documentary of his life.
Errol Morris appeared on “Real Time with Bill Maher” Friday night to talk with Maher about his forthcoming documentary on Rumsfeld, “The Unknown Known.” Maher watched the documentary and came away with some appreciation for Rumsfeld, even if the liberal political comedian clearly does not agree with the former Defense secretary for Presidents Gerald Ford and George W. Bush on most issues.
Scarborough Reaches Into History To Show `Legacy Media` Their Past Biases Driving Their Current
Sen. Ted Cruz`s Father, Rafael Cruz, Gives Awesome Speech
Via The Blaze
The Umbrella Czar
Real men, even when they fail, carry their own umbrellas… and do not force Marines to break their code of dress (http://tinyurl.com/bdtk66a). But, if you needed someone to stand in for your manhood, a Marine is a good choice. In fact, I know gay men who are more manly than Obama! @GayPatriot