Rx for Conservative sickness

The nicey nice Peggy Noonan writes a good piece in the Journal, in her usual depthless style of gentle "bad doggy" criticism; as if spanking us on our butts with a rolled up newspaper will solve everything. It won't, and wishing that it will won't help us.

We need to lance open the diseased body of the supposed Conservative philosophy and reveal the feeble nature of "our" philosophy for all of us to view. We must be brave enough to look at the cancer within and not just the fixable minor blood clots as the co-dependent Noonan has done. We have to scrutinize each part of the corpse and talk about what really afflicts us, and then face the tough truth of the matter. After that we might be able to act.

I think we have elected people to every level of government who have the stench of mediocrity about them. I have preached about Bush's inexcusably ordinary agency appointments till I'm blue in the word processor, but it is these indifferent boiler plate conservatives, those with no conviction or passion at all, who have caused almost all the problems this Administration has had since the beginning. Name a single outstanding person in a single agency, please. (OK OK, Mike Brown and Norman Mineta) I'd only add that to be for less government does not mean we want incompetent government.

I think we are toast, and old toast is useless. The Democrats are going to lead us to wherever we are headed, and we did it to ourselves. When the march is over, a conservative will be the guy who wants fewer government employees in the Department of Lawn Preservation so they can be transferred to more important agencies like the Bully Prevention Department or the Department of Hurt Feelings.

I think that is where Bush has led us, and we didn't have the elected officials with the guts to so much as whisper in protest----except in Spanish.

The real problem with Conservatives is that we oppose professional governance so much that we opt out of the system after each election, thus leaving the governance to corrupt politicians; criminal business enterprises; dopey pressure groups; the Christian Right; neo con whatevers; Right to Life people (which we all think is just opposition to abortion, but in actuality is a tax and tax and tax philosophy in order to prolong life through whatever expensive disease the elderly are dying from); Moral Majority (a conglomeration of Christian churches EXCEPT FOR MORMONS); and free enterprise folks, many of whom are simply hanging out.

Liberals believe in government with a passion, the bigger the better, and they never stop building toward that goal, one that can only have as a final destination the complete governmental state with nobody but government able to do anything. In communist orthodoxy this process is known as the "thesis, antithesis, synthesis," a never ending dialectic chain that arrives at what seems to be a final synthesis (but not under this theory of continual revolution), which breaks apart thus starting the process all over again. And all we Conservatives do to stop it and put a better system in place is write and bitch. Remember, all Liberals see themselves as leaders of government and thus the first beneficiaries of the socialist state. That's why they love it.

We need ideas. Ideas that can quickly percolate down to the common person working for a wage and be immediately and discernibly beneficial. The bromides like "a rising tide lifts all boats"---er, except for those on the beach with holes in their hulls---"Capitalism works," is what we tell the employees and stock holders of Enron, the Micropolis Corp, and the ton of "investors" in the ruinous Long Term Capital Management company. NAFTA ain't working for the people who have lost their jobs to cheap Mexican or Vietnamese child labor; something ain't working when the lower income people are forced out of their cars by high gas prices, mandatory insurance, and too high registration fees----all of which escape the purview of the rich and famous---or rich and not so famous. The ruinously high rents being paid for apartments in San Francisco or New York means the system is only working for some people.

Each and every one of these conditions need to be addressed and SOLVED by a Conservative philosophy, because the big government guys all offer what seems to be an obvious solution: a benign fascist state.

"Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose," is what more and more people actually believe.