The Conservative Brotherhood

On the Booker Rising site there was a debate surrounding the impending end of the Bush tax cuts. Being a site catering to those of conservative leanings, as expected many touted the party line that the tax cuts should be reinstated when they expire at the end of this year. The religious fervor with which this position was defended mystified me. I think society is best served by the proper level and distribution of taxation, commensurate with the obligations and ideals of the social compact. Since in our form of representative government the people are essentially taxing themselves, the issue becomes what ideals and obligations the people wish to tax themselves to address. Whatever tax rate the government is instructed to enact, the supposed goal is “to promote the general welfare”. If this is the case then the argument becomes, is the general welfare to be a subordinate consideration to the tax rate, or conversely, is the tax rate to serve the general welfare. If it is at all proper to ask this question it means that taxation is more than just a mathematical formulation in an economic abstraction or theory; it has social and moral implications as well. What those implications are, again, must be searched for and found in the meaning of “the general welfare” as inferred by the social compact.

More and more often the subject is race. It wasn’t too long ago I was informed by those more correctly psychologically situated that the stench of “race” was the smell of my upper lip. Now, every day or week we are confronted by increasingly overt references to the separate Americanism of different ethnic groups. We run the gamut from the neo-Nazi rants of Rush Limbaugh to the “authentic American” glossolalia routine of play -for- pay Sarah Palin. Yes, there are intermittent dim allusions to conservative philosophy, and many black conservatives hold dearly to that tenuous thread in lieu of challenging their cherished preconceptions. But how many are so determined to be intellectually race-less they refuse to access conventional reason?

So it was just me- right? It was another paranoid delusion to espy the specter of racism in Rush Limbaugh’s elocutions. Oh no, black people have just been conditioned to misinterpret conservatism for racism – right! Rush’s opinion about the “black” quarterback, Donovan McNabb, was just evidence of his fearlessness in tackling the taboo subject of race in the NFL – remember. That McNabb has statistically out-performed all of the Eagles previous white quarterbacks, and will be well-regarded when compared to all quarterbacks that have played in the NFL, was secondary in Limbaugh’s expert analysis outlining the preference that black NFL and college quarterbacks famously and unfairly receive in Mr. Limbaugh’s universe. Paranoid racists mistook Limbaugh’s perfect and balanced reasoning as racism because they either feared or misunderstood the subtleties of his conservative political thought. That was the party line- remember! And of course we all know conservatism is the anodyne to racism. So, we need not revisit the episode when Michael Steele was reminded that Mr. Limbaugh had a natural entitlement to First Amendment privilege, while he was affirmatively hired as a single-testicular token figurehead of the demographically too-white GOP, with no right to conflict with his betters. His black perspective or personal intelligence wasn’t required, just his mossy face leading stray blacks to the promised land of the GOP.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog called, “U.S. and Israel”. It was written in response to the incident involving the Freedom Flotilla which attempted to bring humanitarian aid to Gaza. In the blog I suggested that the U.S. could have addressed our own geo-political designs and advanced the interests of peace and the two-state solution in the Middle East by having our U.N. Security Council representative join with the other fourteen members of the Council and make the vote of condemnation against the Israeli action unanimous. Subsequent events have articulated my reasoning better than my words.

I had to let the “discovery” of the vast mineral wealth of Afghanistan percolate in my mind for a couple of weeks. My first reaction on seeing the report was, “Oh, now it makes sense”.

My stance on the war is documented in several blogs to this site over the years. I was always uncomfortable that the authors of the PNAC position paper, most of whom subsequently assumed senior leadership posts in the Bush Administration, argued for an invasion of Afghanistan years before 9/11. My intrigue antennae vibrated when the alleged planners of the 9/11 “attack” were ideally situated in that remote boondocks and the American nation was compelled to war in Afghanistan, of all places. And I marveled at the fortuitous confluence of events that brought the people who wanted to invade Afghanistan into power at the very historical instant that a gaggle of non-state ruffians elected to attack the world’s only superpower from a bivouac in that garden spot. I am apparently diseased - perfection makes me paranoid.

If the President wants to improve the political and material condition of our nation he must do the one essential thing. He must instruct our representative sitting on the U.N. Security Council to take a vote against Israel. I realize some may accuse me of anti-Semitism. I expect it. It is the first refuge of scoundrels whose preferred line of attack is to equiponderate criticism of Israel and racism. But I believe my solution would lift a heavy burden of hypocrisy from the shoulders of U.S. diplomats.

As a case in point, the recent incident of the Israeli assault upon the “Freedom Flotilla” in international waters, which was roundly and immediately condemned by the other fourteen members of the Council, and which could certainly be legally construed as “piracy”, required an embarrassing palter from the American in order to cast the lone dissenting vote. Are we to assume all the other nations received radically different or flawed accounts of the event? Nations with long and storied histories, vast experience in worldly affairs, sophisticated communications, and with no special animosity towards Israel, made a prima facie condemnation of the Israeli action based on the norms of international law. But as usual the U.S. pled non possumus, citing insufficient evidence, and effectively handcuffed the Security Council’s ability to take meaningful corrective action against Israel.

On Memorial Day we are always presented with a bill. It is usually entered in our national accounting as, “the price of freedom”. But the C.P.A of conscience cannot find one credit of freedom purchased with the last 70,000 American military lives or two trillion dollars of lucre. There is not one new liberty that has been purchased by the sword, or any unalienable right that has been credibly threatened by any foreign state or potentate to justify the debit of death and destruction supposedly necessary to secure our “freedom”. But by now we pay the $800,000,000,000 per annum in a daze of patriotic rote, with the additional tender of our innocent youth, to make the waste “honorable”.

Why must I always be contrarian? How can I not be when in the cyber company of the silent macsnority asleep at the wheel of the vehicle of reason? The comments of Rand Paul drew much less reaction than their provocative nature would have prophesized. It lends weight to my contention that many of the blogger class focus on defending the labels by which they identify, and allow ludicrous renditions of their creed to by-pass rudimentary inspection for reasonableness or validity. Many Libertarians defend Mr. Paul’s revisionist view on the raison d’être and necessity of Civil Rights legislation, because as a Libertarian he is entitled to free speech and his opinions on the uses and role of government. They convert the argument to a debate over his right to his views and deemphasize the thesis that emerged from his befuddled Libertarian mind.

Thomas Sowell wrote an article yesterday entitled, “Enough Money”, where he took issue with a statement made by the President to the effect that there is a point where people should feel they have “enough money”. Mr. Sowell chose to interpret this as the President proposing an official cap on income. I think reasonable people realize the President was talking about a psychological state of being rather than an economic circumstance. In my opinion Mr. Obama was drawing on a lesson learned from one of Aesop’s fables more so than Marxism 101. Mr. Sowell strained his considerable abilities trying to lay bricks in this particularly foolish conservative façade. He sought by rhetorical stealth, followed by shock and awe, to assault common sense with unrefined antinomies and inapt associations to the French Revolution; attempting to paint the President’s statement as an ultra vires call to class warfare rather than as the colloquialism it was. Mr. Sowell hadn’t always been prone to such Procrustean artifices. I suppose it is just another harbinger of the miasma of our ultra-partisan political environment.

During the campaign and then from the day of election it has been advanced that this administration, and Democrats in general, have a peculiar animosity towards the Second Amendment. I am not aware of any initiatives launched by the current Federal administration to alter or redefine the Constitutional status quo. What I see are local, usually urban, attempts to stem the proliferation of guns in their environments, which lead to philosophical debates on the appropriateness of elements of 18th century thinking and its universal application in 21st century America. There hasn’t been an administration in my lifetime where this issue hasn’t come up for judicial review at least once. It is a reliably controversial issue for partisan firebrands to hang their hats on and invoke fear of the dastardly intentions of the latest elected tyrants. But are our attentions properly focused?