Normally I avoid sites like Townhall.com like the plague; the last time I got tricked into reading a Townhall.com article I lost the ability to have sex with my husband for, like, a week straight.
But today, I find myself curious. It’s a clinical sort of curiosity, like the kind I get that inspires me to jump on Wikipedia and look up the cultivation history of the pineapple or the mating habits of bonobos. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular–I just wondered, What is on the conservative mind these days..? So I nipped on over to the Townhall to find out.
Handily, the front page of the site provides a long, linked section on the lower left-hand side entitled “Today’s Conservative Opinions!” Wow, how serendipitous is that! I thought, and started methodically clicking through each link. So for those of you who are just as curious as I am, here it is: Today’s Conservative Opinions!
Thomas Sowell, “Empathy” Versus Law:
Would you want to go into court to appear before a judge with “empathy” for groups A, B and C, if you were a member of groups X, Y or Z?
Appoint enough Supreme Court justices with “empathy” for particular groups and you would have, for all practical purposes, repealed the 14th Amendment, which guarantees “equal protection of the laws” for all Americans.
Seriously, white men, you don’t want a judge who isn’t all about white men, do you? I mean, does that have to even be said? Aren’t the majority of Americans white men, and isn’t that the real, genuine experience to have, thing to be and ideal to aspire to? If you’re not either a white man or can show you’ve made a career of putting white men first, then you’re not going to practice equality, because equality is defined as what’s good for white men. God, I wish I was a white man!
John Hawkins, Twenty Small Ways To Get Our Country Back on Track:
1) Read the Constitution and read the Bible: If you understand the Constitution and the Bible, you’ll understand the foundations of this country and will be better able to tell when the country or the church is going astray.
2) Support and/or join organizations that are making a positive difference: There are a lot of great groups out there fighting the good fight, including but not limited to…The National Rifle Association. Your local church could use your support as well.
And for the 25% of you Americans who aren’t Christian, read the goddamn Bible anyway and this time take it to heart, you infidels–in the great words of George H.W. Bush, I don’t think that non-Christians should really even count as citizens. Or the NRA will come for you. Or it would if more people would support and/or join it. So do that too. God bless America!
Pat Buchanan, Glimmers of Hope for the GOP:
Put starkly, the voting groups growing in numbers — Hispanics, Asians, African-Americans, folks with college degrees, the young — are all trending Democratic, while the voters most loyal to the GOP — white folks and religious conservatives — are declining as a share of the U.S. electorate. And demography is destiny.
McCain’s diffidence on life, affirmative action and gay rights, his embrace of amnesty and NAFTA, all help explain the enthusiasm gap.
White folks = old people of pure European descent without college degrees. I like that definition. Your whiteness is also questionable if you’re pro-choice, you lack homophobia or you don’t spend a significant amount of time stressing over the Brown Hordes just waiting to pour across our borders and take over America.
David Horowitz, The Threat at Home:
From communism to Islamo-fascism, the left in America – as elsewhere – has had a lifelong love affair with tyranny and terror, which is the title of an important book that my Frontpage editor Jamie Glazov has just published. It’s called: United in Hate, the Left’s Love Affair with Tyranny and Terror. That is who they are. Progressives are adept at speaking the language of peace and love and justice; but these words are just a smokescreen for their real agendas which are search and destroy. Anybody who has ever encountered a progressive up close in any kind of political disagreement knows that this is a hate movement. They hate conservatives; they hate Republicans; they hate white males, and increasingly they hate Christians and Jews.
Really, all progressives are serial killers and mass murderers. And they all hate white men. Even when 20 million of them are white men. They’re all just waiting to institute nationwide torture programs against white men, and yes that includes themselves, those sick sons of a–! And all their brouhaha about how sucky torture is..? Total smokescreen. They can’t wait to waterboard all the white men!! BUY THE BOOK!
Burt Prelutsky, A Matter of Opinion:
When, by the way, do we stop apologizing for slavery? For one thing, most of our ancestors didn’t even arrive in this country until 40 or 50 years after 600,000 Americans died in a war that put an end to it. For another, most of the African slaves didn’t come to the United States; many more were delivered to the Caribbean and South America, courtesy of France, Germany, Spain, England, Sweden, Holland and Portugal. And lest we forget, it was the Arabs and their fellow Africans who rounded them up for the slave traders in the first place. Which makes it sadly ironic that so many American blacks, including Muhammad Ali and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, assumed Arabic names. Finally, one of the only places, aside from Communist nations, the Middle East and Thailand, where slavery still endures is in Africa!
I guess we stop apologizing for slavery when we decide it was really okay. He does provide lots of reasons that we could decide that, right now–! Like, other countries had more slaves than we did so there, and the countries that we got our slaves from had slaves themselves which definitely makes it all right, right? and there are other countries that STILL have slaves and you notice, they’re like the B-R-O-W-N countries so really, how can it have been really that bad, us taking slaves from there?
Ken Connor, California Dreaming: Reasoned Debate on Gay Marriage:
Is it in society’s interest to jettison the historic heterosexual model for marriage and embrace a new paradigm that includes homosexual unions (and, inevitably, other kinds of unions that are fashioned by other kinds of sexual impulses)? What are the implications for children of such unions? Are moms and dads merely superfluous, or do men and women both provide important role models for children? Will children suffer from gender confusion without heterosexual role models? Will gender have meaning in the future? Is gender identification important in preparing children to take their proper place in society? How will society be reproduced? Will we do it the old fashioned way or will we resort to brave new world technology? How will we regulate such technology? Will increased demand for such technology lead to designer children? Will fathers play a role in the lives of their children or will men be reduced to the status of mere inseminators? Will mothers become an anachronism?
If you let men marry men, pretty soon you’ll be seeing a nationwide push for even more men to get to marry, say, their dogs, because there is a huge number of men out there who have been suppressing their sexual impulses towards Fido for decades. (Bet you didn’t know that.) Or women will take to the streets and demand to be allowed to marry their vibrators because I CAN tell you from first- and second-hand knowledge that a really large number of women do actually have strong sexual impulses involving vibrators. We can’t let people decide who or what they want to marry based on their sexual impulses! And the children of those women who marry their vibrators, how confused are they gonna be then, huh? How will the child of a woman married to her vibrator know what his or her proper place in society is?! People will start wanting to genetically engineer their children if we allow gay marriage because…er, okay, I can’t figure out the connection there, but moving ON! And Mothers will cease to exist–!
er…I’m not sure how that one works either. Okay, I give up. Somebody else is going to have to unravel this particular tangled skein.
Doug Giles, The Obama Doctrine: The Castrated States of America
The President is dead set on taking off our rowdy body armor and replacing it with a petite glittered bustier.
You just know Osama and his boys are in some Pakistani cave smoking a hookah piled high with blonde Lebanese hash as they praise Allah and laugh their butts off at how stupid and soft we’ve become in just a few months while they plot their next “manmade disaster,” as Janet Napolitano would call it.
Huh?
(backs slowly away from author)
…before I run screaming away from you, I do feel I have to point out that you’re demonstrating a lot more personal familiarity with recreational drugs than I’ve ever had right there in that one sentence…
Empathy is a finite quantity, after all. Someone demonstrating empathy towards people unlike themselves is absolutely not an indication that they work towards understanding others’ positions, needs, and desires—it’s indicative of a person who has less empathy left for you! omg!
Truly, this is the height of “Reasoned Debate on Gay Marriage.”
This has always struck me as a particularly pernicious right-wing meme. Like, really? You can think of absolutely no way in which my partner is, um, distinguishable from a dog (or toaster)? No part of how she (and I, for that matter) are part of human society that is even slightly different from how dogs, cats, vibrators, and toasters are a part of human society? Alright then.
First hand. And… second hand. </beavis and / or butthead>
…*raises hand* What is ‘blonde Lebanese hash’?
Marriage is so sacred that I know several republicans who’ve done it several times!!
And this planet is definitely at risk of being underpopulated.
Yeah, right.
I’ve read the Bible an find parts of it to be excellent literature. Other parts not so much. But I find as a whole that it is a document which points to loving generosity on our part….and a God who tells us that it is his/her place to judge, not ours.
My local church gets a lot of my support in time and financial contributions. We have several fabulous lesbian couples and a few gay men. And a few republicans. Not sure if we have any NRA members, although I know we have a few gun owners (mostly deer & turkey hunters whose family consume the fruits of their recreation).
As always, thanks for sharing your invective! : )
Thene: Hash is the resin glands from pot that make the psychoactive chemicals. You know the sticky crystals on weed? (Maybe you don’t, but if you are smoking good stuff that hasn’t been handled too much it ought to appear as if it’s frosted almost.) They get the glands off somehow and smash into blocks and you smoke little bit of it and get really super high. I think the fact that it is blonde means it’s high quality (I think the lesser quality stuff is dark brown) and hash from the Middle East is the best in the world.
That said, I just can’t imagine Osama bin Laden sitting around stoned and plotting an attack at all. You know that stoners don’t make very good terrorists.
He didn’t write that though. You can think that past crimes are not okay, and even recognise their current (also not okay) effects, without going all “sins of the fathers”.
This has bothered me for a while, although the example I usually think of is Germans born long after 1945, rather than whether white people are forced to apologise for slavery. If they are, I hadn’t noticed.
I agree with Andrew F. Refusing to apologize for something you didn’t do doesn’t mean you condone it.
*puts on flame resistant suit*
I’ve actually heard people suggest that all society’s problems are the result of white people and that racism was invented by white people, as if a whites never experienced anything like slavery and a white-free society would be a utopia. Most of this stuff is coming from progressives. If we are really progressive people, we have to get rid of these attitudes. The existence of a bunch of racist white guys does not equal white=racist, and doesn’t mean members of other ethnicity aren’t racist as well. When people react to these racists by equating whiteness with racism, people are hurting their credibility.
Many people have a hard time admitting that they said something racist or have a negative attitude toward another ethnicity. the best thing you can do is acknowledge and evaluate those wrongs and apologize when they happen. Apologizing for something you didn’t do is insane.
*slinks off*
I’ve never, ever, heard anyone say that “white people invented racism” unless it was a conservative doing a strawperson of what liberals believe.
At the top of my head I can think of three, but I know there is more. I heard a Native Canadian say that white people are naturally inclined to subdue other cultures and exploit them for wealth. I heard (or watched) a rant from a young black woman on Youtube who said “white people invented racism” (among many other things like homosexuality, satanism, nukes, knives, guns and AIDS) The other I read on a black supremicist blog that was along the same lines.
I wouldn’t be surprised of republicans used it as a strawman argument, however my point is that these kinds of crazy attitudes actually exist, and aren’t helpful. I don’t imagine it’s too widespread as republican’s might have you believe, but they are there.
“Is it in society’s interest to jettison the historic heterosexual model for marriage and embrace a new paradigm that includes homosexual unions (and, inevitably, other kinds of unions that are fashioned by other kinds of sexual impulses)?”
That is certainly a revealing way of putting the question, because in reality recognizing “homosexual unions” (the AFL-CIO of homosexuality!) will not “jettison” heterosexual marriage. Men will still be able to marry women, women will still be able to marry men. It tells us something about people like Ken Connor that they are unable to grasp this.
From another point of view, of course, the historical heterosexual model for marriage was jettisoned long before gay people began clamoring to get married. Women in the US and elsewhere whittled away at the model which made them basically the property of their husbands: they were allowed to own property, to testify in court, to serve on juries, to work for pay and to keep the money they earned doing so. One could say with as much justice that the historical model of medicine was masculine, because doctors were all male; and that this historical model was jettisoned when women managed to become doctors anyway. That didn’t mean that men stopped becoming doctors, or lawyers, or any number of other jobs and professions that had excluded women, though they did scream loud and long about having to give up their former exclusivity; which they also did as black men, and black women, gained entry to previously white male strongholds. One could also mention the vote, higher education, and any number of other spheres that were historically one thing but changed.
As I’ve argued before in various places, it’s really too late to invoke the slippery slope: heterosexuals have already allowed so many changes that we now have no choice, on Connor’s logic, but to allow even human-animal marriage. (C’mon, you all know that Gene Autry and Roy Rogers loved their horses more than any other human being.) Especially, conservatives have completely thrown out their opposition to divorce and remarriage, embracing such whoremongers as Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and Rush Limbaugh as their leaders and role models.
So what Connor is saying is that heterosexual marriage is defined by its excluding same-sex coupling. Myself, I don’t believe that same-sex marriages are going to be more than a statistical blip; it’s revealing that Connor seems not to think so, or chooses to talk as though he does. Most marriages will still be heterosexual; most parents will still be heterosexual. It’s also worth remembering that heterosexuals, including or especially women, voted with their feet against marriage through most of the 20th century. Heterosexuals can cohabit, copulate, reproduce, and rear offspring without benefit of clergy, and most homosexuals will surely do the same.
I’ll have to read the rest of Connor’s article; it sounds enlightening, though not in the way he intended it to be.
“Empathy is a finite quantity, after all. Someone demonstrating empathy towards people unlike themselves is absolutely not an indication that they work towards understanding others’ positions, needs, and desires—it’s indicative of a person who has less empathy left for you! omg!”
That’s a good point, and I would go further and say that a non-empathetic person would be ESPECIALLY biased toward those who seem most like them.
Andrew and Jenn–the problem with this guy’s rant is that I really doubt anybody, and he does not even try to claim this either, has ever asked him personally to apologize for slavery. His major malfunction appears to be occurring because our nation, as a political entity, which I’m 90% is the “we” he is referencing in his article, apologizes for allowing slavery in the past semi-periodically. That he finds this sufficiently upsetting to write an entire article about it is a little telling, for one, eh? A nation can and should maintain an official apologetic stance towards any atrocities committed during its existence–only a moron thinks that the official representative, apologizing on behalf of the political entity as a whole, is some kind of either massive personal imposition or admission of the legitimacy or lack thereof of feelings of personal guilt–it’s not a personal matter at all. The desire to confuse the situation to the point where one tries to claim it is one and then go off on it from there–unintelligent, pointless and unimpressive. Sorry, folks.
That’s a good point. I see what you mean.
Jenn:
Well, people say wacky stuff that is nevertheless at least tenuously grounded in reality all the time. I’m more inclined to say that, in general, people of all cultural and racial backgrounds have an inclination (it’s certainly a combination of natural tendency and cultural conditioning) to subdue other cultures and exploit them for wealth, it’s just that European white folks are better at it than most others. It’s a difference of degree, not kind. And that’s not a value judgment of any kind. Not a good one, anyway. Someone had to be the first to invent the cultural and technological means required to attempt global domination, it just happened to be European whites.
As for the “pretty soon, people will start marrying their dogs” crap, I have a theory that most if not all conservatives secretly hate their spouses (if they have one), and this meme is just a clumsy attempt to project that hatred onto someone other than themselves.
Snort. I can still tell an “I know you are, but what am I” argument, even if they try to fancy it up with words they don’t actually understand.
Also, by this logic, Herbert Hoover and George W. Bush were the most progressive presidents in US history.
Oh, there’s some obscure professor at some school somewhere who is of the opinion that only white people can be racist. I only know this because our resident redneck read about it and uses him as a goalpost in any discussion about race. “That’s fucking stupid” doesn’t seem to put it to bed, mostly because reality is defined by the craziest person in the room.
Think of the craziest or least sensical position on race you can think of, and someone out there holds that opinion very dearly. It’s unfortunate, but true.