Month: December 2009

Is Huckabee Cooked?

Weigel rounds up conservative reaction to Huckabee granting suspected cop killer Maurice Clemmons clemency. TNC's read:

It's worth reviewing what actually happened in the Maurice Clemmons case. Huckabee, apparently, reduced the sentence of a guy who was given 100 years in prison, for crimes he committed between the age of 16 and 18–none of which were murder or rape. I just find it impossible to criticize him for that decision. What I was trying to get at yesterday–albeit rather meekly–was that people who have an issue with Huckabee would do better to look at the laundry list of fuck-ups and loopholes which allowed Clemmons to remain free.

Clemmons was shot dead this morning.

Clemmons And “The Clinton Regime”

Joe Carter, who worked on Huckabee's campaign as Director of Rapid Response, weighs in on Huckabee's latest clemency scandal:

After reviewing hundreds of cases and interviewing numerous people involved in the process, I concluded to my own satisfaction that the governor’s actions and judgment were generally defensible. Yet there remained about a half-dozen situations in which even after reviewing all of the information I was unpersuaded that justice had been served. Although I was sympathetic with some of the justifications offered for making the decisions, I found them inadequate for a number of reasons.

For example, in a number of the cases—and almost always in the most controversial requests for commutation—there was sense that the petitioners were attempting to redress injustices committed by the “Clinton machine.”The disdain for Bill and Hillary Clinton and their associates that peaked among conservatives in the early 1990s remains palpable among Republicans in Arkansas. Many of the petitioners and supporters of the commutations and pardons were truly convinced that they were simply rectifying injustices committed by the former Democratic governor and his cronies. (This was especially true in the infamous Wayne DuMond case where the victim was a second cousin of Bill Clinton.)

Health Care Premiums Go Up, And Down

Chris Good, Brian Beutler, and Karen Tumulty summarize the CBO report on health care reform and insurance premium prices.  Megan's take (follow up here):

[M]any people will not face the full costs of their treatment–slightly more than half of the people in the individual market are expected to receive subsidies.  But that just means that someone else will have to give up those thousands of dollars.  It looks to me like health care spending as a percentage of GDP is going to be higher, not lower, when all the changes are phased in.

Transcribing Cheney

Balk scratches his head after reading Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen:

Now, I’m no professional journalist or anything. I didn’t go to J-school, I don’t spell “lead” the right way, and I hate talking to people on the phone, but even with all those qualifications I’ve got to think this would be the time where you, I dunno, asked a follow-up? “Cheney was asked if he thinks the Bush administration bears any responsibility for the disintegration of Afghanistan because of the attention and resources that were diverted to Iraq. ‘I basically don’t,’ he replied without elaborating.“

Increasingly, these journos see themselves as conduits for politicians, not as independent actors determined to get at the truth and hold the powerful accountable. There are no follow-ups any more; and when you see how Palin was insulated from real questioning in the campaign and book tour, you realize how corrupted the MSM has become.

Mike Allen has done this before – giving Cheney or Rove a platform as well as anonymity – with no pushback or skepticism. What matters is the “get” and the pageviews, not the substance. These people are not checks on power; they are increasingly its willing accomplices.

Leaving the Right

It's an odd formulation in some ways as "the right" is not really a single entity. But in so far as it means the dominant mode of discourse among the institutions and blogs and magazines and newspapers and journals that support the GOP, Charles Johnson is EdmundBurke1771 default party position, other things being equal. But there has to come a point at which a movement or party so abandons core principles or degenerates into such a rhetorical septic system that you have to take a stand. It seems to me that now is a critical time for more people whose principles lie broadly on the center-right to do so – against the conservative degeneracy in front of us. Those who have taken such a stand – to one degree or other – demand respect. And this blog, while maintaining its resistance to cliquishness, has been glad to link to writers as varied as Bruce Bartlett or David Frum or David Brooks or Steve Chapman or Kathleen Parker or Conor Friedersdorf or Jim Manzi or Jeffrey Hart or Daniel Larison who have broken ranks in some way or other.

I can't claim the same courage as these folks because I've always been fickle in partisan terms. To have supported Reagan and Bush and Clinton and Dole and Bush and Kerry and Obama suggests I never had a party to quit. I think that may be because I wasn't born here. I have no deep loyalty to either American party in my bones or family or background, and admire presidents from both parties. My partisanship remains solely British – I'm a loyal Tory.  But my attachment to the Anglo-American conservative political tradition, as I understand it, is real and deep and the result of sincere reflection on the world as I see it. And I want that tradition to survive because I believe it is a vital complement to liberalism in sustaining the genius and wonder of the modern West.

For these reasons, I found it intolerable after 2003 to support the movement that goes by the name "conservative" in America. I still do, even though I am much more of a limited government type than almost any Democrat and cannot bring myself to call myself a liberal (because I'm not). My reasons were not dissimilar to Charles Johnson, who, like me, was horrified by 9/11, loathes Jihadism, and wants to defeat it as effectively as possible. And his little manifesto prompts me to write my own (the full version is in "The Conservative Soul"). Here goes:

I cannot support a movement that claims to believe in limited government but backed an unlimited domestic and foreign policy presidency that assumed illegal, extra-constitutional dictatorial powers until forced by the system to return to the rule of law.

I cannot support a movement that exploded spending and borrowing and blames its successor for the debt.

Oakeshott I cannot support a movement that so abandoned government's minimal and vital role to police markets and address natural disasters that it gave us Katrina and the financial meltdown of 2008.

I cannot support a movement that holds torture as a core value.

I cannot support a movement that holds that purely religious doctrine should govern civil political decisions and that uses the sacredness of religious faith for the pursuit of worldly power.

I cannot support a movement that is deeply homophobic, cynically deploys fear of homosexuals to win votes, and gives off such a racist vibe that its share of the minority vote remains pitiful.

I cannot support a movement which has no real respect for the institutions of government and is prepared to use any tactic and any means to fight political warfare rather than conduct a political conversation.

I cannot support a movement that sees permanent war as compatible with liberal democratic norms and limited government.

I cannot support a movement that criminalizes private behavior in the war on drugs.

I cannot support a movement that would back a vice-presidential candidate manifestly unqualified and duplicitous because of identity politics and electoral cynicism.

I cannot support a movement that regards gay people as threats to their own families.

I cannot support a movement that does not accept evolution as a fact.

I cannot support a movement that sees climate change as a hoax and offers domestic oil exploration as the core plank of an energy policy.

I cannot support a movement that refuses ever to raise taxes, while proposing no meaningful reductions in government spending.

I cannot support a movement that refuses to distance itself from a demagogue like Rush Limbaugh or a nutjob like Glenn Beck.

I cannot support a movement that believes that the United States should be the sole global power, should sustain a permanent war machine to police the entire planet, and sees violence as the core tool for international relations.

Does this make me a "radical leftist" as Michelle Malkin would say? Emphatically not. But it sure disqualifies me from the current American right.

To paraphrase Reagan, I didn't leave the conservative movement. It left me.

And increasingly, I'm not alone.