It's The Bow-Tie, I Tells Ya, The Bow Tie
It would appear that the tie is again cutting off the flow of oxygen to George Fwill's brain as he tries to explain the virtues of "conservatism":
Today conservatives tend to favor freedom, and consequently are inclined to be somewhat sanguine about inequalities of outcomes. Liberals are more concerned with equality, understood, they insist, primarily as equality of opportunity, not of outcome.
However, what you do in the privacy of your own home must be monitored and regulated. And you must be willing to give up a little freedom for a little security. And you must accept that the government can snatch you off the street and send you to a "Black Site." Oh, and you shouldn't have the freedom to seek legal redress.
Today's "conservatives" favor freedom for big money and little else.
Hence liberals' hostility to school choice programs that challenge public education's semimonopoly. Hence hostility to private accounts funded by a portion of each individual's Social Security taxes. Hence their fear of health savings accounts (individuals who buy high-deductible health insurance become eligible for tax-preferred savings accounts from which they pay their routine medical expenses -- just as car owners do not buy insurance to cover oil changes). Hence liberals' advocacy of government responsibility for -- and, inevitably, rationing of -- health care, which is 16 percent of the economy and rising.
Apparently Fwill has some gold-plated health coverage because he hasn't yet learned that there's already health-care rationing. And that's only if you can afford to have health coverage at all.
Here is the core of a conservative appeal, without dwelling on "social issues" that should be, as much as possible, left to "moral federalism" -- debates within the states. On foreign policy, conservatism begins, and very nearly ends, by eschewing abroad the fatal conceit that has been liberalism's undoing domestically -- hubris about controlling what cannot, and should not, be controlled.
I do believe we're seeing the emergence of a new meme - that George W. Bush is a liberal. Fwill, in a moment of sanity, opposes the war so the reference above is likely to refer to Iraq. And he ascribes it to "liberalism." The rightists consider Bush's immigration plan to be "liberal." And Useful Idiot Richard Cohen yesterday tried to make the case that George is a liberal.
Perhaps I'm being too hard on Fwill. After all, I've argued that actual conservatives need to save the Republican Party from the radicals that now dominate it. But calling BushCo™ "liberal" is pure idiocy. As much as he tries to dishonestly make the case, liberalism isn't authoritarian. And that's what BushCheney is.
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