First off, Carl, you are a jerk. All the intellectual babble in the world doesn’t make you smarter than a 5th grader.

The “American Conservative” represents the standard when it comes to defining free enterprise, low-taxes, small government, morality, ethics, growth, production, security, and whatever other positive label you can apply. Liberalism is about taking the easy way out and trying to appease every special interest group or voter known to man. Moderates in any shape or form are like dogs in heat trying to get laid by a Liberal.

The person that really raised the issue about what do we do to get our platform across to the uneducated or adolescents was a very good question. Well, it’s tough. You are going up against 60 year old educators (hippies from my day and age) that still think the Vietnam war was the evil to end all evils. These retards have grown into Media Mongols, and CEOs, and Politicians with clout and money. They love the idea of teaching the young how to follow the leader. Do what I tell you but not what I do. These people are the scourge and slugs of society. It is all about power, money, and control with these jerks.

Being a Conservative is the hard road. It takes energy, work, commitment, strength to be a Conservative. In order to change public thinking or awareness we have to figure out the best ways to educate, illustrate, write, expose, and advertise the benefits of being a Conservative as opposed to being a Liberal. On top of that we need to RECRUIT Conservatives to run for Public Office. There is your answer.

The coming recession and the turmoil the Obama administration is going to put us all through will help. We may be so sick of this guy in just a few short years we could see another Reagan landslide. Now Reagan, there was a REAL Conservative President.

So, you never want to lose the “American Conservative” label. It never goes out of style and it doesn’t need redefining. Reagan did one thing that people should never forget. He told the liberals “My train is moving on. If you want to get on board then fine, if not, we don’t need you.” This majority in this Country (so the polls say) are still conservative in their thinking. They just had no reason in the last election to vote or move from liberal to conservative because guess what — McCain was NOT a Conservative.

Keep the faith. The Conservative train will travel again.

Cheers,
Bob

Have you actually stopped to look at what your party stands for these days? It’s a lot different that what you think. The conservativism you talk about is the conservativism that I can support. It’s not what is being practiced today.

But man, I just HATE pompous conservatives, of which there are plenty.

You must have an interesting choice in career. Same administration counts, completely opposite experience for me.

Oh, and your pop-psychology babble is strictly freshman 101 stuff. Been there, heard that, got the shirt. I’m surprised you weren’t blathering about heirarchies and so on. Of course, psychology isn’t exactly science so much as opinionated and credentialed voodoo anyway. I reckon you must be a soft “science” professor, or worse, an armchair hobbyist type. Heavens. Carry on.

OOGEDY-BOOGEDY CONSERVATISM:

Our lives are not only about what is, but also about what should be. For that, Kathleen Parker’s “Oogedy-Boogedy” piece seemed to have been written as if non-social-conservatives are uneducable. But, for teaching proper values, it hardly ever matters (at least, to Conservatives) what your religion, political inclination, national origin, gender, or skin color may be.

A. AMERICAN MESSAGE: Rather, among social conservatives, there is a common, civilizing, “American Message,” to whit:
1) Communicating and experiencing meaningfulness necessitates a frame of reference, with coordinate definitions (modeling);
2) Definitions necessitate reference to BOUNDARIES;
3) Shaking boundaries loose in order to mix everything into a mush is often preceded by violent explosion, in respect of which little by way of meaningfulness crawls out;
4) Preserving boundaries in an unstable world implicates faith in a common direction or leader;
5) While the world’s peoples remain in disarray about their common direction, they may at least respect a de facto common leader (U.S.A., which, to large extent, had such responsibility foisted upon it);
6) Leadership that is meaningful to one’s sense of autonomous-self is guiding, not totalitarian;
7) Boundaries (physical, political, financial, cultural, and moral) of the U.S., as a non-dictatorial leader, should be respected and not, without careful reason, subjected to violent change; and
The preserving of identifiable parameters of America, as America, remains essential to worldwide confidence, faith, assurance, and meaningfulness.

B. EMBODIMENT OF MESSAGE: In seeking to embody such a Big Idea, America:
1) Nourishes respect for ideals of individual freedom, dignity, self reliance, initiative, creativity, self expression, and autonomy (i.e., pursuit of happiness);
2) Seeks continuously to re-normalize or regulate markets, such as markets of influence, of trade, of goods, and of ideas, in order to reduce the disproportionate trappings of monopolists, abusers, seditionists, enemies, psychopaths, and pirates;
3) Seeks to provide a practical social safety net, to preserve marketplaces of workers — in respect of health, education, and population replenishment;
4) Resists faux messiahs’ Orwellian calls for forced economic equality (as opposed to economic opportunity);
5) Avails means for reducing Orwellian and monopolistic abuses of speech by governments, politicians, media, organized religion, private monopolies, and international pirates;
6) Seeks ways to minimize disproportionate leveraging of legislative influence;
7) Resists Big Government intrusion and dictation into people’s autonomy;
Stands against false prophecies of world peace based on surrender of initiative of individuals and nations to international controllers of world government; and
9) Mutually respects all spiritual models which themselves return respect for the seeking of moral guidance and the promotion of charitable works.

C. ORIGIN, RACE, GENDER, RELIGION: The American Idea about Conservatism neither favors nor disfavors anyone purely on account of national origin, race, gender, or religion, but instead cares about whether loyalty to the idea of conserving America as it engages with the world is returned in kind.
America should care when people try to undermine Essential Components of the American Idea by the monopolizing, precluding, or prescribing of:
1) The erasing and replacing of America, by Orwellian turning of America’s best values against itself (masked tolerance of the intolerable);
2) The politically correct collaring of free expression of ideas (masked totalitarianism);
3) The path for destroying those family values that are foundational to Western Civilization (anarchic hedonism);
4) The destruction of faith in any higher Source of meaningfulness (“oogedy-boogedy” psychopathic despair of the godless against empathy).

D. WILDERNESS: Neither Democrats nor Blueblood Republicans (and certainly not Libertarians or Libertines) are doing much at all to defend the Essential Components of the American Idea. So, Social Conservatives may need to go into the wilderness awhile, to summon inner strength, to reawaken and rejuvenate their message in respect of the American Idea. As they emerge, soon, they will need to remain much more wary of Social Liberals in Conservative Clothing.

E. SPECIFICS: The “Red Assed Moderate” wing of Social Conservatives wants:
1) Strong national defense of America;
2) Strong enforcement of borders and immigration policies;
3) Tax and service incentives, to coax environmentally responsible investment in American-based education and enterprise;
4) Some sort of decent, universal health care;
5) Creative destruction (i.e., progressive taxation on consumption?) of the disparities in income, wealth, and power that so disproportionately favor pirates of international finance and that so poisonously undermine market-based forces;
6) Respect for essential, civilizing, family values; and
7) Engaged cooperation with other nations, while defending the integrity of the American Idea.

F. BOTTOM LINE: Kathleen Parker overstepped when she implied non-conservatives cannot or should not be exposed or educated to the worth of such values.

My, such misdirected animosity! I’ve managed to prosper through, what, five or so Repug administrations, although every time my finances have taken a hit. I guess it’s better where youlive on Bizzaro world. You’re wrong about my age, but hey, thanks for the complement!

Sounds like you have either a fractured personality (statistically not very likely) or cognitive dissonance issues. Have you ever seen a shrink for that?

You know, hostility is generally considered a form of angry internal rejection or childish denial in psychology. In everyday speech it is more commonly used as a synonym for anger and aggression.

In psychological terms, hostility is the willful refusal to accept usually overwhelming evidence that one’s perceptions or beliefs of the world are wrong and hopelessly delusional. Instead of the normal response of reconsidering, the hostile person attempts to force or coerce the world to fit their view, even if this is a forlorn pathetic hope, and however further harmful the cost to one’s self esteem or damaging social impressions one makes on other people. Just keep reciting your mantra, “It’s the Liberals! It’s the Democrats!” Earplugs are available at your local RNC.

Whilst testing theories against reality is a necessary part of life, and persistence in the face of failure is often a necessary part of invention or discovery, in the case of hostility there is the distinction that the evidence is not considered and a stubborn decision is made to try again despite the same outcome. Or instead the evidence is suppressed or denied, and deleted from awareness – the unfavorable evidence which might suggest a prior belief is flawed (or in laymen’s terms, is full of shit) and is instead ignored and willfully avoided. Psychologically, it can be said that reality is being held to ransom, and in this sense hostility is a pointless form of psychological extortion – an attempt to repeatedly try and force reality to produce the desired feedback, in order that your deluded preconceptions become validated.

In this sense, hostility is a response which forms part of discounting of unwanted cognitive dissonance, or to put it another way, in simple terms, it can be the filtering of information that factually conflicts with what one already believes, in an effort to ignore that information and reinforce one’s stupid beliefs. In detailed terms, it is the perception of incompatibility between two cognitions, where “cognition” is defined as any element of knowledge, including attitude, emotion, belief, or behavior. The theory of cognitive dissonance states that contradicting cognitions serve as a driving force that compels the mind to acquire or invent (some would say, pullout of one’s ass) new thoughts or beliefs, or to modify existing beliefs, so as to reduce the amount of dissonance (conflict) between cognitions. Experiments have attempted to quantify this hypothetical drive. Some of these have examined how beliefs often change to match behavior when beliefs and behavior are in conflict.

For instance:

A person who clings to the same simple-minded world-view, even when the world view has essentially shown it doesn’t work.

A person who refuses to do something (even if for their own benefit) because to do it would be accepting that something else they felt strongly about was wrong (or would benefit from moderation or compromise), that they could not face, and thus diminishing self worth even more.

A person who psychologically inside is being driven by a need to prove to their parents they were right, or successful, or deserved love, even knowing the matter will never be resolved as they wish, or that it will not make a difference, or that it is a pointless trail, or that their parents are dead or incapable of response.

Now who do we know in popular culture that would serve as an example? Hint: It rhymes with tush.