Judeo-Christ Wants The Poor To Get Off The Dole

We love it when they type a shorter for us. (Not so much when we're surprised by such a sentence & there are liquids near the devil-box. Is there insurance for that?) And it is cute when they pretend to be "mature." ("Grown-ups in charge again," & all that.)

Conservatism is a fully mature, broad-based set of principles and ideas that form a coherent whole.

It's mostly babble about splitters, independents, meat to the base, yada. As expected from a pharmaceutical chemist/freelance author going on about religion & politics, though we will begrudge Mr. Dunkin some credit for accuracy of perception here:

In short, the pool of independents who are generally sympathetic to fiscally conservative ideas, but who are concurrently unsympathetic to socially conservative ideas, is probably not anywhere near as large as it is claimed to be. This is a lot of the reason why the Libertarian Party doesn’t have much appeal.

That they aren't as big a group of assholes as they could be? Surprising, but true, at least in this context. But as one might expect, he doesn't know when to shut up.

This isn’t just my opinion, either. The Tea Parties are the exemplary expression of fiscal conservative activism. Yet these same Tea Parties have had no problem whatsoever in supporting candidates who are extremely socially conservative, such as Mike Lee, Christine O’Donnell, Joe Miller, Ken Buck, Carl Paladino, and Rand Paul, as some chagrined left-wingers have noticed. Why? Because the people driving this movement, and the resurgence of conservative activism in general, are across-the-board conservatives who, while understanding that fiscal issues are the order of the day, aren’t disturbed by the social side of conservatism, and it’s highly doubtful that they’d want to toss it into the garbage can. There seems to be little to no evidence that “independents” have been driven away by these socially conservative candidates.

Take just as long as you need to recover from the reference to NY's Repub. goober candidate Paladino as extremely socially conservative. One might imagine that Paladino should really be disturbing to social conservatives, but we suppose hypocrisy is one of the prices to be paid for mature coherent wholes.

Conservatism is a movement. We shouldn’t have fiscal conservatives splintering off and undermining social conservatives, just because they don’t like social conservative issues as much as social conservatives do, or vice versa. Both groups should accept the place of defense conservatives at the table as well, knowing that both fiscal and social issues might not be this group’s cup of tea.

Odd, innit, that conservative defense policy is liberal, drunken-sailor style spending on invasions & occupations? A mere sop to the neo-conservatives, but it's revealing of the cognitive dissonance required to keep the pole up under their big conserva-tent, where fiscal conservative means "No government assistance for people who need it; military spending, however, is questioned only by internal subversives & union members, so let's appropriate some more money for Homeland Security," which is quickly echoed by the social conservatives. After all, what good will the new sodomy laws do if there's no faith-based apparatus to enforce them?

Take the issues surrounding abortion, for instance: is ending taxpayer subsidies for abortion clinics a socially conservative move, or a fiscally conservative one? The either/or question doesn’t make much sense, because, as Chris Christie just demonstrated, it is in reality both. What about abortion in general? Social conservatives obviously have no problem recognizing the rightness of protecting the sanctity of innocent life. Why couldn’t fiscal conservatives observe that each aborted baby now means less potential entrepreneurship, economic growth, and job creation in the future, and be concerned about the long-term implications?

If not for abortions, then, there would be even more Americans out of work then are now; Americans having jobs, especially ones that pay adequately, does not increase the wealth of the deserving wealthy.

What about welfare? Fiscal conservative arguments tell us that reducing the welfare rolls and getting people back to work, as the Republicans did in the 1990s, will lead to saving taxpayer monies, greater prosperity, and economic growth. Why can’t this argument fit hand-in-glove with the social conservative observation that much of what drives the demand for welfare in the first place are things like the breakdown of the nuclear family, the rise of single parenthood (especially female), the decline of Judeo-Christian moral standards, and the like? Addressing the social concerns essentially means you are addressing the fiscal as well. Two facets, same gem.

The coherent whole: The (Clinton? No?) economic boombubble of the 1990s? The result of Republicans (Clinton? Who?) cutting "welfare" & forcing the lazy bums back to work. Let us offer some of that vaunted common sense reactionaries claim for themselves: Pretty fucking hard to get off "welfare" & get a job when unemployment is around 10%, decline of Judeo-Christian moral standards & single women bearing children notwithstanding. (More babies: Good. More children of [FEMALE!] single parents: Bad. Coherent?)

We were also disappointed by lack of recognition of the moral hazards of Social Security & Medicare anywhere in the article. Could a pharmaceutical chemist (Tim Dunkin is a pharmaceutical chemist by day and a freelance author by night, writing about a wide range of topics on religion and politics at www.theblogmocracy.com.) set aside some of his core small government principles & Judeo-Christian moral standards to profit from the misery of others?

And yet, the PJ People are shocked that the lamestream media doesn't jump all over their fantasies.

At one of many other venues, as well.