Blog on the Lillypad
Tuesday, November 09, 2004
semicolon.reachcoop.org has posted this link to a terrific article by Mark Steyn, a Canadian who writes for the British newspaper The Daily Telegraph.
I didn't vote for Bush, not because I am not conservative, but because I AM conservative, and I don't think Bush is conservative at all. In the final days before the election, he noticeably softened his stance on opposing gay marriage, trying to push the decision off onto others. He has never done anything about abortion other than talk about how bad it is. And he has gotten us into a war against one country even though we were brutally and shamefully attacked by the government of a different country. Now we are in a war that will cost more American lives, as well as the lives and limbs of Iraqis whose only crime is that they live in Iraq. And the man who admittedly engineered the massacres of 9/11 sits safely on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, making and releasing video tapes for a worldwide audience.
Furthermore, Bush has created a huge deficit and has yet to offer any clear and believable plan on paying it off. If you just turn down the volume on George W. Bush, and you look at his actions, you realize that we have just put Jimmy Carter back into office.
All that having been said, (and btw, I certainly didn't vote for John Kerry, either), the election resulted in some tremendous turnarounds as the mainstream of the USA turned out to be what Europeans call conservative, and I would just call sensible.
Steyn's article interests me because he classifies American "conservatism" as a realistic approach to survival. You really cannot build a society on homosexual marriages and abortion. To continue a society, you have to have children, and they have to be healthy, happy children raised with values that embrace both compassion and courage. And you have to teach them to want to have children and raise those children with values of compassion and courage. And that desire to have and parent children has to be a center point of the society, not an addendum.
Steyn said it way better than I can, but I emphasize the point that even if you put Christian morals aside, you should still recognize that a self-disciplined, educated middle class that invests its time in its children and teaches them to want to have and raise happy children will outlast any other society on earth.
As for George Bush, well now the conservatives have roared and shaken the American election and the pollsters, so Bush will trot out the cowboy hat and Bible. Maybe he will stay in line with genuinely conservative values, or maybe it will be four more years of the conservative song and dance while he continues to execute short sighted, neo-conservative policies that resolve nothing and keep us in debt and at war.
The good news from the election is that there were genuine conservatives elected to office, and so the voice of a more-reasoned and honest conservatism has been preserved in our government.
But the best news is that a large portion of the American population that normally doesn't consider itself conservative voted to preserve a way of life that assures that American society itself can continue as the productive, free, innovative and jovial society that we love.
I didn't vote for Bush, not because I am not conservative, but because I AM conservative, and I don't think Bush is conservative at all. In the final days before the election, he noticeably softened his stance on opposing gay marriage, trying to push the decision off onto others. He has never done anything about abortion other than talk about how bad it is. And he has gotten us into a war against one country even though we were brutally and shamefully attacked by the government of a different country. Now we are in a war that will cost more American lives, as well as the lives and limbs of Iraqis whose only crime is that they live in Iraq. And the man who admittedly engineered the massacres of 9/11 sits safely on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, making and releasing video tapes for a worldwide audience.
Furthermore, Bush has created a huge deficit and has yet to offer any clear and believable plan on paying it off. If you just turn down the volume on George W. Bush, and you look at his actions, you realize that we have just put Jimmy Carter back into office.
All that having been said, (and btw, I certainly didn't vote for John Kerry, either), the election resulted in some tremendous turnarounds as the mainstream of the USA turned out to be what Europeans call conservative, and I would just call sensible.
Steyn's article interests me because he classifies American "conservatism" as a realistic approach to survival. You really cannot build a society on homosexual marriages and abortion. To continue a society, you have to have children, and they have to be healthy, happy children raised with values that embrace both compassion and courage. And you have to teach them to want to have children and raise those children with values of compassion and courage. And that desire to have and parent children has to be a center point of the society, not an addendum.
Steyn said it way better than I can, but I emphasize the point that even if you put Christian morals aside, you should still recognize that a self-disciplined, educated middle class that invests its time in its children and teaches them to want to have and raise happy children will outlast any other society on earth.
As for George Bush, well now the conservatives have roared and shaken the American election and the pollsters, so Bush will trot out the cowboy hat and Bible. Maybe he will stay in line with genuinely conservative values, or maybe it will be four more years of the conservative song and dance while he continues to execute short sighted, neo-conservative policies that resolve nothing and keep us in debt and at war.
The good news from the election is that there were genuine conservatives elected to office, and so the voice of a more-reasoned and honest conservatism has been preserved in our government.
But the best news is that a large portion of the American population that normally doesn't consider itself conservative voted to preserve a way of life that assures that American society itself can continue as the productive, free, innovative and jovial society that we love.
