Notes From D.R. | Random Thoughts on the Passing Scene

Richard Ivory on the GOP’s need to develop an “urban conservative” message. (A must-read!)

UPDATE: More from Crystal Wright.

Jim Antle on the GOP’s hopes for 2010.

Can’t they all just get along?

As one media-fed controversy (“Crimsongate”) dies down, another one rises, this time sparked by Ohio Senator George Voinovich’s recent remarks about the GOP in the Columbus Dispatch. Voinovich, a moderate Republican, declared that his party is being hurt by the perception that it’s dominated by Southerners. “We got too many Jim DeMints and Tom Coburns,” Voinovich asserted. “It’s the southerners. They get on TV and go ‘errrr, errrrr.’ People hear them and say, ‘These people, they’re southerners. The party’s being taken over by southerners. What they hell [do] they [have] to do with Ohio?’”

Voinovich’s remarks were condemned by Louisiana GOP Senator David Vitter; in addition, US News & World Report religion writer Dan Gilgoff claimed that Voinovich “…may be using ‘Southerners’ as shorthand for religious conservatives or white evangelicals.” A Hotair.com discussion of Voinovich’s statements degenerated into an online brawl between those who believe that the GOP panders to religious conservatives from the South and those who believe that libertarian-minded Republicans want to force conservatives of faith out of the party.

It’s sad that Voinovich’s remarks have apparently worsened tensions between the GOP’s libertarian and socially conservative factions; as a moderate, Voinovich should be the target of each faction’s contempt, not the jumping-off point for renewed hostilities between both sides.

The GOP can live without Voinovich, but it will die if social conservatives and libertarians don’t set aside their petty grievances. If the party’s two main factions were united, their combined power would bring the Democratic Party to its knees.

There is no logical reason why social conservatives and libertarians cannot coexist peacefully within the GOP. If members of each faction share the same general goals (building up a strong national defense, restraining the reach of the federal government, implementing pro-growth economic policies, etc.), then it’s irrational and irresponsible to allow divergent views on certain social issues to tear the party apart.

On Hot Air, some libertarian commenters argued that social conservatives seemingly want to impose a religious test upon the party’s current and future members. It’s hard to imagine this actually being the case: if conservatism is the central tenet of the Republican Party, then it would be impossible to make members of the party pledge allegiance to any one religion.

Conservatism is ecumenical; when properly defined and properly understood, it can appeal to anyone regardless of religion, race, identity or income. If the Republican Party is indeed the political vessel of conservatism in the United States, then by definition the party cannot have a “Christian Only” entrance requirement.

Another argument advanced by Hot Air’s libertarian league is that the Southern evangelical flavor of the GOP leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouths of voters from other regions. According to this view, Southern evangelicals are self-righteous and arrogant, believing themselves to be representatives of the “heartland” and “real America”; such self-righteousness is leading the GOP into de facto rump-party status.

I agree with the libertarians in this regard: rhetoric about the “heartland” and “real America” is unnecessarily divisive and off-putting, since it implies that only certain regions of the country are willing to listen to conservative arguments. Those who prattle on about the “heartland” and “real America” seemingly want to concede the country’s major cities to the Democrats.

This is destructive thinking. If America is truly in the middle of a war between capitalism and socialism—between freedom and statism—then it must be noted that the front lines of that war are everywhere: every town, every city, every county, every state. If conservatives are serious about maintaining the country’s character as intended by the Founders, then they cannot leave any region behind.

There are little heartlands everywhere across this country, places where folks can be reached by the optimistic message of conservatism so long as that message is delivered the right way. Some of these areas will not be able to hear a religiously-themed conservative message; selling a “values” message to a secularized region of the country defies all logic. However, these regions could be reached by a libertarian-themed conservative message: this is why it’s so important for the GOP to develop an urban-oriented conservative vision to complement the rural-oriented conservative vision that has led to the party’s success in the South.

Libertarians and social conservatives need each other; why engage in a pointless civil war when, as allied powers, they could achieve so much in the struggle against socialism? Instead of wasting time feuding over Voinovich’s words, Southern social conservatives and libertarian-minded Republicans from other regions of the country should work together to strengthen the GOP and the overall conservative movement while agreeing to disagree on certain hot-button issues. Either these GOP factions will work together as a fighting force, or they’ll delight Democrats with a long, drawn-out divorce.

Does “birtherism” have its benefits?

Few things are more bizarre than the notion that President Obama was not actually born in Hawaii but in Kenya—yet this conspiracy theory has apparently captured the imagination of a large number of Americans. According to this theory, Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, effectively surrendered her United States citizenship prior to the birth of her son—and since her husband, Barack Obama Sr., was not a citizen of the United States, but a native of Kenya, Obama Jr. is not a citizen of the US either and thus not eligible to be President.

For the record, I don’t buy any of this stuff. If credible, irrefutable evidence casting doubt upon Obama’s eligibility status actually existed, the Hillary Clinton campaign would have obtained and revealed such evidence, forcing Obama out of the 2008 race. (Even if the Clinton campaign failed to uncover such evidence, a media entity opposed to candidate Obama’s aggressively progressive agenda—think Fox News or the Washington Times–certainly would have exposed the truth prior to the November 2008 election.)

However, let’s assume for the sake of argument that the “birthers” are on to something. What if Democrats knowingly nominated a non-citizen for the highest office in the land? What if the party’s operatives knew full well that everything wasn’t copacetic with his certificate, and allowed him to become the nominee anyway?

Would that be an outrage, from a conservative standpoint—or an opportunity?

At bottom, the “birthers” argue that Democrats essentially smuggled an undocumented immigrant into the White House. If that’s the case, then why don’t Republicans do the same?

Surely, there are some solidly conservative foreign-born Republicans who are “more American than Americans themselves.” Millions who came to the United States to seek prosperity fell in love with this country’s history, traditions and values; more than a few of these “new Americans” must be of Presidential timbre, no?

Somewhere, there has to be a brilliant, firmly conservative non-citizen who loves the Constitution—well, at least the more “relevant” parts of the Constitution—and would do a better job of governing the country than some of the folks we’ve had in the Oval Office over the past two decades. So why don’t Republicans groom such a person for the White House and keep the pesky citizenship stuff hidden? Worked for the other guys, right?

If the “birthers” are correct—that Obama made it to the White House by stealth–then there’s nothing wrong with deciding that turnabout is fair play. Steering a foreign-born Republican into the White House would be one heck of a feat; if GOP operatives could keep under wraps anything that gave away the actual birth location of a charismatic conservative contender, it would be the masterstroke to end all masterstrokes.

If one has a resolute love for this country, why should it matter if one just happened to have been born in another country? Is it not possible that a foreign-born President could have a greater appreciation for this country’s uniqueness than a natural-born Commander-in-Chief who has taken this country’s preciousness for granted? If a secretly foreign-born Republican Presidential contender had the potential to inspire a rebirth of patriotism in the American people, then why not put that candidate on a path to victory, even if one must use unconventional tactics in order to make such a victory a reality?

The “birthers” believe that Obama is tearing the country down. Would these folks have a problem voting for a Republican Presidential candidate who vowed to build the country up, even if that candidate had, shall we say, citizenship issues? If the GOP nominated a candidate who was suspected to be foreign-born, but who promised to cut taxes, appoint strict constructionists to the bench, strengthen the military and promote a culture of life, would the folks currently asking for Obama’s birth certificate really pressure that candidate to verify his or her eligibility?

Considering the poor quality of recent “natural-born” Republican Presidential contenders, a secretly foreign-born GOP aspirant with real conservative credentials wouldn’t be such a bad thing. If people born outside of the United States are good enough to be neighbors, co-workers, friends and spouses, why should they be denied the chance to fight for the Presidency? If Obama did conceal his “real” eligibility status, it was only because American xenophobia forced him into the citizenship closet. That’s intolerable—and if this xenophobia also stands in the way of a highly skilled, strongly conservative Republican becoming President, then conservatives should support any effort, no matter how seemingly radical, to get such a person elected despite such archaic attitudes.

And if this strikes you as patently ridiculous, ask yourself: Is it any more ridiculous than “birtherism” itself?

The editors of National Review on “birtherism.”

Thomas Sowell and Victor Davis Hanson on President Obama’s decision to “act stupidly” vis-a-vis the Henry Louis Gates case.

UPDATE: Michael Steele on Obama and abortion. Plus, John Hawkins asks: What if McCain had won?

Shamara Riley on how RNC Chairman Michael Steele can compete for black votes. (A must-read!)

Ross Douthat on the legacy of Iraq.

G-Force tops the charts.

Jeff Jacoby on abortion and “population growth.”

Maybe the folks who regarded President Bush as unfit for command were on to something.

The new TIME article chronicling former Vice President Cheney’s fruitless effort to encourage Bush to pardon convicted White House aide I. Lewis Libby is a harsh indictment of our most recent ex-Commander-in-Chief. Bush, who began his White House tenure posing as a “compassionate conservative,” revealed himself to be a man with a heart of stone in the final days of his administration, failing to deliver aid to Libby as the waters of legal controversy threatened to submerge him.

As reporters Massimo Calabresi and Michael Weisskopf note, “This Libby-pardon fight…began two years earlier, in the federal district courthouse in Washington. In a case that gripped the capital but often mystified the rest of the country, Cheney’s former top aide on domestic and foreign policy stood accused of obstructing a federal investigation into the source of an egregious media leak: the identity of an undercover CIA officer named Valerie Plame. Her husband Joseph Wilson, a former diplomat, had written an Op-Ed for the New York Times in July 2003 claiming to have evidence that the Administration had lied to bolster the case for war in Iraq. Within days, in an effort to discredit Wilson’s story, a conservative columnist [Robert Novak] had revealed the identify of Wilson’s wife. Plame’s ‘outing’ was seen by her husband and his fellow Democrats as an act of revenge orchestrated by Cheney himself — and the most extreme example of how far an Administration would go to cover its tracks in a war gone bad.

“Libby maintained his innocence throughout his trial, claiming that any false statements he had made to investigators resulted from bad memory, not deception…Bush had declared that anyone involved in leaking Plame’s identity would be fired. Cheney had personally assured Bush early on that his aide wasn’t involved, even persuading the President to exonerate Libby publicly through a spokesman.”

In March 2007, Libby was convicted on charges of perjury, obstruction of justice and lying to federal investigators. Three months later, Libby was sentenced to 2 ½ years in prison and a $250,000 fine; right before the Fourth of July, Bush commuted Libby’s prison sentence. However, Libby’s felony conviction stood in the way of his ability to resume his career as a lawyer and to regain his reputation, obviously damaged by Washington’s politics of personal destruction.

Cheney, wanting his former aide to be made whole, pushed for a Bush pardon of Libby. Unfortunately, his efforts were doomed. According to Calabresi and Weisskopf, “Bush had long approached pardons with suspicion. As Texas governor, he granted them sparingly. His reluctance stemmed not from a lack of mercy but from his sense that pardons were a rigged game, tilted in favor of offenders with political connections.” Bush was apparently uninterested in the idea that Libby deserved a pardon precisely because he was the victim of a rigged game, a White House mouse caught in a perjury trap.

In a January 2009 Oval Office meeting with Bush, Cheney “…made his points in a calm, lawyerly style, saying Libby was a fall guy for critics of the Iraq war, a loyal team player caught up in a political dispute that never should have turned into a legal matter. They went after Scooter, Cheney would say, because they couldn’t get his boss.” However, Bush wasn’t buying this argument; he seemed to legitimately believe that Libby had intentionally lied under oath, despite Libby’s insistence that a weak memory, not a determination to deceive, resulted in sworn statements judged to be untrue. “A few days later, about a week before they would become private citizens, Bush pulled Cheney aside after a morning meeting and told him there would be no pardon. Cheney looked stricken. Most officials respond to a presidential rebuff with a polite thanks for considering the request in the first place. But Cheney, an observer says, ‘expressed his disappointment and disagreement with the decision … He didn’t take it well.’”

One day after Bush ceded control of the White House to Barack Obama, Cheney used polite words to lash out at Bush, telling the Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes: “Scooter Libby is one of the most capable and honorable men I’ve ever known. He’s been an outstanding public servant throughout his career. He was the victim of a serious miscarriage of justice, and I strongly believe that he deserved a presidential pardon. Obviously, I disagree with President Bush’s decision.” According to Hayes, “Bush’s decision not to pardon Libby has angered many of the president’s strongest defenders. One Libby sympathizer, a longtime defender of Bush, told friends she was ‘disgusted’ by the president. Another described Bush as ‘dishonorable’ and a third suggested that refusing to pardon Libby was akin to leaving a soldier on the battlefield. They believe that the prosecution of Libby was riddled with inconsistencies and double-standards. Not least of those is the fact that former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage, who leaked the identity of former CIA operative Valerie Plame to at least two reporters, was never charged. And Fitzgerald had known from the outset of his investigation that Armitage was the leaker.

“Others, including some who believe it’s possible that Libby did lie to the grand jury, argue that Libby should have been pardoned because his conviction came as a result of highly-charged political fight between the Wilson, the CIA, and the Bush administration. The entire chain of events that led to Libby’s conviction started with a lie from Joseph Wilson, Plame’s husband, who claimed to have debunked forged documents related to intelligence reports on Iraq, Niger and uranium. But Wilson, who was sent by the CIA to investigate the reports after his wife recommended him, could not have discredited the reports as forgeries because the U.S. government did not yet possess them at the time he made his trip.” Hayes further notes: “Two sources believe that the White House was concerned with public relations and simply did not want to defend or justify a Libby pardon.”

Bush’s failure to pardon Libby was more than just dishonorable: it was immoral. Libby did not deserve to have his reputation permanently damaged because of his involvement in “Plamegate.” If Bush actually refused to grant Libby a pardon because he was afraid of what the media would say, history should label him a coward.

No, Dick Cheney will never win the Mr. Congeniality award, but if TIME’s account of his efforts to help Libby is accurate, he’s more of a man than Bush ever was. Cheney saw a wrong and tried to right it; Bush saw a wrong and said, “Oh, well.”

While conservatives are upset by Obama’s actions as President, they shouldn’t forget that it was Bush’s foolishness and poor judgment that allowed the Hope and Change Express to arrive at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Bush’s decision not to pardon Libby after his conviction on trumped-up charges was unconscionable, the act of a President gone mad. Hard as it is for a partisan conservative to admit, the left’s 2000 assessment of the Bush-Cheney ticket was largely true: Cheney was the adult, the one with gravitas, the one who would keep things together. Sadly, for Libby and for all of us, he was not the one with all the power.

David Brooks, Jonah Goldberg, David Frum, Gary Andres, Linda Chavez, Mona Charen, Charles Krauthammer, Kimberley Strassel, Thomas Sowell and Peggy Noonan on the problems with President Obama’s health-care plan.

If you want to protect a woman’s right to choose, vote Republican.

It’s always been fascinating to hear progressive pundits and politicians declare that conservative Republicans have been plotting for years to overturn Roe v. Wade and send the abortion question back to the states, so that evangelical Christians and right-wing Catholics can pressure state legislatures into curtailing reproductive rights for pregnant women. In truth, the last thing conservative Republicans would want is to see Roe overturned.

Think about it: if a majority of states severely restricted or criminalized one’s ability to have an abortion for birth-control purposes, and “irresponsible” sexual activity did not decline among middle-class and lower-middle-class Americans, we would have a rather significant social problem on our hands, no?

If women were effectively compelled to bring their unborn children to term, and could not financially support those children, these women would presumably have to turn to government support to provide for their offspring. (Even if the fathers of some of these children tried to help out, government support would still be necessary if the parents of these children happened to be very low on the American economic scale.) What conservatives refer to as the “welfare state” would have to be dramatically expanded to accommodate these impoverished children.

Since when have conservatives ever been interested in expanding the “welfare state?” If there’s one thing conservatives hate besides past Communism and present-day radical Islam, it’s the “welfare state.” However, the “welfare state” would have to annex more territory in order to keep these children from dying, especially if the parents of these children could not obtain sufficient support from members of their extended family or their local places of worship.

It’s hard to imagine the average conservative going for this. It’s easier to imagine the average conservative accepting abortion on demand as a necessary evil.

Seize my conservative credentials if you wish, but I would have no problem paying higher federal and state income taxes if I knew the money would go to providing for impoverished children who would otherwise perish in the foul rooms of filthy clinics. What can I say? It’s the compassionate conservative in me.

It’s impossible to envision a critical mass of conservatives being willing to do the same.

For years, both the left and the right have perpetrated a fraud. According to the most vocal of progressives, conservative Republicans want to subjugate women by denying them control of their own bodies. According to the most verbose of conservatives, “lib’rul” Democrats believe that there can never be too many abortions: how many times has Rush Limbaugh told his millions of listeners that feminism is a de facto religion, with abortion being the sacrament thereof?

Let’s not deny that a number of folks on the left see an aborted fetus as the residue of a constitutional right. Let’s also not deny that a number of folks on the right see an aborted fetus as something that would have become just another bastard on welfare, sucking money from hard-working taxpayers and growing up to become another prisoner or layabout. Keeping Roe alive is, in truth, a bipartisan matter.

Just as one cannot trust the next Republican Congress to actually shrink the size and scope of the federal government, one also cannot trust the next Republican President to appoint pro-life Justices to the US Supreme Court. Yes, Sarah Palin has captured the imagination of faith-filled conservatives because she has demonstrated a personal commitment to life—but what if she does not, or cannot, demonstrate a political commitment to life in the White House? If President Palin has a Supreme Court vacancy, will she really be able to resist the whispers in her ear from advisors encouraging her to select a judge with a “moderate” reputation? Palin is, so we are told, the second coming of Ronald Reagan. Dare we forget that Reagan placed two pro-Roe Justices on the High Court?

It would be nice to see Roe overturned one day, and the question of abortion returned to the states so that this issue can be debated with civility, respect and tolerance for all views. However, it will never happen. Unfortunately for those of us who sincerely believe in the rights of the unborn, Roe is a “politically permanent” ruling in the vein of Marbury v. Madison and Miranda v. Arizona. Powerful interests on the left and the right believe in the validity and practicality of Roe; it fulfills the progressive desire to allow pregnant woman to have control of their reproductive destinies, and simultaneously satisfies the conservative need not to have too many supposed “undesirables” nursing at the government’s teat. From a pro-life perspective, Roe is execrable; however, the lion’s share of political power in America is held by those who see Roe as expedient.

John Avlon on anti-President Obama “birthers.”

This 1999 column by Walter Williams is an interesting read in light of the alleged racial-profiling controversy involving Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

UPDATE: More from Larry Elder.