LOS ANGELES—I’m sitting in the airport Route 66 Roadside Bar here, waiting for my Air Canada flight back to Canada, clutching a copy of William F. Buckley’s National Review magazine, and surreptitiously eyeing the pretty waitress with the rather charming decolletage.
OK, OK—but I have to kill far too much time time in airport bars, and so long as I don’t make an actual pass at the waitresses, what’s the problem?
When I start taking sly looks at the male bartenders, that’s the time to worry.
Now, I always carry a copy of National Review along because it prevents Liberals from trying to strike up boring conversations.
The Lib-Left set are a bit daunted by Buckley, his crew of writers, and their adherents.
They know instinctively their own weak arguments will collapse with soul-destroying suddenness when faced with volleys of intellectual conservatism.
Right now, I am enjoying tremendously the sheer panic amongst Democrats over Illinois Senator Dick Durbin’s charges that American interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre for suspected Muslim terrorists are akin to the thugs and murderers who ran death camps for Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and Cambodia’s Pol Pot.
At Guantanamo Bay, prisoners get three meals a day, cooked according to their religious preferences if necessary, clean linen every day, and air- conditioned cells. They’ve never lived better, according to most reports.
So, the Dems are now scurrying to smooth over yet another vote-losing fiasco, and Durbin is trying to say he never really meant to say what he said.
Ah, ah.
Also under my arm is a copy of the London Economist, a magazine that, as of late, has cast a jaundiced eye at President George W. Bush’s Republicans. The ‘Lexington’ column is a favorite read in the Economist, and even though it tends to be anti-Republican, it at least eschews the fanatical stances against Bush, Dick Cheney and the like that so many frustrated Democrats take.
Lexington has been reflecting on the face of the Republican party under Bush, comparing it to the days of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. It’s been a worthy perspective.
Today, some 40% of Americans see themselves as churchgoers, born-again Christians, or of the Christian Right. This being so, a Democrat friend bemoaned, the GOP only has to win over 11% of other voters and they’ve won an election. “We may be looking at something akin to the Franklin Delano Roosevelt/ Harry Truman era when the Democrats won five straight presidential elections, and the Republicans were in the political wilderness for 20 years. Only this time, we’ll be in the wilderness, ” a Democrat friend forecast gloomily.
Now while the Goldwater catastrophe of 1964 under Lyndon Johnson’s avalanche brought the GOP to its knees (In much the same way as Kim Campbell’s 1993 fiasco was a death blow to Canada’s Progressive Conservatives), Goldwater is still revered as the father of modern American conservatism.
But, as Lexington notes, while Goldwater was a hawk on defence, harsh on crime and bleeding heart judges, believed in the supremacy of states’ rights and was against gun control, on social issues, unlike the current Republican administration, he was pretty open-minded.
He believed TV evangelists such as Jerry Falwell “deserved a swift kick in the rear-end” and contended abortion was an issue only for women to decide on, and not “some Pope or other do-gooder.” On homosexuals in the military, he famously declared, “Heck, I don’t care if these guys are sexually straight, I just want them to be able to shoot straight.”
Like Goldwater, Lexington assesses how Reagan kept the Christian Right at bay. As I’ve noted before, Reagan was also the first president to allow an openly gay couple to stay overnight as guests in the White House, and the first to give an openly gay senior intelligence officer top-security clearance.
He was the first governor of California to allow openly gay instructors to teach in high schools.
Quite clearly, on social issues, the Republican party of Bush is far different than that of Goldwater and Reagan. Yet, rather than lose elections with hardline stands on social issues, the GOP is on a steamroller ride to win again in 2008 and maybe eventually duplicate a Roosevelt/Truman dynasty.
Naturally, the outbursts by Durbin, and my former “loose cannon” friend Howard Dean, are helping in no small way to put steam into the GOP machine while letting the air out of their own flagging political tires.
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