As the summer rolls on, I keep looking -- desperately -- for a reason to cast a vote for John McCain. I abhor the notion of voting for Barack Obama. Not because he is black, but because I think he is not that bright.
But everytime I about ready to come around to the notion that John McCain would not be that bad, I am stopped dead in my tracks. I become, once again, convinced that he is a dunderhead.
His latest bout of sheer stupidity can be found in a New York Times piece that will appear tomorrow, titled "McCain’s Conservative Model? Roosevelt (Theodore)". Theodore Roosevelt was about as conservative as William Ayers, founder of the Weather Underground.
McCain claims, "I count myself as a conservative Republican, yet I view it to a large degree in the Theodore Roosevelt mold."
He knows about as much about political history as he does economics. Teddy was not a conservative. He was a staunch Progressivist, that from his earliest political days, believed in an incredibly active Federal government. Far from being a promoter of free markets, he was a staunch believer in muscular government regulation AND establishing forceful partnerships with big business that would squeeze out the individualism of small business.
In fact, in 1906, aided by Senator Albert J. Beveridge, Teddy led a Progressive insurgency against the "conservative" wing of the Republican Party. Roosevelt was a bloodthirsty imperialist. Remember that it was Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt that ordered Dewey to attack the Spanish fleet at Manila before the President even order such action.
As Jonah Goldberg notes in his book Liberal Facism, by 1912, Roosevelt was a firm believer in "bigness":
... and now believed the state should use the trusts for its own purposes, rather than engage in an endless and fruitless battle to break them up. "The effort at prohibiting all combination has substantially failed," he explained. "The way out lies, not in attempting to prevent such combinations, but in completely controlling them in the interest of public welfare."
It gets worse. Roosevelt's New Nationalism, in his own words...
"rightly maintains that every man holds his property subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it."
And this was 100 years before the Kelo decision by the US Supreme Court, which upheld the right of local communities to use emininent domain to seize private property and convey it to commercial interests for economic purposes.
Even H.L. Mencken -- the sage of Baltimore -- recognized the power Roosevelt was gathering to government. As Goldberg notes,
"The America that Roosevelt dreamed of was always a sort of swollen Prussia, truculent without and regimented within".
Mencken called Roosevelt a "Tammany Nietszsche", and attacked him for stressing "the duty of the citizen to the state, without the soft pedal upon the duty of the state to the citizen."
And it gets deeper. As Goldberg notes on page 99 of Liberal Fascism, the New Republic -- a magazine with almost pure left-wing, liberal, and socialist bona fides -- was founded to "explore and develop and apply the ideas which had been advertised by Theodore Roosevelt when he was the leader of the Progressive party".
How conservative can that possibly be?
Does John McCain even know what he is saying before he says it?
John McCain is NOT a conservative. He is not the heir to Ronald Reagan. He is not the air to Jack Kemp. He is not the heir to Barry Goldwater. He is a fundamental deviation from the Conservative principals that drove the Republican Party from 1976 to 1998. And he is not that different from Barack Obama, he's a just a different flavor of snowball.
Like his hero Teddy Roosevelt, he doesn't believe in classical liberalism, individualism, and the rights of individuals. His approach to campaign finance reform is to create priviledge classes of donors at the expense of the participation and regulation of the system by citizens. McCain-Feingold, more than anything, is an incumbent protection racket for the political class.
But more than anything, he is a complete dunderhead. The last line of the article is completely inconsistent with claiming to be in the "Theodore Roosevelt" mold:
I believe less governance is the best governance, and that government should not do what the free enterprise and private enterprise and individual entrepreneurship and the states can do, but I also believe there is a role for government.
Theodore Roosevelt, and his cousin/nephew-in-law Franklin, didn't believe that any more than Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
So which is it?