Rick Moran, proprietor of Right Wing Nuthouse, seems to have designated himself the righteous Ayatollah of diction for the conservative blogosphere. How else to explain this screed, which devotes numerous paragraphs to demonizing moi, your lovable, centrist narrator? Moran writes:
I have given up my one man quest to protect the English language from right wing Visigoths who insist in raping, pillaging, and burning their way through the dictionary – corrupting definitions and creating havoc with meaning while doing their utmost to make intelligent discourse impossible… …Case in point: Today’s blow up over the flag at Ground Zero being pulled up before President Obama spoke. Or something. Doug Ross, among others, rushed into the fray after a tweet from ABC News White House correspondent Jake Tapper that read; “One minute to air and they decided to take the flag down from the live shot!” …[A]n excitable and indignant Ross wrote:
‘This administration and, by extension, the Democrat Party are now so thoroughly divorced from the history, traditions and morals of America that we might as well admit the Marxist left has executed a successful coup d’état on this Republic.’The mindlessness, the out of control idiocy represented in that one comment says volumes about many on the right, who toss around words like “Marxist” and concepts like “coup d’etat” as casually as if they were discussing the weather…
…It is doubtful that Ross, or any of the bloggers who linked and aped his manifestly absurd blog post would know a true Marxist if they came up and bit him… Democrats are Democrats. Marxists are Marxists … What concerns me and should concern anyone with any reverence for the English language, is that jamokes like Ross – and there are thousands of them on the right who use these ill-chosen descriptives every day – are either too ignorant to know what the real definitions of “socialist,” “communist,” and “Marxist” are.
For a man who prides himself on verbal precision, Moran slings invective with the best of any “right wing Visigoth”. But that said, Moran seems to have been in suspended animation since the thirties, when the Democrats launched their first major attack on the Constitution with Wickard v. Filburn.
The path the modern, MoveOn-controlled Democrat Party is on today was presciently described by Stuart Chase in 1942. He wrote that the agenda of the Fabian Socialists — who had launched a counter-revolution against America’s founding — was to create an authoritarian and completely centralized government apparatus. The tenets of the Fabian Socialists were codified as follows:
• Strong, centralized government
• Government-controlled banking, credit and securities exchange (like Dodd-Frank, etc.)
• Government control over employment (like the “Employee Free Choice Act” and NLRB efforts to increase unionization of the workplace)
• Unemployment insurance, old age pensions (like 99-week unemployment benefits, Social Security, easy access to welfare)
• Universal medical care, food and housing programs (like Obamacare, food stamps, HUD)
• Access to unlimited government borrowing (like massive deficits)
• A managed monetary system (like an opaque Federal Reserve)
• Government control over foreign trade (like China tariffs)
• Government control over natural energy sources, transportation and agricultural production (like drilling moratoriums, the EPA’s regime of “Cap-and-Trade”)
• Government regulation of labor (like the Wagner Act, monopolistic power of trade unions, et. al.)
• and Heavy progressive taxation (like our current tax code, the most “progressive” of all Western countries).Rick, the policies of the modern Democrat Party are absolutely synonymous with Marxism. And that’s not just my opinion, that’s the take of historians and Constitutional attorneys like David Limbaugh and Mark Levin.
I used to read Rick’s blog religiously until he decided that he could not longer be a true conservative. His mantra seemed to be that conservatives needed to move left to the center if they wanted to remain relevant. Of course, this was in 2008, when he was pimping for a left moving “conservative” named John McCain.
Now, Moran never suggested that the left should move right toward the center, but his hook was that Republicans should become (not that they are) a “big tent” party, embrassing even those whose philosophy is totally antithetic to conservative standards and values. Basically, Moran was promoting the theme that if conservatives just became more like those they opposed, they would attract more supporters. Just become Democrat Lite. Yeah, that’s the trick.
Then there is always the tactic that if one of your readers happen to disagree with your opinions, and post that disagreement, you fly into them with a profanity laced diatribe about how stupid that reader is. Perhaps that explains why there are almost zero comments on Rick Moran’s blog. People don’t like being told how stupid they are by those who think they are the smartest thing on the internet. Perhaps Rick didn’t notice that for all the slandering of the TEA Party that the left did saying how stupid TEA Partiers were, it didn’t really work out well for the Democrat[ic] Party last November.
Well, we saw how right the Morans of the nation were when John McCain was soundly tromped by a little known junior senator from Illinois whose personal relationships would have gotten him booted from any primary in the past. McCain couldn’t create excitement in his own age base, much less with anyone else. Republicans stayed home and didn’t bother to vote for a guy that left them as cold as yesterday’s pizza. Still, Moran preached, and informed us that he, and only he, knew the road to political salvation. He was wrong then, he remains wrong, but his new (or most recent) tactic is to attack conservative bloggers (Rush Limbaugh and Glen Beck being on the Moran Hit List for quite a while now) for not subscribing to his form of conservatism, which is basically Democrat Lite. How petty does a man have to be to post that if people are going to refer to Democrats, they should at least be correct in calling it the “Democratic” Party? Obviously Moran has found himself in some kind of time warp, not realizing that the low tax, pro-business, open market, strong foreign policy and strong military Democrats like JFK no longer exist. Someone should buy Moran a copy of The Communist Manifesto so he could see just how far left the Democrats have gone.
You are not the first conservative blogger Moran has attacked, and you won’t be the last. You see, he is struggling to stay relevant. No one has bothered to tell him it is a battle already lost. He posts at other sites, and sometimes I respond to him there (since being banned from his site) only to tweek his nose a bit.
Of all the ways I could describe Moran, I think “supercilious” (haughtily disdainful) is the most appropriate quick note. A couple of years ago, I read a piece he wrote that described Beck’s radio show as being insignificant and a waste of time. I commented that he sounded like a competitor who was envious of Beck’s success. A short time later, he began advertising his own insignificant little one station radio show in the wilds of Indiana or some Cosmopolitan bit of country waiting to be syndicated and still awaiting syndication.
We may not agree with everything Beck has to say, but to engage in criticizing our leaders with righteous indignation, in order to promote yourself, is a cheap shot. Consequently, Rick Moran has built an ever increasing group of detractors and is still seeking a group of followers. His most favorite tactic is to attack those on the right who have obtained a degree of success in an effort to make himself appear to be superior. He often attacks their grammar and written form as an expert on the subjects, while exposing his own failings in those same areas. It would be excellent humor if it were meant to be funny; unfortunately, Moran considers himself to be a serious Conservative writer on the pages of American Thinker and Pajamas Media, while writing their most insipid and short regurgitations of other news stories, (a process we must all engage in with varying forms of expertise).
Leading readers to conclude that it isn’t all that difficult for the amateur to publish on those pages; however, Moran is only on those pages because he has the persistence of a house fly that has landed on a wall and refuses to leave until he has deposited the off color, foul looking material to mark his spot. Since Moran is dedicated to leaving these foul markings on a regular basis is considered consistent and can be counted on to leave his ugly fly spots whenever space needs to be filled.
Like a career bureaucrat in the beltway who survives by making untalented bootlicking a calling card, Moran leaves his mark on Conservative writing and theory.
As retire05 stated, “Just become Democrat Lite. Yeah, that’s the trick”, that is how I view the Republican party as of this moment. Sure, there are conservatives within the party, however, they are nowhere to be found within the leadership of the party. And for someone who regards himself as a conservative, to promote party movement away from conservative values, he is being disingenuous to his audience, as well as himself. He is committing the same murder of word usage that he accuses the ‘right’ of making.
As for Curt’s linked article, that discusses the tenets of the Fabian Socialists, it reads like the enacted edicts and directives present within Atlas Shrugged, by the central government, with each and every one of them contributing to the total failures of the system. And all by the one prominent thought that directed them all. That they, the government, knows better than you, the citizen, on how you should lead your life. Our resident liberals’ views, regarding this, are opaque, and clouded by an admiration felt, not known.
The Republican party, in general, is regarded as the “right” by the left, however, the leadership is far from it. They are entrenched within the same type of welfare politics, just from different angles, that the liberal democrats use as their weapon of choice. The end is the same, no matter which party you support, just from different means. And the end is the centralized government, controlling all aspects of citizens’ lives, and keeping the pols in power.
What is truly disingenuous, and intellectually dishonest, is the labeling of the Republican party as ‘conservative’, and accusing them of being in bed with the TEA Party. True conservatives, and those who support the TEA Party, disavow the leadership within the GOP, and particularly the ‘direction’ that leadership is taking the party. Both parties are liberal, just that one is more liberal than the other.
Moran is simply a product of the movement of acceptable viewpoint, as described by Beck in The Overton Window, and is only slightly less liberal than the democrats themselves. I cannot, and will not, listen to him, nor read his writings. I much prefer guys like Levin.
John Galt I can certainly understand the frustration of Conservatives with The Republican P arty and the fractured attempt to mount any meaningful attempt to derail Obama’s 2012 momemtum.
What ticket would best reflect your values and what would it take for said ticket to win? Would you sacrifice 2012 to have a real shot at 2016.You know I like Rubio. Your thoughts on him?
@rich wheeler:
No, that is a coward’s way out, and would most certainly fracture the party even further, although, that might not be a bad thing.
I like him as well, however, he is still too much of an unknown.
I like Cain and Palin, in no particular order. Right now, the only thing Obama has going for him is the bump he’s received since UBL’s death, although I have enough criticisms of how it was handled to discount it. Obama’s economic policy is a failure, and he is continuing much of the ‘nosing around’ that previous administrations have been complicit in, regarding sticking their noses into business they ought not. A message of simple, conservative values would best reflect my own values, and the two that I mentioned are the ones I believe come closest.
And this is what it really boils down to. Within the GOP, there is the wing of “dem-lite” candidates, such as Romney, Gingrich, and some others, who cannot distinguish themselves from Obama. If it is to be one of them, I feel that Obama would win easily, based on the fact that for some, he is the evil known, and for others, such as myself, they would be disgusted by the track the leadership within the GOP has taken the party, and even if they vote, as a group their heart really wouldn’t be in it, and not much support would be given.
If one of the conservatives, supported by the TEA Party, were to win the nomination, then the support would be huge, even amongst the independents, as a true alternative to Obama’s failed direction. Just my two cents. I don’t go in much for the spectacle of candidate’s positioning themselves for the run for President. I will vote my values.
John G. I understand YOUR enthusiasm for a 100% Conservative ticket Palin/Cain or Cain/Palin but with true respect for rational thinking can they garner enough indie votes to secure an E.C. victory? Seems HIGHLY unlikely.Thoughts on Huntsman as possible darkhorse.
If you haven’t seen it I think you’d like Civil War movie The Conspirator. Some interesting Constitutional questions brought up.
@rich wheeler:
I find it more unlikely that the populace would choose the GOP, if their candidates were nothing more than a “lite” version of Obama. In that case, I think people choose the evil that they know, over someone like Romney. I believe that Cain and Palin, although contentious, articulate their positions well, and with much of the country feeling the negative results of failed Obama policies, they would be looking for something a bit more refreshing, concerning politicians.
No, I have not seen that movie. If I get the chance, I’ll watch it, just to see what constitutional question you are referring to. Thanks for the head’s up.
johngalt, I agree with you that there are few true conservatives in the GOP now. Most are just a lesser form of Democrat, not veering very far from the socialism that Democrats have been trying to impose on us for 100 years now. Label them what ever Rick Moran wants, Eurosocialists, progressives, centrists, yada, yada, the bottom line is they are what they are and what they are NOT is conservative.
When you tell others that through taxation, you have a right to take their earned wealth and give it to someone else, you are not a conservative. When you think that government is the answer, you are not a conservative. When you promote programs that are clearly unconstitutional, like Social Security, Medicare/Medicaid, you are not conservative. When an unelected official tells a company they cannot move to a particular state, and you don’t stand on the steps of the Capitol with a megaphone shouting the wrongheadedness of that action, you are not a conservative.
As to candidates for 2012, I have no particular favorite, although I have ruled out some of them: Romney, Huckabee, Huntsman, Paul. I am tired of retreads who think simply by hanging in there long enough it is their turn to have use elect them. That was one of the problems with McCain. He felt the nomination was owed to him, even though he destroyed his conservative credentials a long time ago.
Who do I want? Someone who is willing to tell it like it is, and take the heat for it. Someone who will point out that while we give Brazil $2 billion to drill for oil, we can’t let American companies drill for our own oil. Someone who will demand that people not live on welfare for their entire lives and that we productive citizens have no responsibility to pay for their kids, that they chose to have since we cannot tell them how to live their lives. Someone who will demand that we pull our troops out of Europe since Germany is no longer a threat and those nations need to step up to the plate and protect themselves. Someone who supports taking a red marker to the hundreds of alphabet agencies that the American taxpayer supports, like the Department of Education which has produced increased test scores in not ONE student. Someone who says clearly, these are the things that government should do since it can do it better than the individual on their own (a military) but all other things are either the responsibility of the states or the individual.
Now, if you can find that person for me, I will not only vote for them, I will work my tail off for them.
John G. Retire05 and strong willed Conservatives. Believe me, I respect you sticking to your beliefs when it comes to picking a nominee.Unfortunately there DOESN’T appear to be, at this time, any Conservs. that have the Reagan likeability quotient nescessary for election to POTUS. A bit of the Irish blarney and charm RR displayed.
Most voters don’t enjoy the hardball politics we play here at F.A.
BTW Mac didn’t lose because he was too moderate. No Repub. could have beaten BHO or Hillary in 2008. The vote was for change and anti W.
If you believe as strongly as you suggest, stand up and start a Conservative 3RD Party with the Tea Party as your base and young PERSONNABLE leadership from people like Rubio and Rand Paul.
@rich wheeler:
That would be giving up the Republican party to the liberal-lites, who only pursue a slower death for the country than the liberals in the Democratic party. No, I propose that conservatives take back the Republican party, and shift those like Romney off to the fringes.
@retire05:
Herman Cain and Sarah Palin come closest to that ideal. The trick will be in convincing the public that it is in their best interest to shift the country towards that ideal, and that a continued path with ‘welfare politics’, either from the liberal-lites of the GOP, or the full-blown liberals in the Democratic party, will only result in the death of what the founding fathers envisioned our country to be. There are a few others who could be mentioned with Cain and Palin.
johngalt, I used to think that Allen West would stay true to his conservative values, but it seems even he can be taught to do the Potomac Two-Step. Today, The Hill reported that Allen West was one of four Republicans who voted against a bill that would scrap the part of Obamacare that provided $100 million for the construction of school-based health centers. A West spokeswoman said that the congressman “believes there are bigger funding issues to be focusing on right now” and he questions the House’s efforts to dismantle the health care law on a piecemeal basis.
Now, I don’t care how they dismantle Obamacare, one piece at a time or no, but I want it GONE.
Now, there is so much wrong with “school-based” health centers that the list is too long to go into, but here are a few:
these are schools, not hospitals or clinics
schools have nurses that are capable of calling 911 or treating minor problems
“health-care” centers, at whatever schools had them, would be required to provide information on birth control, abortion, safe sex. I don’t want first graders being told that shit. Kids need to be left alone to be kids, not force them to grow up before their time as Democrats seem to want to do ala Gramsci style.
it is not the responsibility, or the place, of the federal government to delve into schools that are funded by states. I think the federal government needs to stay out of the education business
I also, do not want a third party. I want to take the GOP away from the Democrat Lites. I want to dump those Republicans who vote like Democrats and have stopped representing the general population and pander to their “special” interests. But as long as there are idiots like Rick Moran, who seems to think that people actually care what he says, who are in a position to influence those who are in elected office, it is an uphill battle for those like us.