The Death of Conservatism

Monday, Sep. 14, 2009
The Skimmer
By Randy James
TIME

The Death of Conservatism

By Sam Tanenhaus; Random House; 123 pages

Burke. Buckley. Limbaugh? Modern conservatism has decayed from the positive, pragmatic force its founders envisioned into a bitter resistance movement that's given up on fresh ideas, argues Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review.

While Richard Nixon backed national health insurance and Ronald Reagan tempered his muscular rhetoric with political flexibility, today's dominant conservatives are little more than "inverse Marxists," clenching an outdated dogma that would sooner see government destroyed than saved.

The result is a shrinking movement inhabiting a "fringe orbit" irrelevant to the needs of today's America, an intellectual flatlining confirmed by Barack Obama's victory.

Tanenhaus traces conservatism's history with respect and likens its crisis to the funk that bedeviled liberalism after the failures of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs (though he glosses over modern-day extremism on the left). His essay is ultimately an elegy: with the atrophy of conservative thought, the loss of genuine ideological debate leaves all of us poorer.


http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1920311,00.html

...that he likes HMOs, after being told that they're for-profit and try to minimize the amount of health care people get.

What kind of "national health insurance" did Nixon want?

that he did not sit with Nixon to negotiate something.

All we hear is one side of the tape - with Roger Moore's bias. I think that there is more to that.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/27/AR2009082703919.html?hpid=topnews

...per this quote which Jed Lewison of Daily Kos found:
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Kennedy said he would discuss "missed opportunities" as well as accomplishments. For example, Kennedy said, he has wondered whether Democrats should have taken a rare opportunity during the Nixon administration to accept Nixon's national healthcare proposal. While many Democrats believed the plan was flawed, it may have been better to sign onto it, given that decades later, the nation still has more than 40 million uninsured people, Kennedy said.

"I'll have to go back and look at whether we should have jumped on that. Did we make a mistake waiting?" Kennedy said.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/8/31/774631/-Kennedys-greatest-regret
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I emailed Steven Pearlstein to ask if he had an exact quote, and he replied that he didn't.

A director of documentaries is Michael Moore. One of the actors who played James Bond is Roger Moore.

The audio in "Sicko" has a conversation between two people.

inject into the conversation? All he did was play the unedited conversation between Nixon and Ehrlichman.

Chilling ... And spot on. They hate people. They worship the corporate dollar. End of story.

There's no clear spot to drive the stake.

Brwn Shirt Ankle Biters of lost Reason and Sanity is a cancerous Pathogen and must be exterminated...ya don't keep cancerous warts on your body...ya take um off....

as the current crop clearly demonstrates on an hourly basis.

Corporate control of our lives is only increasing.

An alliance, or fusion of mega corps, the military industrial complex, and/or theocrats, with Government is an anathema to conservatism The Reagan coalition carried the seeds of its own disintegration.