While I have long been a fan of Barry Goldwater’s outspoken nature and commitment to conservative principles, my regard for the man increased when nearly twenty years ago, in the summer of 1989, I learned how he handled the arrest, at the height of the 1964 presidential campaign, of Walter Jenkins, the closest aide to his rival for the White House, then-President Lyndon Baines Johnson.  Jenkins had been arrested for having sex with a man in the men’s room at Washington, D.C. YMCA.

The then-GOP standard bearer refused to make political hay of the matter at a time when one could make political hay out of such things.  That refusal defined the decency of the then-Arizona Senator and future conservative icon.  He was a principled politician a gay man could admire.

In responding to Jack Shafer’s pieces in Slate, The Intolerable Smugness of Bill Moyers and More on Moyers, the longtime Johnson aide defines an attitude toward conservatives as identical to that of his ideological allies who believe their “ideological enemies” treat gays with scorn, “Sen. Goldwater and his allies in the press seized on Walter’s arrest as a sign of Washington’s ‘moral degeneration.’“  Wrong, Mr. Moyers, at least about Goldwater.  The historical record confirms what Goldwater wrote in his memoir:

Meantime, the White House anxiously awaited what we were going to say about the matter. It drove them crazy when I refused comment. Here was the cowboy who shot from the hip, the Scrooge who would put the penniless on the street, with no Social Security, the maniac who would blow our little children into the next kingdom in a nuclear Armageddon. If he would kill a million men and women, wouldn’t he destroy one individual? Why was the extremist pursuing moderation?

When the media clamor over the case had climbed to a fever pitch, I said the only matter which concerned the campaign was the national security aspect. We never spoke of it except to repeat the security factor in response to questions and pressure from the media. Our reply was always the same: The FBI was the competent agency to answer such questions.

(Emphasis added.)

I guess Bill Moyers was right, “his memory is unclear after so many years.”  Funny how that memory keeps a Republican in a bad light.  I guess he’s conditioned it to fit his imagination.

(more…)

Looks like LA is joining the ranks of cities hosting tea parties to protest the Obama Administration’s fiscal recklessness.

I got my sunglasses ready:

Looks like I’ll be heading out to the Santa Monica Pier on Friday morning February 27 from 9 to 10 AM. For more information, check the party’s facebook page.

Nick Gillespie anticipated my next post, so since he blogged about it first, I gotta give him credit (so read the whole thing)–and thank Glenn for linking the Reason editor’s observation:

If Obama is serious about restoring trust and confidence in the government’s ability to live within its gargantuan means (and he should be), he should start by rewriting the $410 billion Omnibus Spending Bill that the Democrats have just dropped like a big, wet, steaming, stinking pile of…pork barbecue.

I was going to say that at minimum, the president should threaten to veto the bill unless Congress eliminates its 8,570 earmarks. Then, if Congress sends it to him with the earmarks included, he should follow through on that threat.

Then, it will be up to congressional Republicans to sustain his veto by uniting against any attempt to override it.

It would be a chance for both the President and the GOP to show their mettle.

When I read that expression, “professionally offended,” in David Harsanyi’s column, I first thought he would be writing about those gay marriage advocates who readily dismiss supporters of traditional marriage as “haters.”  But, he was actually commenting on a recent cartoon in the New York Post:

It’s a discredit to our national confidence that each time some impolite thought — perceived or otherwise — is uttered, sketched or typed, a faction of professionally offended Americans engage in a collective hyper-sensitivity meltdown.

It has been a long-standing custom for opponents to shut down debate by tagging an adversary with some dreadful label. No one wants to be called a racist, a commie or a neocon.

Or a hater.

It seems that’s the strategy of gay marriage advocates, particularly given Sean Penn’s harangue at the Oscars.  They want to shame people into supporting gay marriage, not necessarily because it’s a good thing, but because they believe anyone who doesn’t favor “full equality” (whatever that means) for gay people must necessarily be a bad person.

Perhaps, I’m just comparing the two because my friend Dale Carpenter (one of the most thoughtful advocates of gay marriage) just e-mailed the link to a column of his that I had recently read in draft form.  And his wise words were in my mind when I followed Glenn’s link to Harsanyi’s column.

More sympathetic to the “No on 8″ campaign than most have been, Dale observes that those trying to defeat the ballot initiative, “were trying to overcome deeply embedded views about something Americans think is the foundation of responsible family life.”

That line really hit home to me.  It gets at at the essence of the opposition to same-sex marriage.  And it is important that advocates of same-sex marriage, like Dale, acknowledge that simple truth rather than let themselves become easily offended by opposition to the social change they favor.

Most advocates of traditional marriage have strongly held views about the meaning of that institution.  It’s not that they hate gay people.  It’s that they see gender difference at the heart of marriage.  And those who disagree with that interpretation should not let themselves be so readily offended by a heart-felt difference of opinion.

In announcing the nomination of former Washington State Governor Gary Locke to be the nation’s next Commerce Secretary, President Obama said, “We know that business not government is the engine of growth in this country. . . ”

I agree.  So, I guess that means he won’t be increasing taxes on business and will reduce regulations which stifle businesses, particularly small ones.  And those small ones do create the most new jobs in America.

Sometimes, the president sounds more like a Republican than his predecessor.  Just wish, on economic matters, he would act in a manner consistent with such rhetoric.

Whenever I defend former President Bush’s foreign policy to his critics, they will invariably remind me how America’s image abroad suffered under his administration.  We weren’t, they claimed, as well liked when he left office as we were when he came to power.

Sometimes, however, when you do the right thing, you earn the enmity of those who would rather take a different approach. All too often, world opinion is shaped by those who see diplomacy as the be-all and end-all of foreign policy, even when that means negotiating with tyrants who responding to diplomatic niceties with polite palaver while developing weapons of mass destruction, oppressing their own populations and threatening their neighbors.

Last month during his nation’s attack on terrorist targets in Gaza, former Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Natan Sharansky recounted how his government learned that being liked often came at the cost of his people’s security.

After a variety of terrorist attacks in 2001-02, “Israel held its fire, and the world indeed condemned terrorism. But the attacks only increased.“  When “more than 130 Israelis were killed in a single month,” the government shifted tactics.  It launched a military offensive against terrorist targets in the West Bank.

Even as Israel took “unprecedented measures to minimize civilian casualties, including refraining from using either aerial or artillery bombardment, putting its own soldiers at unprecedented risk,” world leaders rushed to condemn the Jewish State.

Yet, as the world condemned Israel, terrorist attacks declined dramatically.  Life even improved for the Palestinians in the West Bank.  Doing the right thing increased the venom directed against the Jewish State.

Well, now, it seems that the Obama Administration seems to equate decreasing the volume of venom as doing the right thing.

As the United Nations plans its Durban II “anti-racism” conference, Administration officials would rather play go along get along than stand up to a world body eager to single out Israel for racism while ignoring real racial discrimination in other nations.  As Anne Bayefsky put it, “Obama’s Durban II team slipped easily into the U.N.’s anti-Israel and anti-Jewish environs, taking the approach that ‘fitting in’ was best accomplished by staying silent.“  (Just read the whole thing.)

As the US “fits in” just to gain standing in world public opinion, we forfeit the opportunity to condemn the hijacking of an “anti-racism” conference by those hell-bent on maligning the Jewish State.

This is not learning from history, it’s repeating its mistakes.  Just ask the Israelis.

I didn’t watch it as I had an even to run for my college alumni association’s entertainment group (which I head).   And anyway, if I everyone watched these things, what purpose would live-blogging serve?

So, thanks to Ann and Steve, I think I got the gist of the specch.

And at 8:34 Central Time, Ann wondered, “Whatever happened to all the hope? This is leaden and lecture-y.”

Three minutes later at 7:37PM Mountain Time, Steve opined, “It’s rich that a guy who just added a trillion dollars to the deficit is complaining about a trillion dollar deficit.”

So, I guess the president spoke fast, wasn’t very inspiring and talked out of both sides of his mouth.  Such is my summary of the posts of the best live blogress and best live blogger in the business.

Thanks to them, I could get the gist of the speech while enjoying an evening with a crowd of Obama-loving individuals trying to make their way in the entertainment industry.  I wonder if it means anything that they choose to attend this event rather than watch the speech. . . .