In 1981, Bill Armstrong (freshman Senator from CO) said the same thing to Reagan and Howard Baker. Strom Thurmond basically told him to sit down and shut up. I wouldn't call fiscal wariness a yahoo sentiment, but it will never be a majority view in American politics.

Forget the line item veto and the balanced budget amendments - go with a proposal to limit the growth of spending to match the population growth (like CO has done). A President who won't veto a budget bill doesn't deserve a line item veto, anyway.

Bush has not vetoed a single spending bill since he took office.

Republicans control Congress. Why would you veto your own party's bills?

Because your own party is spending money like drunken Democrats.

To remind Bill Thomas and Ted Stevens that they are not Robert Byrd, and that their political futures depend on the man at 1600.

You guys gotta stop reading Reason and the American Conservative.

It's worth our while to trade spending for structural reform. I just wish we were getting more structural reform for the money.

pj:

slippery slope...just start the reform going

The constituency for medicare (although peaking)
will eventually pass. People who can expect to
live well past the age of 70 will eventually
create a constituancy for real wealth creation
rather than fixed income entitlements. The
generation now collecting most of the benefits
of medicare/social security came of age expecting
these programs to be in place so it would seem
strange to assume they could be converted.

The bigger long-term problem for Feeney is probably not that he voted against the Medicare bill -- the White House will need him on some close vote in the future -- but the fact that his conversation with Bush, and the fact that Bush allegedly hung up on him, ended up being recounted in the pages of The Hill. That brands him forever as a leaker in the eyes of Bush and his aides.

Republicans as the party of government, "conservatives" as the ideologists of government, disparaging skeptics of vast entitlement schemes: the Promised Land indeed. Count me with the yahoos.

Paul:

Quite. If only we could go back to the days of conservative ideological purity, when Medicare was passed in the first place because conservatism was powerless, as opposed to now when we can begin reforming it but have to sully ourselves. The ivory tower is so much neater than the battlefield.

So I guess Goldwater, Taft, Buckley, Chambers, et al. never entered the battlefield? Effete ivory tower types, those, eh?

I don't demand ideological purity; but I do object when conservatism transforms into the right wing of liberalism.

Paul:

Excellent examples. None ever governed, but all died pure (well, not WFB yet).

Some have governed and died pure. St. Augustine comes to mind. He never gave an inch to the heretics when it came to core principles ("Hammer of the Donatists," they called him), even as the world collapsed all around him. The Vandals were on the doorstep of Hippo on the day he died.

Of course, that was St. Augustine . . .

Does Orrin deny the pessimism at the heart of conservative? A failure to triumph is hardly the same as an unwillingness to "enter the battlefield."

Orrin cheers capitulations that bring notional power, that is, the power to govern, but only within the confines of liberalism.

OK, so we won't abolish the Department of Education: we will expand it, just like you liberals would, but please, can we at least have them test students?

Don't worry, we won't try to eliminate Medicare. Oh no. In fact, we will grow it, but can ya give us a break at let us add some market-based tinkering?

An essay discussing St. Augustine.

So you think it's worth staying pure yourself at the cost of the Vandals ruling after? That elevates the idea of self over society to a degree no conservative should accept. The point is to conserve society, not yourself.

Maybe so, but don't expect me to preserve any Senator or Rep. who wants to snort and gobble like the Byrd.

That was plain sophistry, OJ. Augustine was no emperor. He was a bishop in a provincial outpost. But my point was that he did govern without capitulating to the heresies of the day.

But if you insist, Christianity does unquestionably posit that individual immortal souls are of immeasurably greater worth than mere transient societies.

I do not spend my time attacking Bush as a sellout. In fact, I generally like him. But I cannot see the sense in belittling his right-wing skeptics. Should he receive no pressure from the right? Should it all be from his left?

If Christianity says your own soul is worth more than those of everyone else in the society you help destroy, then I'm no Christian and Christ should have saved Himself.

Eric Hoffer explained why we have to fight the true believers:

Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and
die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions,
that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded
of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect. The rejection of
approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes
freedom, tolerance, and equity.

Mr.Judd is first and foremost a party man,left,right,doesn't matter.

I think OJ has a good case ... but I think the "wahoos" do too. The fact is, having a few conservatives play hard to get didn't cost the legislation, and it may create extra leverage in future bargaining vis a vis the Democrats. As long as the conservatives would have supplied votes as needed, it's fine to cast some votes on principle.

M:

My party is more important than my delicate feelings, for sure.

Morality and governance is the most tricky of business. One must, alas, invariably compromise, but where, and to what extent?

Ah there's the rub.

So remind me why it's oh so necessary to drag the good St. Augustine into this conversation.

Unless it's because George Bush has been heard, during his midnight forays down White House halls, fervently whispering with proud head bowed, "Make me fiscally responsible, Lord, but not just yet"....

So now I am a nihilist, huh? I have a hard time understanding how calling a politician to account according to the principles of the very philosophy he claims makes one a nihilistic utopian.

Can you not see how this mentality is exploited by the Left? The Left acknowledges and credits a certain "respectable" Right opposition, upon which it of course heaps its abuse, ignoring with complete contempt anyone to the right of the respectable conservatives. The silence is more damaging than the abuse. In effect, it signals that anyone outside this credited opposition is beyond the pale.

For instance, the NY Times hires David Brooks, calls him a conservative, and then pats itself on the back for its own magnanimity in giving voice to a Neanderthal. What it has done (or is trying to do) is turn a moderate liberal into a "conservative," thereby discrediting real conservatives. It is a variation of Hegel's dialectic: radicals push implacably left, and drag the opposition with them. The Left creates its own opposition.

Half the opinions promulgated by National Review in, say, 1980 are today well outside the mainstream of "respectable" conservative opinion today.

What I am really objecting to here is the dreary spectacle of fine conservatives like Orrin Judd abeting this process by disparaging any right-wing opposition to a governing conservative.

Finally, OJ: do you dispute that Christianity is ultimately about souls, which, being immortal, will outlast any human society on earth?

Luke 12: "But God said to him, 'Fool! This night your soul is required of you; and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?'"

Or again, Matthew 16: "For what will it profit a man, if he gains the whole world and forfeits his life? Or what shall a man give in return for his life?"

This is not to endorse a contempt for the world. There have been a thousand struggles in Christian history to defeat various Gnostic or Manichaean heresies. But it is the very tension represented by that old formula "in the world but not of it" which is at the core of Christendom's tremendous creative energy.

Paul:

Yes. I'm disputing the notion that keeping your own soul "pure" is more important than the kind of society you help create. After all, it's not as if your "purity" buys you eternity. We can't bind God, especially not by our adherence to a mere political philosophy.

On the political point: you seem to require that, on the basis of principle, the GOP dismantle Medicare, Social Security, public education, etc. immediately, rather than begin the reform processes that may make them effective programs. That's neither conservative, nor sensible. Such a radical transformation would all but certainly remove them from power semi-permanently, causing massive disruption to society and thwarting your very purposes in the long run. Of course, they would regain their purity....

OJ:

I recognize that there is a Burkean argument for gradual reformation rather than abrupt abolition. I think it is a strong argument. The administration may or not may be adopting such a strategy. I happen to think they are not; that they are more interested in buying off various sections of voters. I hope I am wrong about that.

But my dispute with you, to repeat, is your insistence on characterizing principled conservative opponents of this or that piece of administration legislation as yahoos and utopians (and now nihilists, it appears).

And the lectures about purity are growing tiresome, seeing as I have not once brought up the question of purity, whether in the context of theology or philosophy.

I simply did not say that "keeping your own soul 'pure' is more important than the kind of society you help create." No soul is pure; that is the essence of the doctrine of Original Sin, a doctrine to which I wholehearted subscribe. But I do maintain, with the Christian Church across the ages, that God values souls over societies, that He calls man into friendship with Him not as societies but as individual souls.

Paul:

So, you're George W. Bush, Dennis Hastert and Bill Frist rolled into one--what would you have done this year? The far Right has done a lot of bitching but they've offered no constructive ideas that I'm aware of. Of particular hilarity is their negative comparisons of Bush to Reagan, who they complained about similarly in 1983 but now worship.

If you're George Bush, if you're convinced that your most important task is to win the war on terror and if you look at the candidates for the Democratic nomination and conclude that none of them is committed to or capable of fighting that war at all, let alone as well as you will, don't you make whatever compromises you have to on matters of secondary importance in order to stay in office? Aren't you right?

James Pinkerton has TCS essay right up our alley.

Pinkerton is a libertarian isolationist at this point. And he hates W. He should be writing for Anti-war.com and LewRockwell. Here are three simple questions for conservatives:

(1) Would Burke have supported intervening to stop the French Revolution, even though it was only the French being oppressed?

(2) Given that we have an Education Department, Medicare, Social Security, etc. and that all are popular, would Burke leave them as they or try to reform them so that they return responsibility to the beneficiaries?

(3) Gay marriage: the damage having not yet been done; would Burke oppose letting it be done?

I'd answer:

(1) Yes, intervention is okay, though not necessary.

(2) Reform.

(3) Oppose gay marriage.

No?

Pinkerton irks me too, but he is difficult to categorize, which makes him interesting. I went after him for his biotech enthusiasm. But it's revealing that he has made similarly observations as the right-wing critics of W., even if he does celebrate their implications.

It's hard to say where Burke would have come out on Iraq intervention, but he sure was unsparing about British imperial abuses and overreach (he thundered against his own countrymen during the American Revolution in two very famous speeches**, and led the impeachment of a prominent Imperial governor in India).

On gay marriage, it is interesting to note that he was scathing in his condemnation of marriage in Jacobin France, accusing them of having reduced it to "the vilest concubinage." Ring a bell?

On state entitlements, it is even harder to extrapolate Burke's thought. But I do think that the "gradual reform" argument is true to his temper.

** Hear these stirring words from a true master of the English language:

"The temper and character which prevail in our Colonies are, I am afraid, unalterable by any human art. We can not, I fear, falsify the pedigree of this fierce people, and persuade them that they are not sprung from a nation in whose veins the blood of freedom circulates. The language in which they would hear you tell them this tale would detect the imposition. Your speech would betray you. An Englishman is the unfittest person on earth to argue another Englishman into slavery."

Skeptics of intervention might latch on that profound remark about a people's "temper and character" being "unalterable by any human art."

Kirk was dubious about the democratizing mission:

http://www.townhall.com/hall_of_fame/kirk/kirk274.html

Hey, synchronicity. As a clicked on the comments, I was thinking about the Star Trek theme that humans prefer hard freedom to soft slavery (right up until they're irradiated), and there you are citing Kirk.

Paul/Orrin

Please don't ever stop arguing, you two.

Peter:

For awhile we were both working Saturday mornings and the arguments would start at 5am.

Well, I don't get in until 7am on Saturdays, but it is still pretty slow . . .