Jack Hunter: 'Downgrading Liberalism?'

Source:The Atlantic- the self-described Southern Avenger blogger, Jack Hunter.

Source:The FreeState 

"I’ve been mulling over Dan McCarthy’s rich meditation on intellectual splits in the right, evoked by the Jack Hunter controversy. Salon editor Joan Walsh was right to observe that the attack on Hunter was really an attack on Rand Paul for his father’s skepticism about imperial wars and American obeisance to the Israel, a skepticism assumed to have been at least partially transmitted to his more mainstream son. The writers who have gone to town in attacking Hunter—Alana Goodman,Jamie Kirchik, Jennifer Rubin—are all well-entrenched in right-wing Zionist advocacy journalism. Though photographs of a top Senate aide in a Confederate mask do make for entertaining imagery on the local news, no one else seems to care very much.

Walsh notes that in the modern GOP there are leaders “correct on the righteousness” of the Civil War or the Iraq War, “but rarely both.” If, as she and I assume, the smart positions are pro-Lincoln and anti-George W. Bush, the simple explanation is that northern moderates are now rare in the Republican Party. Five of the seven GOP members of Congress who voted against the Iraq war resolution were moderates from non-Confederate states, unlikely to have Stonewall Jackson memorabilia in their dens. Add to them Rhode Island’s Lincoln Chaffee, the sole GOP senator to speak out against the Iraq War, and you have a fairly representative slice of the vanishing brand of moderate Republicanism, absent perhaps its Rockefeller-Jacob Javits pro-Israel wing." 

You can read the rest of this article at The American Conservative

"Jack Hunter: Downgrading Conservatism?" 

Source:Jack Hunter- on the future of American conservatism.

From Jack Hunter

I blame the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress’s of the early 2000s with their two-trillion in tax cuts, that weren’t paid for and their two unpaid for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and their Medicare expansion, and their constant borrow and spending that stayed with President Bush throughout his administration. 

I also blame President Obama with his Democratic Congress in his first two years for failing to reverse the Bush neoconservative  policies. Leaving in the borrow and spending to deal with the Great Recession. And of course the Great Recession, as well as the Democratic and Republican leaderships for their inability to take on their fringes when it comes to the debt doing things they view as completely unacceptable, for the downgrade of 2011.

But Jack Hunter is dead wrong to blame what he views as liberalism, a warped view at that, for the American downgrade. Since it is really the Great Recession that has had a lot to do with the current debt situation. Along with two unpaid for wars that are now in the trillions of dollars and both Democrats and Republicans increasing the role of government. As they’ve both decreased the revenue sources to pay for that government expansion.

If you really want to blame the downgrade on anyone, blame it on the policies and people who put those policies in place for the downgrade. I know that sounds like a warped concept, but commonsense tends to sound warped in Washington to begin with. 

President Bush, comes in with a four-trillion debt and leaves with an eleven-trillion debt and the Great Recession. Which didn’t happen by accident. Again, the two unpaid for wars that are still not over. Three-trillion in tax cuts, that weren’t paid for, that didn’t have much if any positive effect in the economy. The seven-hundred-billion dollar Medicare expansion from President Bush that wasn’t paid for. Most of the spending in the Obama Administration, has been to deal with the Great Recession. Not to create new Federal programs. If you want to downgrade anything, downgrade Bush/Cheney neoconservatism.