CHAVEZ: The conservative challenge

In response to Ms. Chavez's column saying that the Republicans now need a set of conservative policies to differentiate themselves from the Demopublican policies of the recent past, here is one proposed set: 1. Have the Congress reread the Constitution to discover that it is the job of Congress to determine how the country is to be run. By giving up all of that that power to the presidency, Congress has turned our presidents into strutting peacocks with delusions of grandeur, who have led our country into a long string of ill-advised foreign (and domestic) adventures. 2. Have the Congress reread the Constitution to discover the real job of the federal judiciary, and then regulate that judiciary accordingly. As is, the Congress delegates all of the messy heavy-lifting on the moral issues to the Supreme Court. That has given the unelected (and in practice, uncontrollable) Supreme Court so much power that it now constitutes a parallel government, ruling at the whims of the majority of its members. 3. Participate minimally in the UN, and get out of foreign-trade agreements that hand huge chunks of our national sovereignty over to foreign administrators over whom the American public has no control. As was so aptly stated by a Republican congressman recently, the U.S. is a country, not an economy. 4. Get out of the Middle East, and stay out. The U.S. forced the creation of the state of Israel in a region that patently did not want it there, because American Jews bought Harry Truman and paid him to do it (by funding his 1948 election campaign in return). If Israel has not learned how to survive on her own in 60 years, that's too bad, but it is now time for us to stop falling on our own sword to support her. 5. Convert our military from global mercenaries into the defense force for the U.S. Build fences across our borders, bring our military home, and have them seal those borders. Spend our defense budget reequipping to meet the new threats we face. Have customs inspection every cargo entering our country. Send air marshals on all airline flights, and stop harassing our own citizens at our airports. Round up all illegal aliens and send them home. 6. Reregulate the stock market back to the era of FDR, to change it back into a source of expansion money for corporations. Today the stock market is primarily a gambling den for speculators, which permits CEOs to reward themselves with obscene salaries for maximizing dividends by doing no R&D, and by shipping their manufacturing jobs overseas. (Similarly, our Big 3 car companies face irresistible pressure to build only high-end high-profit vehicles, no matter the market demand). 7. Denounce the global warming scam for what it is, and concentrate upon a doable domestic-energy policy.

Excellent post cg1. I'm with you all the way on this one. The only one I question is the Israel solution. I would have to think a lot more on that one.

Actually, quite an ignorant post CG1. I thought America learned a lesson from the clueless Father Coughlin-type "America Firsters". Apparently not. Just as you can't really get rid of cockroaches, you can't rid the country of stick-your-head-in-the-sand America Firsters. Usually it's just a different-flavored version of plain old anti-Semitism, but they just don't have the guts to admit they hate Jews (because of what that kind of hatred can lead to, i.e. the Holocaust) so they try as best they can to disguise it with stories about how "liberals" run the media, control our foreign policy, etc. Of course they don't refer to "Jews" per se, it's usually euphemisms like "Neo-Cons" or the "pro-Israel lobby". It's still the same ignorant hatred. Perhaps you should wear a bed sheet so folks can know you for who you really are.

Actually, there are a lot of compelling and coherent alternatives out there. The problem is that most of the forums in which those alternatives might gain public notice and objective evaluation are firmly in the hands of the liberal "progressive" elite, who will go to any lengths to protect their institutional monopolies. To regain their voices, conservatives must become the new radicals in education, politics, law, economics, media and religion, preserving the received wisdom of the ages and finding creative ways of applying it in our subverted, perverted culture.