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Where’s Your Hill?
When Roy Moore was in the process of being brought down in the Alabama Senate race last December, the standard response from the establishment side of the GOP was, “Look, Moore is a nutcase. This is not a court of law. There is no due process or presumption of innocence. He’s not the hill you want to die on.”
When Alex Jones was purged off of social media the response was, “This is not a government action, but the actions of private individuals. Besides, he’s a nutcase and this is not the hill you want to die on.”
Enter Brett Kavanaugh. As his reputation is destroyed by the minority party suddenly the establishment is appalled. Why? Well, primarily because even though he was nominated to SCOTUS by Donald Trump, Kavanaugh is seen as “one of us,” one of the good chaps whose pedigree of private high schools, Yale and all the right government clerkships and appointments was beyond question.
Is this the hill now? When you surrendered all of that territory before, when you tucked your collective tails between your legs and ran like scalded dogs, now you want to turn and fight? Look what you gave up before. Like the Alabama race, proceedings in the Senate Judiciary Committee are not the equivalent of a court of law. The ideas of due process and presumed innocence you gave away in December are a little hard to reclaim now. When you look at all of the private, non-government entities behind this smear job, how can you rebuke them?
Principles are funny things. If you don’t apply them to the people you dislike then they are unlikely to be of any use when you really need them.
Published in Politics
Ahem. In fact, Alabama rejected that loser.
You sure did. In other comments I spelled it out more fully: the Alabama GOP selected him, but the state as a whole rejected him.
After this evening’s press conference, are you really in a place to criticize?
Yes. I have seen both conventions. The Libertarians are a party of weirdos. The same cannot be said for the mainstream parties.
But, your contribution to the smear going on is to blame Trump. You claim to be for liberty, but you are for whatever hurts Trump. It is your north star.
It is so sad.
True. Not with the likes of Sen. Flake among them, they don’t have much basis for being smug about moral superiority.
That’s very interesting, because when Facebook or Twitter censors people, there are libertarians among us who say it’s not a matter of man’s relation to the state, and then they have nothing more to say about it.
I said all that I could about the Moore(Republican) vs. Jones (Democrat) matter here: http://ricochet.com/archives/more-moore-at-the-risk-of-wearinag-out-the-membership/.
All that I can say now is that I sure do wish that we had that Republican vote instead of Senator Jones’s.
Yes. Luther Strange would have been a solid vote. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to vote for him in the general.
Me too, M1919. Same with everybody here. But when a party nominates garbage, that’s what we get. Note that not one person here had anything to do with the outcome, yet there’s this air of “we allowed this”, “why did we permit this”…
Over 300 comments in, and I think the positions are clear.
For many, it seems, if the person appears in some way questionable in their character in your mind, then they do not deserve any assumption of innocence nor defense from accusations made without evidence. And any such defense of those people can only be explained by blind loyalty to ‘my side’.
Assuming they are guilty of such accusations, however, is not explained by blindness, but instead good judgement and careful choice of the hill to die on. To defend someone who might not win or might not be a solid conservative is just not worth the cost or effort.
Roy Moore may or may not be a lowlife. He lost his election costing the party a valuable seat. But does that justify injustice towards him, and if it does not, does it justify good men doing nothing?
I suppose it’s not really relevant even to the Roy Moore situation, but I’ve lived in several areas where I see young girls having babies starting at age 14 or even younger. The “fathers” are other teenage boys usually under 18 but even if they’re over 18 it may not be considered a criminal matter if there’s less than 3 years difference in age or whatever. But the main thing is, they don’t have and may never have either the ability or the willingness to support a “family.” So they get welfare, free housing, etc etc. And this often is the start or continuation of the cycle of poverty. Yet this is somehow basically acceptable, these days. But if the father were someone old enough to actually support a family and keep them off the taxpayer’s expense, it’s a crime.
Maybe someday, someone will be able to explain how that makes sense.
NO and NO
Well put. Freedom of speech allows Jones to put his views out there to be digested and discussed. It also allows us to either support those views or ridicule them. This is why the left must suppress conservative speech, because our ideas make too much sense . . .
We are morally superior. We are the only party that stands up for traditional morality. Yes, because we live in the real world, we sometimes decide to compromise and vote for a seriously flawed person, because the alternatives are worse.
The Democrats and Libertarians openly support wanton sexual immorality. Sorry, man, but there it is. It’s not necessarily every Democrat or every Libertarian, but those are the party platforms.
The Libertarian platform:
Here is the link so that you can check for yourself.
Amen, brother!
It goes further. We can also be flawed human beings ourselves, yet vote for candidates who uphold standards we might not meet—or them either.
As I’ve said before, not supporting flawed candidates (Republicans who say or do stupid things) allows a greater evil to occur (Democrats getting in office). To me, this is flawed thinking, and is most certainly not conservative.
Thanks, Stad, and good point. I am not a moral paragon myself on all occasions, and I don’t know anyone else who claims to be, except that one unforgettable fellow from Nazareth.
I made a comment in another post only Jesus and the Virgin Mary could meet the high standards national Republicans need in order not to abandon a nominee or candidate.
Oh wait, I forgot about Jesus and his cleansing of the temple . . . Prone to violence! Unworthy!
Not to mention that whole water-into-wine thing.
You realize He turned water into wine and Brett Kavanaugh got drunk on it?
And then he ran a train on the apostles.