THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

A MAN WITH A CONSCIENCE LOOKS AT THE JEFFORDS DEFECTION | 2001-05-25

Unlike conservatives, Jeffords is more interested in principles than in the Republican label. Wayne Morse, who made the same switch in 1955, also valued his liberal principles over the party label.

This fact leads us directly into another fact of history that liberals never mention, and that conservatives - ALL CONSERVATIVES BUT ME - have kept hidden: That fact is that Republican conservatives have NEVER valued principles over party.

No conservative Republican has ever considered the future of America more important than the Grand Old Party of Abraham Lincoln (Please see December 16, 2000, THE THING THAT WOULDN'T DIE).

In 1932, 1934 and 1936 the Republican Party almost ceased to exist outside of New England. Liberals took over the national Democratic Party, but conservatives stayed with the Democrats because they had enormous power in Congress because of their seniority. By 1936, less than a FIFTH of the House of Representatives was Republican and many of them were liberal Republicans.

In 1936, conservative Republicans had no power anywhere. If they had had any interest in conservative principles, they would have left the Party of Lincoln to its handful of liberals and voted for conservative Democrats. There is no record of any conservative Republican ever considering such a move.

So what did conservative Republicans do after the 1936 rout? They could have chosen to join their fellow conservatives in the Democratic Party and rule the country. At that time and for a generation to come, the American electorate contained a solid majority of Southern and ethnic conservatives, especially Northern Irish, and conservative Republicans in the Northeast and Midwest and West.

But putting principle before party never even occurred to Northern conservative Republicans. They simply gave their national party to their liberal-moderate minority. After 1936, to save the party label, Republicans began to nominate one moderate after another for the presidency.

From 1940 until very recently, conservative Southerners, Westerners, Midwesterners, and socially conservative Northeastern ethnics made up a solid majority of American voters. But liberals ran our national politics.

Because party labels meant more to conservatives than did principles, they were fatally split. The base of the Democratic Party was made up of Southern and ethnic conservatives. The base of the Republican Party was Midwestern and Western conservatives.

The South voted for anybody with a Democratic label. The Midwest voted for anybody with a Republican label. Conservatives would vote for anybody with the right party label, no matter what they stood for.

So liberals held the balance of power.

In plain English, the party label was more important to conservatives in both parties than the fate of their country or their principles.

It was conservative Democrats who finally put principle above party.

Finally, beginning in the 1950s, we conservative Democrats began to support the Goldwater-Reagan wing of the Republican Party. Ronald Reagan was one of those who left the Democratic Party to pursue their conservative beliefs.

We had a hard fight. Most Republican conservatives remained loyal to the moderate and liberal Party leaders. They backed Nixon. They backed Ford, Bush, and Dole. If there hadn't been so many Republican conservatives who backed them the party would have stayed conservative after 1960.

Lincoln Republicans are still at it. NATIONAL REVIEW, the magazine that represents respectable conservatism, is now conducting a vicious campaign against the Confederate flag. It demands that all conservatives unite behind the principles of Abraham Lincoln.

So Jeffords is not the real traitor. He is working for his leftist principles. Anyone with a conscience would rather have a Jeffords on their side than NATIONAL REVIEW and its kind of "conservatives."

HISTORY: HISTORY'S BUS | nationalsalvation.net

There was a very interesting comment which discussed "busses," meaning people on whom other people depend. For example, a small business owner is a bus on which all his workers and his family ride.

They pay their fare, but the ride can't take place without the "bus."

There is a lot of talk about "precious resources," which usually means semi-retarded kids society is supposed to dump money on so they can "be all that they can be."

But a society that concentrates on a kinder and gentler conservatism or such like is to that extent taking its mind off its buses. In Asia the society concentrated entirely on fawning over old men who sat around and said Wise Stuff while children passed out with hunger all around them.

The Wisdom Busses of China were broken down, and the society had lots of Wisdom and stagnation.

America has had a zero growth rate for going on two generations for the first time in our history. As Asia starved and talked about Wisdom, America has stagnated and talked about Social Progress.

We have long since discovered that the Social Progress we derived from our ideas of Nature, a society without the class distinctions and territoriality caused only by man's unnatural acts, is in fact the opposite of actual nature.

In fact, China threw out its Ancient Wisdom for Marxism, which is based precisely on the idea that all class distinctions and property and territoriality is artificial. Now China has found that that was as bad a Wisdom and is trading it in for capitalism and Social Progress.

In other words, as I suspect it has done for three thousand years, the Orient is adopting whatever it gets from Aryans.

China, by the way, is not even all that ancient. White India developed aquatic rice, the kind China is based on, and Aryan India developed the gurus, suspiciously like Chinese Wise Men, after the truly early Aryan invasions.

I've never seen any of this, especially the relationship of White India to China, discussed anywhere else.

But history's bus always seems to comfort those "Scythians" or that series of "Northern invasions," now called eastern invasion that kept coming in the Middle East.

So who can be called the bus of history?

The Middle East?

China?

Or those people nobody can trace who keep coming into history and causing its next stage?

WORDISM: SOCIAL EVOLUTION VERSUS CHRIST | nationalsalvation.net

It makes some people impatient when I go into Christian theology, but try to remember that I can only talk about things I know about. There may be a lot of philosophy you would rather hear about, but I don't KNOW it.

But I can give you examples about how the words of Christ became twisted into what is called Christianity, how the exact same Wordism Christ denounced, element by element, in his own society took over from what he preached. If my background were different, I would use other information, but I must use what I know.

The teachings Christ denounced were a product of societal evolution. They gave the priesthood power and wealth. Jesus made the concessions he had to make to stay ALIVE in his society, but if you get lost in the theology, you miss a more basic fact:

Jesus was denouncing the institutions that had survived for specific purposes in his own society. His own society was, in this sense, not too different from later societies.

To quote Kipling again,

"The bitch returns to her vomit

The sow returns to her mire

And the burnt fool's bandaged finger

Goes wabbling back to the fire."

It should surprise no one that the same societal evolution that produced what Jesus denounced would make the institutions that developed in his name a carbon copy of the one he denounced. I am sure the exact same process occurred in other cases, but this is the one I know about in detail.

The ability of ianity to get the wrong end of EVERY stick is flawless. Take The Lord's Prayer. When I read the text this comes from, I notice that Jesus was not primarily giving us a prayer. He said, "It is enough to call a fish a fish." He then gave a short prayer, one completely different from the endless moaning of the priesthood, as the way you should talk to God. It was a RADICAL idea for a person to talk directly to the Father, and to ask him first for one's daily bread, to promise him you would forgive others if he would forgive you, and to ask for guidance.

There was nothing specific the way a prayer is supposed to be, asking God to help Tiny Tim or explaining how you wish for good things. Jesus seemed to have this ridiculous notion that God knew what you needed better than you do: "Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil."

Then came the word that illustrated, "Call a fish a fish." He said,

"AMEN."

Schluss.

Period.

The End.

At the end of a prayer illustrating how to calla fish a fish, the word "For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory forever and ever" makes no sense at all. It's beautiful. I was raised with it and I love it, but it makes no sense at all.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I cannot remember a single passage in which Jesus asked people to Praise the Lord. That was what pagans did. Pagans would go and tell their gods they would do awful things to themselves if God would give them what they prayed for. They made Zeus and Minerva feel good, and if you have read the Odyssey, you know what happened to people who DIDN'T make Zeus or Minerva feel good.

In fact, the whole point of the Lord's Prayer is that you don't have a thing to OFFER God. Until that wonderfully poetic ending, the whole thing is a short, stark set of requests, what you need from God.

Jesus had another radical idea here. He seemed to think that God not only knew what you needed more than you did, but you didn't even have to tell God that he was something special.

But those who set the New Testament down were raised in the Old Testament tradition. You couldn't just stop a prayer without praising God. We hear the Lord's Prayer endlessly in church, but not the lesson that actually went with it.

But that praise at the end makes good poetry, good church stuff.

Another stick: "The poor we have always with us." We have all heard THAT one preached abut endlessly. But it was exactly what Jesus was NOT talking about. Tens of millions o words have been written about what this meant abut the treatment of the poor. Al the big, modern church leaders got together an agreed that their mission was to take care of the poor.

What Jesus SAID was that we have the poor with us always, but he was here about salvation. This is very embarrassing to the modern church, where being a minister or priest is a Profession that doesn't depend on that salvation stuff. Can you imagine a bunch of modern church leaders getting together and deciding their mission was Salvation?

If you read what Jesus said abut the poor, he was always warning about how the treatment of the poor might hurt the poor, but it would DAMN the rich. This was not Social Justice. It is what people today would call religious fanaticism.

The bottom line here is that people think of Christ as coming to knock down a particular set of institutions. So once he exposed them, they would go away. But what no one considers is that those Wordist institutions he denounced had a power of their OWN. If one realizes that, he will see that it was inevitable that the Christian theologians would evolve exactly the same institutions.

Wordism evolves in institutions with the same naturalness that a dog returns to his vomit and the pig returns to her mire.

THIS burnt fool's bandaged finger will NOT go wabbling back to the fire.

Shari:

It occurs to me that the book of revelation starts out with Christ judging the churches before it gets to anything about Armageddon etc.

I have been thinking that socially it is very much like when Jesus was on earth. I don't intend to burn my fingers again either.

ME:

Shari, it's good to see you get things straight.

In Innocents Abroad Mark Twain was on tour with a guy who "wanted to see the ruins of the CITIES condemned in Revelations." Twain had to explain to this fellow who thought he knew his Bible that it was the CHURCHES, not the CITIES that were condemned.

I had a standard joke I would tell Yankee preachers who misquoted the Bible at me. I would say, "You know, there was a big-budget, star-studied movie called 'The Bible', Charleton Heston was in it."

"But keep in mind that I'm from the Bible Belt. We didn't just see the movie, we read the BOOK."

LIBERALS AND O'REILLY SAY "DIVERSITY" MUST BE ENFORCED BECAUSE IT DOESN'T WORK | 2003-05-10

On one program O'Reilly criticized home schooling because of its lack of "diversity."

He then admitted home schooling provided a much better education , but that doesn't matter the way diversity does.

O'Reilly then proceeded to wonder out loud why, while more money is being poured into it, public education keeps getting worse.

It might just be because of "diversity."

"Diversity" is bad for real education. Children need to learn their ABCs at that age. They do not need to learn to study with rap music and shouting around them at the same time.

The District of Columbia spends about ten thousand dollars per year per student and its schools are in a state of collapse.

This "diversity" nonsense fits into the general pattern of "modern" education. Everything, especially "social adjustment" stuff, is more important than education.

That is the main reason public education gets worse and worse with more and more O'Reilly normally pushes integration in the name of "equal education."

But his having a fit about a separate prom shows he wants integration for its own sake. Your education doesn't include the prom.