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    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    The Conservative Case for Voting for Clinton

    The Conservative Case for Voting for Clinton

    Why support a candidate who rejects your preferences and offends your opinions? Don’t do it for her—do it for the republic, and the Constitution.

    Brian Snyder / Reuters

    David Frum Nov 2, 2016 2016 Election

    If the polls are correct, many disaffected Republicans are making their peace with Donald Trump in the final hours of the 2016 campaign. The usual term for this process is “returning home.” This time, we need a new phrase. The familiar Republican home has been bulldozed and replaced by a Trump-branded edifice. It will require long and hard work to restore and rebuild what has been lost.

    Between now and then, however, there is a ballot to face. Last week, I advanced the best case I could for each of the available options. Now, however, comes the time for choosing—and for explicating the reasons for that choice.

    Those attempting to rally reluctant Republicans to Trump seldom waste words on the affirmative case for the blowhard businessman. What is there to say in favor of a candidate who would lie even about his (non) support for a charity for children with AIDS?

    Instead, the case for Trump swiftly shifts to a fervid case against Hillary Clinton. Here for example are some lines from an op-ed coauthored by Bill Bennett, a high conservative eminence and former secretary of education, and F.H. Buckley, a law professor, Trump supporter, and sometime speechwriter.

    Consider, then, what would happen were the “Clinton Cash” machine to move into the White House. We’d have a government with the morals of a banana republic; and crony capitalism, the silent killer of the American economy, would increasingly burden entrepreneurs. Wasteful regulations, drafted to benefit the clients of K Street lobbyists, would transfer wealth from dispersed lower and middle-class Americans to the rich and well-connected.

    The courtier class of Clinton donors would flourish, but woe to those who would fail to partner with the government. It might not be a kleptocracy, but it would be a huge move in that direction.

    Worse still, all the powers of the state would be unleashed against political enemies, with tax audits, EPA investigations, and charges brought under one of the numberless and technical federal public welfare offences. Montesquieu defined political liberty as the “tranquility of spirit which comes from the opinion each one has of his security,” and a Clinton administration would see to it that its political opponents would never know such tranquility.

    We saw a bit of this during Bill Clinton’s presidency, and (whatever else might be said about him) he didn’t have a mean bone in his body. With Mrs. Clinton it would be far worse. She is a very different sort of person from her spouse, and much more closely resembles a Richard Nixon, a Nixon without his accomplishments and with a fawning media that could be relied upon to defend her when it counted, as well as a corrupt administration that would back her to the hilt.

    The conclusion that follows from such sizzling philippics is that anybody, literally anybody, wearing an “R” by his name should be preferred to the demonic Clinton. “Everybody on this stage is better than Hillary Clinton,” argued former Florida Governor Jeb Bush in the sixth Republican debate, January 2016. Bush surely did not believe that, but in the moment, it must have seemed a forgivable fib. Hillary Clinton would have paid a similar compliment to Bernie Sanders on a Democratic debate stage, but who doubts that privately she would have preferred Jeb Bush to the cranky Vermont socialist?

    Demonology aside, most conservatives and Republicans—and yes, many non-conservatives and non-Republicans—will recognize many of the factual predicates of the critiques of Hillary Clinton’s methods and character. The Clintons sold access to a present secretary of state and a potential future president in pursuit of personal wealth. Hillary Clinton does indeed seem a suspicious and vindictive personality. For sure, a President Clinton will want to spend and regulate even more than the Obama administration has done.

    Like Henny Youngman, however, the voter must always ask: compared to what?

    One of only two people on earth will win the American presidency on November 8. Hillary Clinton is one of those two possibilities. Donald Trump is the only other.

    Yes, I fear Clinton’s grudge-holding. Should I fear it so much that I rally to a candidate who has already explicitly promised to deploy antitrust and libel law against his critics and opponents? Who incited violence at his rallies? Who ejects reporters from his events if he objects to their coverage? Who told a huge audience in Australia that his top life advice was: "Get even with people. If they screw you, screw them back 10 times as hard. I really believe it”? Who idealizes Vladimir Putin, Saddam Hussein, and the butchers of Tiananmen as strong leaders to be admired and emulated?

    Should I be so appalled by the Clinton family’s access-selling that I prefer instead a president who boasts of a lifetime of bribing politicians to further his business career? Who defaults on debts and contracts as an ordinary business method, and who avoids taxes by deducting the losses he inflicted on others as if he had suffered them himself? Who cheated the illegal laborers he employed at Trump Tower out of their humble hourly wage? Who owes hundreds of millions of dollars to the Bank of China? Who refuses to disclose his tax returns, perhaps to conceal his business dealings with Vladimir Putin’s inner circle?

    To demonstrate my distaste for people whose bodies contain mean bones, it’s proposed that I give my franchise to a man who boasts of his delight in sexual assault? Who mocks the disabled, who denounces immigrant parents whose son laid down his life for this country, who endorses religious bigotry, and who denies the Americanism of everyone from the judge hearing the fraud case against Trump University to the 44th president of the United States?

    I’m invited to recoil from supposedly fawning media (media, in fact, which have devoted more minutes of network television airtime to Clinton’s email misjudgment than to all policy topics combined) and instead empower a bizarre new online coalition of antisemites, misogyists, cranks, and conspiracists with allegedly ominous connections to Russian state spy agencies?

    Is this real life?

    To vote for Trump as a protest against Clinton’s faults would be like amputating a leg because of a sliver in the toe; cutting one’s throat to lower one’s blood pressure.

    I more or less agree with Trump on his signature issue, immigration. Two years ago, I would have rated immigration as one of the very most important issues in this election. But that was before Trump expanded the debate to include such questions as: “Should America honor its NATO commitments?” “Are American elections real or fake?” “Is it OK for a president to use the office to promote his family business?” “Are handicapped people comical?”

    If we arrive at the bizarre endpoint where such seemingly closed questions are open to debate, partisan rancor has overwhelmed and overpowered the reasoning functions of our brains. America's first president cautioned his posterity against succumbing to such internecine hatreds: “The spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension … leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.” George Washington’s farewell warning resounds with reverberating relevance in this election year.

    We don’t have to analogize Donald Trump to any of the lurid tyrants of world history to recognize in him the most anti-constitutional personality ever to gain a major-party nomination for the U.S. presidency. I cannot predict whether Trump would succeed in elevating himself “on the ruins of public liberty.” The outcome would greatly depend on the resolve, integrity, and courage of other leaders and other institutions, especially the Republican leaders in Congress. To date, their record has not been reassuring, but who knows: Maybe they would discover more courage and independence after they bestowed the awesome powers of the presidency than they did while Trump was merely a party nominee. Or maybe not.

    What we should all foresee is that a President Trump will certainly try to realize Washington’s nightmare. He must not be allowed to try.

    That Donald Trump has approached so near the White House is a bitter reproach to everybody who had the power to stop him. I include myself in this reproach. Early on, I welcomed Trump’s up-ending of some outdated Republican Party dogmas—taking it for granted that of course such a ridiculous and obnoxious fraud could never win a major party’s nomination. But Trump did win. Now, he stands within a percentage point or two or at most four of the presidency of the United States.

    Having failed to act promptly at the outset, it’s all the more important to act decisively before it’s too late. The lesson Trump has taught is not only that certain Republican dogmas have passed out of date, but that American democracy itself is much more vulnerable than anyone would have believed only 24 months ago. Incredibly, a country that—through wars and depression—so magnificently resisted the authoritarian temptations of the mid-20th century has half-yielded to a more farcical version of that same threat without any of the same excuse. The hungry and houseless Americans of the Great Depression sustained a constitutional republic. How shameful that the Americans of today—so vastly better off in so many ways, despite their undoubted problems—have done so much less well.

    I have no illusions about Hillary Clinton. I expect policies that will seem to me at best counter-productive, at worst actively harmful. America needs more private-market competition in healthcare, not less; lighter regulation of enterprise, not heavier; reduced immigration, not expanded; lower taxes, not higher. On almost every domestic issue, I stand on one side; she stands on the other. I do not imagine that she will meet me, or those who think like me, anywhere within a country mile of half-way.

    But she is a patriot. She will uphold the sovereignty and independence of the United States. She will defend allies. She will execute the laws with reasonable impartiality. She may bend some rules for her own and her supporters’ advantage. She will not outright defy legality altogether. Above all, she can govern herself; the first indispensable qualification for governing others.

    So I will vote for the candidate who rejects my preferences and offends my opinions. (In fact, I already have voted for her.) Previous generations accepted infinitely heavier sacrifices and more dangerous duties to defend democracy. I’ll miss the tax cut I’d get from united Republican government. But there will be other elections, other chances to vote for what I regard as more sensible policies. My party will recover to counter her agenda in Congress, moderate her nominations to the courts, and defeat her bid for re-election in 2020. I look forward to supporting Republican recovery and renewal.

    This November, however, I am voting not to advance my wish-list on taxes, entitlements, regulation, and judicial appointments. I am voting to defend Americans' profoundest shared commitment: a commitment to norms and rules that today protect my rights under a president I don’t favor, and that will tomorrow do the same service for you.

    Vote the wrong way in November, and those norms and rules will shudder and shake in a way unequaled since the Union won the Civil War.

    I appreciate that Donald Trump is too slovenly and incompetent to qualify as a true dictator. This country is not so broken as to allow a President Trump to arrest opponents or silence the media. Trump is a man without political ideas. Trump's main interest has been and will continue to be self-enrichment by any means, no matter how crooked. His next interest after that is never to be criticized by anybody for any reason, no matter how justified—maybe most especially when justified. Yet Trump does not need to achieve a dictatorship to subvert democracy. This is the age of “illiberal democracy,” as Fareed Zakaria calls it, and across the world we’ve seen formally elected leaders corrode democratic systems from within. Surely the American system of government is more robust than the Turkish or Hungarian or Polish or Malaysian or Italian systems. But that is not automatically true. It is true because of the active vigilance of freedom-loving citizens who put country first, party second. Not in many decades has that vigilance been required as it is required now.

    Your hand may hesitate to put a mark beside the name, Hillary Clinton. You’re not doing it for her. The vote you cast is for the republic and the Constitution.

    http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...-trump/506207/
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  2. #2
    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    David Frum, a CANADIAN-AMERICAN.

    Born in Toronto, Canada,[1] Frum is the son of the late Barbara Frum (née Rosberg), a well-known, New York-born, journalist and broadcaster in Canada, and the late Murray Frum, a dentist, who later became a real estate developer, philanthropist and art collector. Frum's sister, Linda Frum, is a member of the Senate of Canada.

    Frum is married to the writer Danielle Crittenden, the stepdaughter of former Toronto Sun editor Peter Worthington. The couple has three children.[7] He is a distant cousin of economist Paul Krugman.[8]
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Frum

    LOL!!! This dude ain't no conservative. But people need to remember, Republicans are not just "conservative". We're Republicans, and that means social liberal, fiscal conservative. Social liberal means government stays out of personal lives, defends our civil and constitutional rights. Fiscal conservative means we defend our country, protect our trade and jobs, and promote our own people in terms of jobs and income, because these are the fiscally responsible things to do to limit government in both our lives and pocketbooks.

    Frum is a socialist globalist. How or why he ever thought he was a "conservative", let alone a Republican is beyond me. Republicans oppose everything Hillary stands for. We oppose open borders, we oppose free trade treason, we oppose government run mandates and meddling, we oppose useless wars, we oppose massive permitted immigration, we hate illegal immigration, we don't want refugees coming here when we have 94 million Americans out of the work force, because e can't afford them, we oppose gun control, and we despise CORRUPTION.

    Frum obviously wrote his stupid article before the FBI leaks and learning that they were investigating Clinton not only for her private email server wrongdoing, but also over the Clinton Foundation pay to play. Frum obviously didn't know when he wrote his stupid article that the FBI has confirmed with 99% accuracy that at least 5 foreign enemy intelligence agencies hacked into Hillary's server that had top secret information on it. And Obama knew all about it. He used a fake name to communicate with Hillary on her server. I"m sure we'll see all those before this is over.

    This will be far worse than Watergate. Sorry WaPo, your hateful obsession against Trump has cost you a Pulitzer. Bret Baier of Fox News will be the one who will win it because he broke the story on the FBI agents fighting for justice against their own Justice Department High Officials and Baier is the one who got the amazing story CONFIRMING that at lest 5 foreign intelligence agencies got everything they wanted off of Hillary's incredibly illegal private email server.

    Anyway, back to David Frum, there's an old saying, give 'em enough rope and they'll hang themselves. With these stupid people who write stupid articles, we should say give 'em enough pens and they'll expose themselves.

    You exposed yourself David Frum, you're not a conservative, and your nothing even remotely akin to a Republican. You're a Socialist Globalist from Canada who exposed himself.
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    MW
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    Judy wrote:

    Republicans are not just "conservative". We're Republicans, and that means social liberal, fiscal conservative. Social liberal means government stays out of personal lives, defends our civil and constitutional rights.
    Many Republicans consider themselves social conservatives. For example, social conservatives do not support late term abortion, homosexual marriage, same sex parenting, or bathroom choice for transgenders. I would say the party as a whole is comprised of more folks that consider themselves social conservative vice social liberal. Actually the 2016 GOP platform validates this. So no, being a Republican does not necessarily mean you're a social liberal. The truth matters.

    A social conservative could never support Hillary Clinton.
    Last edited by MW; 11-03-2016 at 12:00 PM.

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    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    Yes, some Republicans are social conservatives, (as are some Democrats), and it is this group that has inserted the invasion of government into one's personal lives into the Republican Platform at the Convention in recent years which is why there are fewer Republicans than Democrats, why women's organizations oppose Trump, why most gay rights organizations oppose Trump, why many social liberal Republicans moved to the Democratic Party, why Trump may lose this election, and we all might lose our country.

    Truth matters.
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    MW
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    Quote Originally Posted by Judy View Post
    Yes, some Republicans are social conservatives, (as are some Democrats), and it is this group that has inserted the invasion of government into one's personal lives into the Republican Platform at the Convention in recent years which is why there are fewer Republicans than Democrats, why women's organizations oppose Trump, why most gay rights organizations oppose Trump, why many social liberal Republicans moved to the Democratic Party, why Trump may lose this election, and we all might lose our country.

    Truth matters.
    I'm not sure if many, or any for that matter, social conservatives are lurking within the Democrat ranks, but if they are, the group is insignificantly small. Social conservatives on the other hand are the majority of the Republican party. Right or wrong, a lot of your other comments are just opinion. Social issues are a big part of what actually differentiates Republicans from Democrats. What I mean is, most folks identifying specifically as Republican or Democrat aren't normally very flexible when it comes to issues such as abortions, homosexual marriage, gun control, and illegal immigration. Of course there are others, I just touched on few items I don't consider myself flexible on.

    In summary, I still say it is incorrect to attempt to pass off Republicans as social liberals. While there may be a minority in the party that consider themselves social liberals, the majority are socially conservative.

    Judy wrote:

    Republicans are not just "conservative". We're Republicans, and that means social liberal, fiscal conservative. Social liberal means government stays out of personal lives, defends our civil and constitutional rights.

    "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" ** Edmund Burke**

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    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    Social conservatism is not something you want to boast about, MW.
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    MW
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    Quote Originally Posted by Judy View Post
    Social conservatism is not something you want to boast about, MW.
    That is where you and I differ greatly. I have absolutely no qualms at all about admitting that I am a social conservative. Opposing gay marriage, late term abortions, illegal immigration, and boys in girl locker rooms is certainly nothing to be ashamed of. Folks that support these things would probably be more welcome among Democrats IMO.

    "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" ** Edmund Burke**

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    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    Opposing illegal immigration is fiscal conservatism, not social conservatism. Illegal immigration is against the law because of the economic impact of such unsustainable overpopulation on American Workers, American Taxpayers, and American Citizens.

    I didn't say your views were something to be ashamed of, I said they were nothing to boast about. But you might keep in mind that when you want government to be the authority on these social matters, you have subscribed to a social authoritarianism that Republicans have historically opposed, which is the "freedom for me, but not for thee" syndrome.

    It was Republicans, not "social conservatives", who fought a war to end slavery, who fought for equal rights, who fought for workers rights, who fought for women's rights, and who fought for civil rights. It was Republicans who ended segregation, not "social conservatives". It was Republicans who did these things for the people of our country, not "social conservatives".

    Forcing pregnant young girls and women into childbirth against their will is not a Republican philosophy.

    Forcing gay couples to live in sin or lead miserable lonely lives separated from a normal family is not a Republican philosophy.

    Forcing transgender children to use a bathroom where they will be teased and harmed is not a Republican philosophy.

    Those acts of force are social authoritarianism against people who are different than you, and that is the core of the "social conservative" philosophy.

    That's why being a "social conservative" is nothing to boast about. If that's who you are, then fine, you're free to hold those views, this is a free country, it's just nothing to brag about, in the opinion of this Republican.
    Last edited by Judy; 11-03-2016 at 08:26 PM.
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    MW
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    Opposing illegal immigration is fiscal conservatism, not social conservatism.
    Okay, illegal immigration could be used as a fiscal argument or social, depends on the specific argument.

    "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing" ** Edmund Burke**

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  10. #10
    Senior Member Judy's Avatar
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    Legal immigration in general could be argued as fiscal and social.

    Legal immigration overall is a fiscal issue because it's an economic issue. People who don't like one group of people from one country or another because of their race, religion, culture, customs and so forth could also argue social objections.

    But illegal immigration is purely a numbers, economic and fiscal issue because they are here illegally outside of the numbers control system. An Irish illegal aliens is no different than a Mexican illegal alien. They're both illegal. The Irish illegal alien, the Mexican illegal alien are no different than a Chinese, Russian or African illegal alien. They're all here illegally outside the legal numbers established by Congress. Illegal aliens have a social impact on our society, no doubt about that, but that's not why they're illegal, they're illegal because they're here outside the immigration control limits set for economic and fiscal reasons.
    Last edited by Judy; 11-04-2016 at 05:45 AM.
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