The blather bunch

Title: Liberty and Tyranny - A Conservative Manifesto
Author : Mark R. Levin

Right wing talk show host Mark Levin has put together what he chooses to call A“ conservative manifesto”. To make it look scholarly he quotes from several sources and annotate his remarks in the “notes” section at the back of the book.

The author, I think, correctly assesses the plight of the conservatives as being in serious trouble. His summation, after stating 10 conservative positions on topics such as ; Taxation, environment, Judges, the administrative state, Gov’t education, immigration, entitlements, foreign policy and security, faith and the constitution, is a call to inculcate in the young the Ayn Rand philosophy of self sufficiency and the “tyranny” of a gov’t that takes your hard-earned dollars and gives them to some undeserving sluggard.

From the book : “For the conservatives, the civil society has as its highest purpose its preservation and improvement” That sounds good . “The modern liberal believes in the supremacy of the state Therefore he characterizes the modern liberal as a statist . Sounds bad

The implication is that the liberal agenda is a nefarious conspiracy to put in place a totalitarian dictatorship.

Interestingly the death of Senator Kennedy brought forth an outpouring of accolades for all the good things the Liberal Lion achieved in his lengthy tenure in the senate.

To see what Levin has to say on the 10 points he has selected just read the book and decide for yourself how his analysis sounds. To me, his demonization of all liberal ideas makes him an ideologue and not a rational person. He claims the liberal statist’s aim is “nascent totalitarianism”.

What he never addresses is the influence and control that corporations have over Republicans. “Corporations buy Republicans and rent Democrats” is all too true.

Several right-wing authors have written popular books recently. These books, such as: Glenn Beck’s, Michelle Malkan’s, Dick Morris’, are, according to Steve Almond, “ not psychotic, fact challenged rants of the mad, but carefully crafted meta-fictions in which the mundane terrors of cultural dislocation are recast as riveting epics of paranoia”. “….they’re about the incursion of sinister forces on an unsuspecting populace”. It is a sad fact that such books reach the bestseller list. That is the diabolical effect of bulk sales.

Levin attributes the current economic melt down, not to the “psychotic greed of Wall Street but the Statist’s deranged need to throw money at the poor and undeserving."

Levin states that the conservatives have a long way to go to regain power and the screed that his book contains is going to make the journey much longer.