The Economic Nationalist

Mark R. Levin explains better than I why those of us Republicans who have not yet voted must rally to the polls and caucuses to stop John McCain.

Let’s get the largely unspoken part of this out the way first. McCain is an intemperate, stubborn individual, much like Hillary Clinton. These are not good qualities to have in a president. As I watched him last night, I could see his personal contempt for Mitt Romney roiling under the surface. And why? Because Romney ran campaign ads that challenged McCain’s record? Is this the first campaign in which an opponent has run ads questioning another candidate’s record? That’s par for the course. To the best of my knowledge, Romney’s ads have not been personal. He has not even mentioned the Keating-Five to counter McCain’s cheap shots. But the same cannot be said of McCain’s comments about Romney.

Please read the whole article here, then please link it prominently from your own blog (if you have one) and otherwise do what you can to spread Mr. Levin’s word. We get to nominate a Republican for the presidency only once every four years. You and I don’t want to be faced in November with the prospect of voting Democratic to keep Mr. McCain from power. Now is our time.

HJH

[Update:]

Here is more:

McCain “would fight us on everything,” [Paul] Weyrich opined, and not just on rail issues, but also regarding several conservative concerns such as the Arizona senator’s open-borders stance on immigration — and “He hates talk radio. He [McCain] has indicated he would favor shutting it down. He hates the religious right.”

And more:

“I’ve always thought I was loyal to the Republican party, but this whole mess has made me realize I am loyal first to Republican principles and to the integrity of the Republican party,” says Jed Merrill, who manages a network of over fifty major political websites including TexasRepublicans.com.

“By voting for McCain we are sacrificing the Republican soul. The conservative side of the party is based not so much on a political platform as a moral bond of integrity, and having reviewed McCain’s record, it is clear that John McCain not only does not share our values but would fight against them,” says Merrill.

Paul Weyrich, founder or co-founder of National Right to Life, the Moral Majority and the Free Congress Foundation, continues,

I will not vote for him. I can’t. It’s a case where worse would be better. If [Hillary Clinton is elected], she’ll do enough damage that two years from now we can recover politically if they don’t shut us down. I think after two years of her that there’ll be a real reaction–just like there was with Carter and there was a big one with [Bill] Clinton. It would be better than McCain, who would fight us on everything.

It would be a good idea to stop Mr. McCain now.

HJH

[Articles that are more interesting are found in the archives below, but here is another new article to bridge the blog’s quasi-hiatus. —HJH]

President Bush’s State of the Union address fell flat with me, but this is hardly surprising. Seven years into an eight-year presidency is probably an unlikely stage for a president to deliver a stirring, memorable address in any case. (more…)

Regular readers know that The Economic Nationalist has found several nice things to say about each of most of the 2008 Republican presidential candidates, and even about some of the Democratic. The blog holds firm paleoconservative views but is not a habitual “bomb thrower.” The blog has shown itself, I would like to think—if one may use the adjectives in their older, conservative, non-Politically Correct senses—to be neither hasty nor pessimistic nor narrow-minded nor inflexible nor intolerant nor suspicious. The blog if anything has been too soft, for it has consistently erred on the side of granting the benefit of the doubt. Therefore, if today the blog warns readers sternly against one particular candidate, then I hope that readers will agree that this blog at least has earned a serious hearing.

The one candidate is the heroic, highly charismatic John McCain. The Republican party must not nominate this man.

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“There is a great deal of ruin in a nation,” observed Adam Smith. Despairing nationalists can take heart. Though we the old American people stand indeed in grave danger of losing the United States as our own, peculiar nation-state, we have not nearly lost her yet. Economic thunderclouds threaten, but we are fabulously wealthy and can afford some belt-tightening, as it were, even when we don’t like it. It is entirely true that we should never have let the nation decline as we have done, that we should have restricted rather than liberalized immigration in 1965, that we should have restrained our federal judges, that we should have approached racial desegregation more circumspectly, and that we should gradually have restored a traditionally American tariff during the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon years. It is also true that we should never have surrendered the Panama Canal or the fruits of our 1973 military victory in Vietnam. All that however is the flood of history under the bridge of the present. Water flown does not return. The question is: what now?

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Three insightful articles on the state of the U.S. economy have recently appeared. The first is from the The Economist and
regards the U.S. housing market:

Even the Fed’s most hawkish governors are now hinting at more cuts in interest rates. The weak dollar and strength in emerging economies will indeed boost exports…. Even so, powerful signals point to a long period of sub-par growth. The huge backlog of unsold homes suggests house prices have further to fall—by around 20% going by housing futures. Lower house prices will force Americans to spend less and save more—a process that has hardly started.

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Lawyers make law for the benefit of other lawyers, computer programmers write software for other programmers, and professors train their best students to be professors. The fictional protagonists writers create in literature are often writers; the press’ favorite topic seems to be the press. To follow the pattern, The Economic Nationalist would blog about blogging and bloggers—which would be boring. As editor, I try to avoid that trap.

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Ho ho! A whale of a discussion thread on economic theory is now hot underway at What’s Wrong with the World. If you happen not to be Catholic or Orthodox, then some parts of the thread might not speak to you; but if you like economics and you can spare a solid hour for some dense reading, to click the hyperlink now is recommended to you.

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The presidential primary campaign flies thick and furious. I am following it with as much interest and intensity as you are.

You do not see more day-by-day campaign coverage in this space, not through lack of interest, but rather because the candidates have now put their cases fully before the voters and the voting has begun. Some of you have already voted; the rest will vote soon. The Economic Nationalist believes that the press at large spends a wholly unbecoming quantity of time and energy analyzing and second-guessing the various candidates’ campaign tactics at the expense of examining their positions and records. You and I don’t want this blog to be part of that trend, so, for now—when the campaigns are in full tactical phase—there is little to say here.

The Economic Nationalist’s regular readers know that Ron Paul’s and Hillary Clinton’s political stock has risen here and that Mitt Romney’s and Mike Huckabee’s has fallen, but it has been a while since the blog has ranked and graded the candidates. For those of you who have not voted yet, the current ranks and grades:

1. Duncan Hunter (GOP) (A–)
2. Ron Paul (GOP) (B+)
3. Fred Thompson (GOP) (B)
4. Mitt Romney (GOP) (B–)
5. Mike Huckabee (GOP) (C+)
6. Lou Dobbs (Indep.) (C)
7. Rudy Giuliani (GOP) (C–)
8. Hillary Clinton (Dem.) (C–)
9. John Edwards (Dem.) (C–)
10. The Constitution party nominee (D+)
11. The Libertarian party nominee (D)
12. John McCain (GOP) (D)
13. Barack Obama (Dem.) (F)
14. Michael Bloomberg (Indep.) (F)
15. The Green party nominee (F)

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