Conservative Heritage Times

You are the National Political Director (I assume that is about the same thing as a campaign manager.) for Alan Keyes. I am receiving mixed signals on how the rank-and-file and the leadership feel about a Keyes nomination. Some suggest it is possible although the leadership knows there are issues. Other have suggested that at least part of the leadership is adamantly opposed. I tend to believe that the latter is closer to the truth.

Surely, Dr. Keyes recognizes this. If so, why is he going to make the attempt? Is he going to attempt a “hostile takeover” of the Party? Is he going to attempt by shear rhetorical skill to convert the Party to interventionism or convince them to look the other way on the issue? Quite frankly, I think it is too late in the delegate selection game, and Dr. Keyes doesn’t have the ground troops to take the nomination by brute force of numbers.

This is something you seriously need to consider. I do not think Keyes can win the nomination. If he does, it will only be for lack of a credible alternative, and the Party will fracture as a result of his nomination.

I hope Dr. Keyes declines to seek the nomination. For his sake and the Party’s.

If he does decline, I honestly think the CP owes Dr. Keyes an apology. They put his name on their poll. They put his name in some official CP communications, and now they are having to deal with the mess they created. If they knew Dr. Keyes was not an acceptable nominee, they shouldn’t have put his name out there.

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Obviously, the ol’ boy knows a little sump’n ’bout sump’n. I predicted that Keyes’ ultimate strategy was to run for the Constitution Party nomination when he first announced he was running for the GOP nomination. He announced so late, and in such an underwhelming way that it was hard to believe he was actually seriously competing for the GOP nomination. I thought then he was just setting himself up to be marginalized, so then he could play the aggrieved victim card. This is what I said on Sept 15, 07.

Ugh! Now we all have to endure Keyes’ insufferable self-righteous rantings. Keyes is an uber-neocon and a Lincoln idolater. My hunch is that he is running in the GOP primary to increase his standing so he can then run for the Constitution Party nomination. If Keyes gets the Constitution Party nomination then that party will have also lost it’s way.

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Well, I have been banned by the Alan Keyes discussion board. I never gave any indication I supported Keyes. I was there in the interest of protecting the integrity of the Constitution Party. So I wasn’t there under false pretenses. I guess they don’t want dissenting opinions. They just want to babble away in their little echo chamber.

Alan Keyes has made little impact on the Republican race*, and is viewed as increasingly irrelevant. Now he risks attempting to secure the nomination of a “minor” party and being rejected by them. This would be a blow from which he might never recover. This is not in the best interest of Keyes or his supporters. It is not in the best interest of the CP. I am trying to spare them the embarrassment of being rejected by the CP, but they seem uninterested in listening.

I actually feel a little sorry for them. Many seem to think Keyes is just going to waltz in and be coronated. Like the CP should just be overjoyed to have him. This is definitely the feeling I got at first. Now I think some are catching on that the CP might be hostile territory.

At any rate, since we don’t censor opinions, any of the Keyes board posters are welcome to post over here. You won’t be banned.

* I don’t necessarily hold poor electoral performance against someone. Unfortunately these days, the more right you are on the issues the less likely you are to actually get elected.

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Daniel Mccarthy has an interesting article he posted on Takimag.com that not only looks at McCain’s position on abortion vis-a-via the contex of Republican politics (meaning the cynical GOP’s enabling of Roe) and what a post-Roe political scene woudl look like.

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Succinctly described, transhumanism is a project for making a new, immortal life form as the evolutionary successor to Man. How this is to be done is not yet clear, for whether humanity’s imminent replacement should be robot, mutant, or a mix of both has not yet been settled among transhumanists themselves. Nor, for that matter, is the final purpose of all our urgent becoming something else entirely clear, either.

Mythic presentations are often more useful than abstract description in evoking what movements, philosophies, or cultures are about; as such, the late Arthur C. Clarke’s science fiction tale 2001: A Space Odyssey could be seen as functionally comparable to the ancient Achaeans’ Homeric vision.

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Chronicles writer and Penn State religious professor Philip Jenkins offers an interesting take on the future of Christianity in this article in The Atlantic

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Response to:

David A. Hartman’s “Why the U.S. Needs Border Adjusted Consumption Taxation.”

Mr. Hartman of the Lone Star Foundation proposes a radical solution to the US trade imbalance: the Business Transactions Tax (BTT), a 21% border adjusted VAT that would replace the US income tax. The BTT is levied upon imports and rebated on
exports, effectively border adjusted to offset foreign VATs. Hartman explains:

It will be seen that the Business Transactions Tax (BTT) has the broadest tax base which results in the lowest marginal tax rate, 21 percent, required for “tax neutral” replacement of the current IRS tax code, retaining only the personal FICA income taxes, while the employer’s share of FICA is debited against the BT1. The BTT is a consumption tax that is rebated to all taxpayers based upon poverty level incomes; it ends double taxation of saving for investment; it can be visible; it equitably includes all sectors, embracing goods, services, government and NFP’s. Most important, it is border adjusted, as was called for by the President’s Panel on Federal Tax Reform’s Growth and Investment alternative. Continue Reading »

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Over the next few days I am going to start going through the rather substantial Keyes archives and dig up every over-the-top interventionist, Lincoln cultist, etc. statement he has made and put them out here for all to see. Here is one for starters. In August 06 Keyes called for war against Syria. Is that what you want Constitution Party? This is going to be too easy. There will be plenty more where this came from. E-mail me with your own examples as you find them.

If the anti-terror war is more than hollow rhetoric, the logical and necessary response of the Bush administration will be a message to Capitol Hill requesting that, on account of the overt Syrian alliance with a terrorist entity, Congress formally declare the state of war that would then undeniably exist between the United States and Syria…

No other course would be consistent with the premise that, after 9-11 the U.S. was not at war just with al-Qaida and those directly involved in the attacks, but with terrorism and all those who practice it; that we were not just responding to a threat to the United States, but to one that in principle menaced the peace and security of the entire world. Given this premise, every act of terror against any people anywhere is an act of war, which engages our interest and ought to engage the interest of all nations, against the perpetrators. Any state that fights in open alliance with a terrorist entity is therefore, like that entity, at war with us and with all the world.

Notice the breathless “menaced the peace and security of the entire world.” Such is the typical language of the neocon (a.k.a. revolutionary Jacobin). Such is the language of the “fear the Islamomeanies” hysterical alarmist.

“…every act of terror against any people anywhere is an act of war…” Is he serious? I had given Alan some credit for being more reasonable and level-headed than his “police the world” followers. I take it back. This man is dangerous.

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This article was written in 2004 when Keyes was running his carpetbagging campaign against Obama.

As someone who once regarded Alan Keyes very highly, I found the announcement that he was accepting the Illinois Republican Senate nomination to be perhaps even more embarrassing for him than his unprincipled defense of the Iraq war. His constant invocations of the wisdom of the Destroyer of the Republic (i.e., Lincoln) always sat very badly with me, and it soon occurred to me that someone who defines his political philosophy by the Declaration of Independence and regarded the Declaration as a kind of theoretical trump card over whatever the Constitution itself said was likely to come to some fairly poor conclusions about American history and government. Indeed he has.

The chief virtue that Keyes displayed during his campaigns was an ostensible commitment to restorting the constraints imposed on the government by the Constitution. He also made worthwhile arguments against the Kosovo war during the 2000 debates. But his defense of the Iraq war can only be described as unprincipled and partisan, because the Iraq war lacked both the constitutional, congressional mandate that he had insisted upon in 1999 for attacking Yugoslavia and it also failed to serve any demonstrable national interest. Above all, I remember very distinctly that in 2000 Alan Keyes argued in support of the long tradition of American nonaggression and supposedly feared the consequences of abandoning that tradition to engage in arbitrary warmaking. Obviously, he either never really believed this or abandoned this “conviction” when it became inconvenient to his party when 2003 came around.

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This is from 2004.

Who is Alan Keyes? Bill Kristol’s college roommate, the stalking horse the neoconservatives put up to take the conservative vote away from Pat Buchanan, the zany who cried racism when, after failing to attract any significant support, he was not allowed into the Republican presidential debates, the senatorial candidate who scandalized some of his supporters by living off his own campaign, a good talker in love with the sound of his own voice but who has never accomplished a political objective, conceived an original idea, or written something worth reading. He is the quintessential representative of a political movement that prefers illusion to reality and must live off the sizzle because there is no steak to offer. ~ Thomas Fleming

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“Under affirmative action, white men are passed over for jobs and promotions in business and government, and denied admission to colleges and universities to which their grades and merits entitle them, because of their gender and race….. America is headed for a day, a few decades off, when there will be no racial majority, only a collection of minorities. When that day arrives, if some races and ethnic groups may be preferred because of where their ancestors came from, while others can be held back because their ancestors came from Europe, America will become the Balkans writ large.” ~ Patrick J. Buchanan

PBJ hits the nail on the head.

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This is Frosty Wooldridge’s latest

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Chuck Baldwin analyzies the popular TV show and wonders if this our future…

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Seems the First Spinster agrees with Michelle Obama and Rev. Jeremiah Wright that America hasn’t been good enough to its black citizens:

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that the United States still has trouble dealing with race because of a national “birth defect” that denied black Americans the opportunities given to whites at the country’s very founding.

“Black Americans were a founding population,” she said. “Africans and Europeans came here and founded this country together — Europeans by choice and Africans in chains. That’s not a very pretty reality of our founding.”

As a result, Miss Rice told editors and reporters at The Washington Times, “descendants of slaves did not get much of a head start, and I think you continue to see some of the effects of that.”

I suppose the head start she received when George W. Bush appointed her as his National Security Advisor despite scant credentials doesn’t count. She was so breathtakingly inept but loyal in that position that Bush had no choice but to make her the Secretary of State.

And this is the thanks we get? Here’s a suggestion for you, Madame Diplomatrix: consider another point of view for a change, instead of the steady diet of resentment you’re obviously on. Maybe a little Pat Buchanan will open your eyes.

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This is Rod Dreher’s interesting take on the whole Bear-Stearns debacle.

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Eunomia sounds the alarm on Keyes winning the CP nomination:

In some depressing news: Alan Keyes will be joining the Constitution Party and possibly running for its nomination.  Where do I turn in my (non-existent) membership card? 

To the extent that I have ever been a partisan, I have been registered with the New Mexico Taxpayers’ Party (as the national party used to be known) when I started voting, so I suppose I am still technically a member of that party, and I did cast my vote for Peroutka in 2004.  I will go on record right now and say that if they nominate Keyes I won’t ever vote for a Constitution Party nominee again.  More or less pointless protest candidacies based in principle are one thing.  Tying yourself to a ludicrous fraud in the process is something else all together.  I say this as someone who once bought what Keyes was selling.  Happily, I am done with that phase. 

Jim is right that “he would still be the biggest name candidate the Constitution Party has ever attracted,” but in this case that is definitely not a good thing.  Most people have no idea what the Constitution Party is.  With a Keyes candidacy it will become known as “the vehicle for the looney’s latest ego trip and money-making scheme.”  If he wins the Libertarian nomination Mike Gravel has to be hoping that Keyes gets the CP nod, since it will easily make Gravel the one considered credible and sane among the third party candidates. “

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From what I am picking up from Internet chatter, one of the reasons Keyes may get the CP nomination is because the other candidates can’t run for various reasons. So we need to put our heads together and brainstorm some possible alternatives to Keyes. Here are a few that I have seen floated before.

Doug Phillips – Vision Forum, Howard’s son

John Eidsmoe – constitutional scholar

Walter “Donnie” Kennedy – pro-South author, formed an exploratory committee for seeking the GOP nomination

Pastor Butch Paugh – patriot radio personality, already a candidate for WV Governor

Additions? Comments? Discussion? We desperately need a candidate.

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We’ve been making a lot noise about Alan Keyes winning the CP nomination. But according to today’s edition of Politics1.com (www.politics1.com), Judge Roy Moore is still the frontrunner:

CONSTITUTION PARTY:As predicted here months ago — when the faux “draft” movement was launched urging bombastic former Ambassador Alan Keyes to seek the GOP Presidential nomination — Keyes has quit the Republican Party and is now officially seeking the Constitution Party’s Presidential nomination. A visit to Keyes’ campaign website now displays the Constitution Party logo in the “breaking news” section at the top of the page. The footer of the page displays a parody of the trademarked GOP logo — shown on the Keyes site in the form of a dead elephant. Keyes may find he is sharply out of step with the CP on the Iraq War, as the party strongly opposed US involvement in Iraq while Keyes voiced strong support for the war during the GOP primaries this year. The other announced candidates for the CP nomination are two frequent candidates: anti-tax activist Don Grundman and anti-gay activist Diane Beall Templin. Other potential candidates for the CP nomination at the upcoming April 23-26 convention include ousted Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy “Ten Commandments Judge” Moore, ’04 VP nominee Pastor Chuck Baldwin, former US Senator Bob Smith, and political writer Jerome Corsi. Insiders tell Politics1 that Moore would be a lock for the Constitution Party nomination — if he wants it.”

That’s the key of course: If he wants it. You can’t beat something with nothing so hopefully party leaders are working to convince Judge Moore to run for president.

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This article from Politico.com highlights some of the problem many local and state GOP organizations are having as those who’ve followed and supported the Paul camapaign have noted. The Dems may very well be bashing each other but McCain has bigger problems to wrry about.

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This is Doug Newman’s latest article

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