Do Conservatives fear the attractiveness of fundamentalist Islam?

Some Conservatives are worried (see here and here) about the world getting a chance to hear what anti-American terrorists have to say. Here is CNN's Wolf Blitzer giving voice to some of those concerns:

One of the arguments against this decision is that it will give these five detainees, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and these four others, a platform, if you will. They will express their Jihadist views. In the process, they will be able to recruit more followers.

Why would Conservatives fear the world hearing what these terrorist defendants have to say? It is almost as if these Conservatives find fundamentalist Islam's ideas, commitment, moral certainty and absolutism more attractive in some respects than the traditional American ideals of democracy, freedom, diversity, choice and the rule of law. Why else would they so fear that when the world hears these ideas they will be seduced into anti-American terrorism? They must not believe that demonstrating our commitment to fair trials, rule of law and justice by publicly giving these criminals their day in court will be seen by the world as more attractive and admirable than terrorist rhetoric. I am starting to suspect that some Conservatives really don't like America very much.

A rash and impulsive conservative?

The idea that the economic situation facing the country was so grave that presidential candidates should not campaign probably did not even occur to either Herbert Hoover or Franklin Roosevelt in 1932 at the beginning of the Great Depression. Yet John McCain, a man who calls himself a conservative, is taking the radical, non-cautious, non-prudent, unprecedented step of suspending his campaign and calling for candidate's debates to be delayed or canceled. When are true conservatives going to emerge to denounce this imposter?

Another example of conservative dishonesty

From CNN Politics.com:

The Florida Federation of Republican Women made the decision to boycott the Oprah Winfrey Show Saturday, after the media mogul refused to have Gov. Sarah Palin as a guest on her show until after the election wraps up.

"Women in Florida helped build Oprah into the icon she is today," Linda Ivell, President of the FFRW said in a statement. "We are deeply disappointed in Ms. Winfrey's decision to sit out the greatest political moment in the history of women since suffrage."

That statement is thoroughly dishonest on many levels. Since Oprah has had a stated policy of having no candidate who is currently campaigning on her show no one could have had reasonable expectations that she would invite Sarah Palin. For Oprah to invite Palin on her show would be unfair to all the other candidates. How could the Republican women then be "deeply disappointed" that Oprah is sticking to her policy? Also how can they claim that a woman being nominated for vice president is "the greatest political moment" since suffrage when the Democrats had a woman vice presidential candidate over 20 years ago? The women of the Florida Federation of Republican Women are putting on a show of faux outrage in an attempt to bully Oprah.

Dishonest conservatives

I know there used to be honorable, honest conservatives. Barry Goldwater was one. But being in power seems to have corrupted conservatism itself. Take the conservatives' choice for vice president as an example:

As Josh Marshall writes at the Talking Points Memo blog

The McCain camp has made her signature issue shutting down the Bridge to Nowhere. But as The New Republic
put it today that's just "a naked lie." And pretty much the same thing has been written today in Newsweek, the Washington Post, the AP, the Wall Street Journal. Yesterday even Fox's Chris Wallace called out Rick Davis on it.

On earmarks she's an even bigger crock. On the trail with McCain they're telling everyone that she's some kind of earmark slayer when actually, when she was mayor and governor, in both offices, she requested and got more earmarks than virtually any city or state in the country.

When you remove the lies there is nothing left. The entire presentation of Sarah Palin as someone who represents change from the corruption of Washington is dishonest.

My previous two blog posts were about a Quad Cities conservative blogger whose entire blogging persona is a lie. She pretends she is non-ideological and non-partisan but somehow ends up only criticizing Democrats and liberals. She writes blog posts in which the main point is a lie – such as a recent post about American flags that Democrats supposedly threw in the garbage and were then rescued from the landfill. (Actually the bags of flags were just left behind at the convention center and a vendor thought they would probably end up being thrown away.)

It makes you wonder whether they are lying because they have nothing truthful to offer, i.e. if they didn't have lies they would have nothing, or if modern conservatives have convinced themselves that lying is a virtue.

Conservatives Are Such Jokers

Be sure to check out Paul Krugman's column in today's New York Times (no longer requires a subscription).

Mark Crispin Miller, the author of “The Bush Dyslexicon,” once made a striking observation: all of the famous Bush malapropisms — “I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family,” and so on — have involved occasions when Mr. Bush was trying to sound caring and compassionate.

By contrast, Mr. Bush is articulate and even grammatical when he talks about punishing people; that’s when he’s speaking from the heart. The only animation Mr. Bush showed during the flooding of New Orleans was when he declared “zero tolerance of people breaking the law,” even those breaking into abandoned stores in search of the food and water they weren’t getting from his administration.

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