Patriot Acts

While Melanie Phillips, like a Bush Era stopped clock, is still banging on in favour of the Islamist terrorist dismemberment of Russia, President Obama is getting on with the serious business of bilateral arms reduction negotiations with that country. What a thing it is to have a conservative in the White House for a change.

No wonder that he is so popular among Catholics, white Evangelicals, Cuban-Americans, self-identifying conservatives, and so on. He represents a return to Eisenhower, with his ending of the Korean War, his even-handed approach to Israel and the Palestinians, and his denunciation of the military-industrial complex. To Nixon, who ended the Vietnam War as President Obama will end the Iraq War, and who began détente with China as President Obama is beginning détente with Iran, Cuba and beyond.

To the opposition to Clinton’s unpatriotic job-exportation, unpatriotic sweatshop-importation, and unpatriotic global trigger-happiness, all continued and expanded by the unpatriotic Bush Administration. And, yes, to Reagan’s bilateral arms reduction, one of the very few conservative things that he ever did, indeed quite possibly the only one.

In other words to the viewing of the wider world in strictly realistic terms, "not seeking for monsters to destroy", but instead, for example, calling for Europe to revert to pre-1914 borders and thus end the First World War, an outcome (also advocated by Pope Benedict XV) which would have precluded both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

Such is by definition a return to that rural and Western half of the Republican Party which supported the New Deal, and to those Congressional Republicans (not all, but some) who cast the votes that passed Civil Rights in the face of Dixiecrat resistance.

So no wonder that President Obama is so popular among Catholics, white Evangelicals, Cuban-Americans, self-identifying conservatives, and so on. And no wonder that the organisation purporting to be the Republican Party is not, and has no idea what to do with itself.

Except, perhaps, to behave like a Bush Era stopped clock, still banging on in favour of such things as the Islamist terrorist dismemberment of Russia.