Conservative Donnybrook

Thou shalt not commit gaffes on the campaign trail.

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John Podhoretz has a nice opinion piece dismissing accusations that Ron Paul is an anti-Semite.  He isn’t, however, prepared to grant Paul full absolution, and reaches a very similar conclusion to my own (be sure to read the comments):

I’m inclined to think that Paul, who is not the most careful and prudent of speakers, is not an anti-Semite — because in a public career dating back 30 years he would likely have said something more explicit and unambiguous. Nor do I think he should be held personally responsible for the fact that he might be attracting extremist support from the neo-Nazi Right. He has not expressed their views and he is not his brother’s keeper.

But politics ain’t beanbag, and if he is getting donations from neo-Nazis that he won’t return in full, he and his supporters have to expect they are going to take lumps. And they have to take their lumps as well for echoing shameful voices of the past. The history of right-wing isolationism is that it has been a hotbed of classic and unambiguous anti-Semitism throughout the 20th century, as represented by leading-edge spokesmen from Henry Ford to Father Coughlin to Gerald K. Smith to the America First Committee.

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In medicine, many licensing agencies will revoke a physician’s license for offending the moral of a community.  In West Country England, a female doctor has so betrayed her Hippocratic oath that she may soon find herself out of a job.  The British General Medical Council is questioning the moral turpitude of Dr. Tammie Downes, a British doctor who has proven “instrumental in helping many women patients decide to continue to carry their children to term.”

The Catholic News Agency is reporting that Dr. Downes may soon lose her right to practice medicine after being denounced by Parliament’s most vigorous abortion crusader, Dr. Evan Harris, who has called on Health Minister Dawn Primarolo to investigate the situation.

Dr. Downes, unlike the pro-death Harris, is far from a crusader.  She inststs, rather, that “whatever her personal beliefs, she feels her duty as a doctor is to help navigate women through the fraught moral and emotional maze of an unwanted pregnancy.”  Refusing to categorize herself neatly within the pro-life/pro-choice dichotomy, Dr. Downes styles herself as being “pro informed choice.” 

The label is fitting.  Downes often takes on the role of counselor, asking the women who enter her office, “What would have to change to make you see things differently? What would help you to see this baby as good news and not bad news?”  Far from being forceful, Downes wants these young, emotionally distraught women to weigh carefully the option of ending an unwanted pregnancy.  By and large, it seems that her approach has had nothing but a positive impact on the lives of her patients:

[W]ith her guidance, many of those who have come to see Dr Downes determined to have a termination have been persuaded to think differently. And none of them, it seems, has regretted it.

Thank you, Dr. Downes.  We hope you continue to foster a culture of life for many years to come.

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According to The Guardian, Professor Ian Wilmut, the pioneering research scientist who cloned Dolly the sheep from an adult cell, has decided “to abandon cloning in favour of a new technique that can create stem cells without an embryo.”

Wilmut, influenced by a new, less controversial technique being developed in Japan, says he will not use the embryonic cloning license bestowed upon him two years ago, instead opting to work with this newer method that utilizes only skin fragments.

Wilmut’s colleagues aren’t exactly cheering over the defection:

The news will come as a blow to scientists who believe that the use of embryos to create stem cells is the best way to develop treatments for serious medical conditions such as stroke, heart disease and Parkinson’s disease.

Theoretically, the new technique will allow for the harvesting of a patient’s own cells, which can later be reinjected into the body to cure disease.

 Human embryonic stem cell research is particularly controversial because, with the present state of technology, starting a stem cell line requires the destruction of a human embryo.  Many opponents of stem cell research argue that the technologies are a slippery slope to reproductive cloning, and therefore devalue human life.  Pro-life opponents argue that the destruction of a human embryo is the destruction of a human life.

Hopefully Wilmut will be able to convince some of his colleagues to follow suit and bring a halt to this latest installment in the culture of death.

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For those inclined to personal-computing nostalgia, I point you to The Register’s nerdlicious retrospective of the original IBM PC, released in 1981.

Ah, the days of one-color displays and booting from floppies. Good times.

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Ross Douthat, one of my favorite blogger/journalists, reviews (pdf) “American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia,” my favorite encyclopedia of conservatism, in ISI’s The Intercollegiate Review:

It comes as no surprise, then, that American Conservatism: An Encyclopedia–an enormously impressive and occasionally frustrating volume that attempts to do for the America what the 1911 Britannica does for the rest of God’s creation–sometimes feels like a compendium of cranks, an almanac of oddballs …

These shades of conservatism past appear alongside better-remembered Right Minds such as L. Brent Bozell, William F. Buckley’s brother-in-law and the ghostwriter of Conscience of a Conservative, whose admiration for an impossibly romanticized Catholic Spain seemed at times to outstrip his devotion to America; Willmoore Kendall, whose turbulent Ivy League career ended when “he reached an agreement with Yale whereby he would be paid five times his salary” in return for resigning his tenure; Sam Francis himself, a brilliant writer who migrated to the racist fringe and died a self-identified “white nationalist”; and of course Ayn Rand, whose personal eccentricities need no introduction.

After a while, the reader becomes accustomed to the melancholy that works its way into so many entries—[he] began to suffer from bipolar disorder…he was predisposed to a sense of cosmic failure, a belief that the universe was running down…suffering from chronic depression, [he] committed suicide… he is now largely shunned by the literary establishment—and accustomed, as well, to the feuds and enmities that run throughout, like threads binding the book together: paleocons versus neocons; libertarians versus social conservatives; West Coast Straussians versus East Coast Straussians; Confederate sympathizers versus Lincolnophiles; Whittaker Chambers versus Ayn Rand; Norman Podhoretz versus Joe Sobran; Murray Rothbard versus, well, just about everybody.

(Links added by me.) I’ll have to ask Professor Frohnen who he’s going to enlist to write the entry for Conservative Donnybrook in the second edition.

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Via Ross Douthat, it looks like Lou Dobbs is laying the groudwork for an insurgent candidacy of his own. His latest CNN column is pretty clearly a Dobbs for President manifesto:

One year from now, we will have elected a new president. As eager as I am for that reality, I can’t imagine any one of the current candidates for their party’s nomination being chosen by the American people to lead this nation for the next four years. I believe the person elected a year from now will be an Independent populist, a man or woman who understands the genius of this country lies in the hearts and minds of its people and not in the prerogatives and power of its elites.

I for one would welcome a Dobbs run. I don’t know a whole lot about him but in a Hillary vs. Rudy race he would look pretty good. As an immigration restrictionist who is skeptical of free trade Dobbs would be taking some popular positions that are more or less forsaken by the major parties, and could pick off much of the base of both, so he might be the real dark horse in this race.

It certainly seems more plausible than a Bloomberg candidacy, which would make no sense whatsoever.

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