RealCurrents

With all the criticism of George W. Bush and Republicans in general, I think we need to sort out a few basic aspects of our current mess so we can then, hopefully, make intelligent changes.

In my view, Republicans (in which I include myself, since I generally vote that way) have two basic problems:

1. Bush’s administration has been hijacked by war-hawk NeoCons, the first evidence of which appeared to be his picking Dick Cheney (seemingly out of nowhere, considering Wyoming isn’t a big state) to be his running mate.

As a result, early philosophical drivers of Bush policy, such as Marvin Olasky’s notion of “compassionate conservatism“, a foreign policy that refrained from “nation building”, and in general a more limited federal government, gradually gave in to the NeoCon urge to use power whenever possible, wherever possible.

Of course, the dam broke after 9/11, an event which may well have been given too much import in re-shaping U.S. foreign and domestic policy. In any case, the war-hawk NeoCons were firmly behind the wheel after that, and within a year were openly maneuvering to invade Iraq.

2. The near-complete failure of the rest of Republicans to make a serious effort to reclaim their party from the war-hawk NeoCons.

As I wrote before, despite Bush’s obvious failings, I put more blame on the Congress, for largely abdicating its responsibilities: “the Republican Congress … has failed to fulfill two of its primary duties: providing a check on the Executive Branch and controlling spending.”

So, two basic problems: the NeoCon takeover of the Bush administration, and the failure of the rest of us Republicans to counter it. With these in mind, it’s time for someone to finally state what’s plainly obvious, at least to any non-NeoCon in the Republican camp:

War-hawk NeoConservatives do NOT represent the views of all or anywhere near a majority of Republicans, nor are they legitimate heirs of Ronald Reagan’s legacy.

Through most of my teen years, I would hear Ronald Reagan in the morning, giving his radio address outlining his views, and no one’s going to convince me that his vision of personal responsibility and freedom, with limited government, has anything in common with the imperialist, police-state policies promoted by the war-hawk NeoCons.

The Republicans lost control of Congress for the simple reason that they failed to do their job. They completely failed to control spending, they failed to rein in government, and one by one those opposed to the invasion of Iraq knuckled under, I guess swayed by the argument, “We’re in a ‘war on terror‘, you just have to trust us.” Well, it’s amazing that the Bush administration still seems to be trying to use that argument. It shows how out of touch they really are.

As far as Bush’s failings go, I think Lee Iacocca hits the nail on the head in his new book, Where Have All the Leaders Gone?. Iacocca gives 9 “C’s” of leadership, and notes that Bush dismally fails on the very first one: Curiosity.

George W. Bush has a lot of good, even great, qualities, and I’m sure most Republicans, including myself, want to continue supporting him, but he has GOT to develop both a much greater interest in what is going on, and multiple alternative channels of information. As someone once said, a leader must use the chain of command to issue orders, but can NEVER depend on the chain of command for information.

As for other Republican politicians and candidates, I hope they will not abandon Bush, but will finally begin to demand accountability (and fiscal responsibility) from his administration.

Obviously, the folks Republicans DO need to be abandoning, and driving from the party, are the war-hawk NeoCons, who haven’t got a clue what terms like “limited government”, “Constitution”, “separation of powers”, and “conservative” really mean.

Sadly, if this mess continues much longer, us conservatives will have to come up with a new name for ourselves, lest people think we’re in favor of torture, abolishing the Geneva Convention, pre-emptive war, and all the other nonsense (evil) that’s been foisted upon us by these “Neo-Conservatives”, who seem to think the solution to every problem is the exercise of more government power.

Raymond’s lament about how CNN has degenerated into the “Celebrity News Network” got me thinking about media and journalism again. I realize how important the media folks are, how much they influence the conversation, and I know it’s essential to keep pushing for improvements in that industry. I, for one, am certainly a fairly dissatisfied customer.

Raymond’s complaint brought up at least two things that particularly annoy me about the media:

1. Journalists seem to be really BAD at ever covering stuff that would actually be useful to know about. We hear about disasters all over the world and, of course, whatever mess (or island resort) Paris Hilton may be in at the moment. Nevertheless, there’s all kinds of practical stuff that we hardly ever hear about. I wrote about one such example, changes in credit card minimum payment rules, back in 2005.

I encountered another example this afternoon, when I was picking up one of my kids from work, and the subject of the minimum wage hike came up. He was wondering when the first increase would go into effect and how much it would be (i.e. whether he’d get a raise). I really don’t know. I think it’s sometime next winter, but I guess information like that is just too practical for the media to bother with.

There’s a lot of examples like that, of missed opportunities to be helpful, across most all the media, and I’ll try to point out more in the future (see the Journalism category).

2. It used to be there were 3 TV networks, only AM radio, etc., but now that we’ve got a zillion channels, they STILL can’t seem to focus on a specific topic. In other words, an awful lot of media channels are all chasing the entire market, rather than specializing.

CNN isn’t the only channel that’s lost its focus, but what’s more frustrating is that with so many more channels available (and so many owned by major media players), they still won’t specialize.

Radio provides perhaps the best test case, at least here in the Houston area, where we still don’t seem to have a dedicated news station, even though ClearChannel has bought several of the top AM stations. In fact, it’s gotten worse, as long-dominant KTRH 740AM lost a lot of its news coverage (and apparently its staff) after the 2004 election, and is just a shell of its former self.

Why can’t a huge media company like ClearChannel have at least one 24 hour news station in a big market like Houston? The obvious answer is they think they can make more money by changing formats all day long, from morning news to Rush Limbaugh to local talk to sports to UFOs, etc. That may work for them, but the longer this goes on, the more I just lose interest.

I wrote recently on All Things about how most of society STILL isn’t taking information overload seriously, and the major media are prime culprits. It’s not just broadcast media, either. It never ceases to amaze me, for example, how many ads I get for print magazines. Don’t they realize I’ve already got a pile of magazines I can never find time to read?

For years Americans have seemed to be relentless consumers of more and more media output, whether TV shows or sporting events or newspapers, books, etc., but I can’t help but think we’re nearing a limit, and that the winners in the media are going to be the ones who help us to find the right information, and package it for us in easy-to-swallow bites.

Google is perhaps the best example of this currently, of a business that helps us to overcome information overload, to cut a swath through the jungle to just what we’re looking for. In other words, Google is actually helpful, and they’ve been richly rewarded for it.

What I’d like to see are broadcast channels that are actually oriented toward my needs, to where my needs are placed first, and advertising comes second. This will seem ridiculous to traditional media types, but in my view, there’s an incredible amount of media out there, and I’ll just go somewhere else. Who knows, maybe I’ll get my weather updates from Twitter before long. After all, I can’t hardly find them on KTRH anymore.