The Solid Surfer.com

Where I Disagree with the GOP

Throughout its brief history, this blog has supported and promoted many entrenched GOP positions, from tax cuts to the war in Iraq to intelligent design theory. But while TheSolidSurfer.com certainly leans Republican, I do disagree with the party's official line (and President Bush's actions) on a number of key issues. Here are some, along with the reasoning behind my stances:

Immigration
President Bush has strongly favored an open immigration policy, offering numerous benefits (including guest-worker status) to illegals and leaving porous borders between the U.S. and both Canada and Mexico. I believe this is a large mistake. Of course, America has been built on immigration (and, in fact, I'm married to an immigrant), and by no means do I propose ending it. Immigration provides new Americans with countless opportunities not present in their birth countries, while giving this nation a fresh supply of skilled workers. But at the same time, we do have finite resources and cannot realistically accept all would-be immigrants without straining ourselves beyond capacity. Therefore, we should more effectively police our borders and ensure that if people wish to immigrate, they do it legally instead of sneaking over the fence (unless, say, it's an emergency refugee situation).

The situation is also all the more urgent, now that we've caught known Al-Qaida members trying to infiltrate America from Mexico. Even beyond immigration issues, we must keep terrorists out of this country. And building a better, well-policed border fence is the way to do it.

Stem Cells
President Bush and leading Republicans have ruled against using embryonic stem cells in medical research, citing a violation against their pro-life principles. Here too, I disagree. Abortion is one thing, but embryonic stem cells come not from fetuses, but from rejected fertility treatment embryos. During such treatments, numerous embryos are created with the hope that one will become a viable fetus able to be implanted in the woman's uterus. When this occurs, the rest are discarded. These embryos are never implanted and never given the chance to develop into an actual person. If you're going to throw them out anyway, you certainly might as well use them to help cure some of humanity's worst diseases.

Israel-Palestinian Conflict
I certainly agree with much of President Bush's and the GOPs actions regarding this situation, particularly their strong support for Israel. But that said, I vehemently disagree with their continuing to reward the Palestinians for doing absolutely nothing to combat terror, extremism, and bad government. Israel has done all it can to try and make peace, and now the ball is completely in the Palestinians' court. And yet the U.S. continues to hold Israel almost entirely responsible for achieving calm in the region. This line of thinking is dangerously wrong, and Bush's policies here will fail just as Clinton's and every other former president's did, unless he acknowledges the Palestinian leadership (and the surrounding Arab countries) as the real cause of the problems and acts accordingly.

Big Government
Traditionally the Democrats have been the party of big government while Republicans preferred a leaner federal structure. But in recent years, Republicans have greatly expanded numerous governmental programs from Medicare to Farm Acts. Even excluding defense and homeland security budgets (which are vital and must remain), President Bush has become the largest spending president in thirty years. Big government is getting out of control and we must find ways to better manage and reduce it.

Republican Legal Troubles

Continuing the discussion from Wednesday, several prominent Republicans including Tom DeLay and Karl Rove have recently faced mounting legal troubles. How serious are these issues?

Congressman DeLay has been indicted on charges of conspiracy to violate state election laws, money laundering, and conspiracy to commit money laundering; all in relation to how he spent corporate donations in the 2002 Texas House elections. Prosecutors charge that DeLay deliberately failed to disclose certain funds in his campaign's accounting statements, but the Congressman claims that these were merely mistakes which have since been corrected.

Will DeLay be convicted? From all available evidence, I doubt it. DeLay admitted the accounting inconsistencies, ordered an audit, and fixed the errors all before the recent probe even began. This certainly looks far more like a smear campaign by DeLay's opponents than a substantial case. The Congressman himself is confident he'll win this battle, and Republicans should be as well.

The Karl Rove/Scooter Libby matter, on the other hand, is in my opinion a much more serious issue. Not because either of them necessarily committed a crime (nothing has been proven), but because the case, along with Libby's resignation, has given the liberal media plenty of fodder with which to attack leading Republicans over Iraq.

The issue in this case is whether Rove, Libby, or anyone else knowingly revealed something secret - the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame. Rove appears to have been cleared, but Libby was indicted today on charges of obstruction of justice, perjury, and making false statements regarding the matter. Specifically, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, the lead investigator, has accused Libby of lying under oath about certain conversations he had with reporters.

Is Libby guilty of lying to the grand jury? Perhaps, and if he is, he certainly shouldn't be let off the hook. But this gives no justification to the media stories claiming a White House conspiracy to attack Ms. Plame's husband, Joe Wilson, over his opposition to the Iraq war and his denial of Saddam Hussein's possession of WMDs. This is clearly the reason they have jumped all over Libby so ferociously, although in reality it seems that Wilson himself may have actually outed his wife.

In the end, though, I believe that Republicans will recover from this mess as well. Even if Libby lied to the jury, he wasn't convicted as the actual source of the leak, and in fact no Republican has. Furthermore, the mainstream liberal media is already as anti-Bush and anti-war as it could possibly be, and for those who haven't already bought into it (i.e. most of the public), this case should do little to change their minds.

This is not to say Republicans have nothing to worry about, and indeed those under investigation will certainly continue to fight the charges. But overall, these issues look far more like temporary hiccups than long term problems.

Republicans at the Crossroads

The past several weeks have been tough for the Republican Party. President Bush's approval is sagging, many conservatives have opposed the Harriet Miers nomination, Tom DeLay was indicted in a financial scandal probe, and now Karl Rove has been charged in a CIA leak investigation. Is the GOP headed for a major fall, or are these merely bricks in the road?

Let's examine the most immediate of these issues - the ratings and the Supreme Court pick:

President Bush's approval rating has slid below 40% amidst rising energy prices, disenchantment over Iraq, and government failures in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. While this statistic may look dismaying, Republicans should not feel pessimistic. The ratings came from Democratic pollsters, who tend to include more Democrats than Republicans in their questionnaire groups. This isn't necessarily a deliberate bias, but it certainly occurs; it's why these same people polled John Kerry as being ahead all throughout Election Day 2004. Meanwhile, many of the approval number's contributing factors are beyond the President's control. Hurricane Katrina and tight energy supplies would have hurt America regardless of Bush's actions. Given all this, I believe the President's aproval ratings will soon head back upward.

The next issue, however, is far more problematic. Harriet Miers's nomination has caused quite a debate among the conservative ranks. At primary issue are both her qualifications to serve on the Court and her judicial philosphy. Experience-wise, while Miers is a close friend of the president and has been a successful attorney, she lacks an extensive judicial background. This, however, should not be troubling; many fine past justices such as Earl Warren and William Brennan entered the court with similar dearths of experience.

On the other hand, her judicial and constitutional philosophy is a major question mark. Would a Justice Miers act as an originalist (in the mold of Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia) and regard the Constitution as fixed in meaning, or become an activist and take her own view of the document? We don't know the answer, but much in Miers' past suggests that she may hold an activist slant. And given that most activists tend to impose leftwing views onto the law, Republicans have good reason to be worried. Personally, I believe that the chance of Miers becoming an activist is too great, and that President Bush should withdraw her name and nominate a confirmed originalist (Judge Emilio Garza?) in her place.

Next up, we'll take a look at DeLay's and Rove's seeminlgy mounting legal troubles.

U.S., U.N., Africa, and Afghanistan

A significant piece of evidence in the money laundering case against House Majority Leader Tom DeLay was a supposed list of Republican candidates who received the dirty funds. But now prosecutors have admitted that the document does not exist. Looks like DeLay wasn't just assigning blame when he claimed to be an innocent victim of partisan politics.

The latest move by the U.N. is just disgusting. They invited Robert Mugabe, the dictator president of Zimbabwe who seized white-owned farms and caused drastic food shortages for millions of his people, to address a conference aimed at solving world hunger. What's next - Fidel Castro heading up a conference on democracy?

About a month ago, I briefly noted an article discussing the advantages of DDT in combatting malaria. And now another piece is greatly urging spraying the chemical in hard-hit Africa. Use the links at the bottom of the article to call on your senators and President Bush to support this.

Afghanistan warming up to Israel? President Karzai wants to formally recognize Israel if his Palestinian "brothers" also get a state. Coming from the leader of a Muslim country, this condition unfortunately does not surprise. But the Afghan leader should recognize who his true brothers really are; significant genetic and cultural evidence point to the Afghans as being one of the Ten Lost Jewish Tribes.

News Site of the Day: TheRant.us

John Lennon - Republican?

The fact that I titled a recent post after a John Lennon album reminds me that the ex-Beatle would have turned 65 over the past weekend. And to commemorate the occasion, Beatles biographer Hunter Davies speculates on what Lennon would be like were he still alive. Of course any such predictions are pure guesses, but Davies concludes that just like in the late '60s and early '70s, John would be at the forefront of liberal/radical activism, protesting against Bush, Blair, and the war in Iraq.

Now certainly Mr. Davies knows plenty about the Beatles, but on this matter I believe he is fully mistaken. Au contraire, I see Lennon becoming a patriotic, pro-America Republican.

Yes, I know this may sound ludicrous to some - this same man, after all, virtually represented all things anti-authority, protested vehemently against Vietnam, and wrote his most famous solo song ("Imagine") as a virtual ode to utopian communism. But perhaps even more strongly, Lennon detested hypocrisy and always remained on the search for the "next big thing." Given this, I doubt he would have stagnated politically like so many of his leftwing brethren; rather, I believe he would have reversed course entirely a la Michael Medved, David Horowitz, and other liberals-turned-conservatives.

Notwithstanding Davies' official group biography, the best Beatle book out there, in my opinion, is the late Ian MacDonald's Revolution In The Head. (For the record, I am a huge Beatles fan who owns all their albums, has read a number of books on the band, and has seen both McCartney and Ringo in concert in recent years.) Not quite a traditional biography, Revolution examines the Beatles and their music in the context of the decade they represented most - the 1960s. (The band formed in 1957, issued their first single in 1962, and broke up in 1970.)

Many of the book's most fascinating sections cover Lennon and his cultural and political views, and far more than being a by-the-numbers liberal, the head Beatle continually explored new avenues of life experiences in an ongoing search for meaning and importance. Never settling on any one phase for long, John led the group through a myriad of '60s hallmarks - tough rock 'n' roll, Bob Dylan-style folk music, psychedelic drugs and the Summer of Love, meditation and Indian mysticism, anti-war protests, and finally a return to their roots (the "Get Back" project which was released as the "Let It Be" album). This same pattern continued after the Beatles' breakup, as John launched a solo career, explored leftist/communist political activism with Yoko Ono, spent an infamous two-year "lost weekend" living the celebrity life in Los Angeles, sought peace and quiet by moving to New York, retired from music in 1975 to become a stay-at-home father, and returned to his career in low-key fashion shortly before his assassination in 1980.

Clearly, Lennon was no career leftwing activist; rather, it was a particular phase in his highly varied and fascinating life, and as he grew older, he certainly appeared to grow more conservative in his cultural and family outlook. At the same time, he always railed against establishment stagnancy, and today, it is the Democrats, particularly those on the far left, who have largely assumed this characteristic. I believe John would have continued these personal trends, and were he alive today, would with sharp moral clarity support America's efforts to achieve freedom around the world. Assuming he would have obtained U.S. citizenship (he was on track, having been granted permanent residency status), I feel he would have become a card-carrying Republican and voted for President Bush in the 2004 election.

Perhaps his latest song would have even been a cover of "G-d Bless The USA."