Find the real conservatives and listen to them

            Where are the true conservatives now when we need them the most?  Well, George Will’s column appears in The Monitor’s editorial pages, and he talks every Sunday on ABC’s political talk show.  David Brooks is on the New York Times op-ed page, and he’s a frequent talker on Meet the Press and ABC Sunday morning too.

            There are never many true, principled conservatives at any one time.  It’s a difficult thing to be.  You need a deep understanding of your own principles and where they come from, and a strong sense of the ebb and flow of history and current events.  Then, you must follow the facts and your principles wherever they lead, even if they go against the leaders of your own political party.  Practically from Day One, Will and Brooks have been two of the Bush administration’s strongest critics.  Based on their conservative principles, the Bush administration has never been conservative.

      “Government should be limited, frugal, fiscally sound, and above all competent,” Will says.

The incompetence is what bothers him most, from the post-invasion bungling in Iraq, to Katrina, to Harriet Miers.  The current cloudburst over the Justice Department, which originally grew from their emphasis on loyalty over competence, is at best incompetent public relations.  Each day it looks more like obstruction of justice.  Then there is the president’s attachment to loyal failures, like Donald Rumsfeld and “Brownie.”  “When failure has no price, you get a lot of failure,” Will says.

            Kyle Sampson, former chief of staff to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, said in sworn Senate testimony that his boss said things to cover himself that were “inaccurate.”  It’s also clear that Bush is digging a moat around “loyal Bushies,” Karl Rove and Harriet Miers in the White House, because they are very guilty.   They’re glad to have Gonzales on the news looking like a liar and an idiot, or maybe a lawbreaker.  If the president’s chief adviser and the White House counsel are in with Gonzales as deep as they seem, the next question is, what did the president know and when did he know it?   Keeping Gonzales out there pn TV slows the process of working the conspiracy back to the White House.

            My first job was with a true conservative, Sen. Sam J. Ervin of North Carolina.  This was in 1968, five years before he became a household name with his Watergate hearings.  My politics were typical of 20-year-olds during the Vietnam War, and I disagreed with Ervin on most issues.  But I agreed with his conservative principles.  The Constitution means what it says:  “No law” means no law.  No searches and seizures without a warrant and probable cause means you don’t search.  The government doesn’t paper its files spying on people whose only crime is dissenting from government policy.  Our disagreements came when we applied the facts to the principles and reached different conclusions. 

This business with the U.S. Attorneys would have driven him wild.   Before he was a senator, he was a distinguished trial judge and Supreme Court judge in North Carolina.  Experts on the constitution in the best law schools considered him an equal.  He knew how powerful U.S. attorneys could be.  They can send people to jail.  A federal investigation can destroy a person’s finances, ruin his family and reputation, even when he proves he is innocent.  Pressuring U.S Attorneys to investigate voter fraud with insufficient evidence that a crime has been committed, pushing them to bring an indictment prematurely to influence an election, or punishing them for investigating political corruption in the wrong party – for true American conservatives like Ervin, Brooks and Will, these abuses of Executive power are direct threats to the rule of law – far more serious than Bill Clinton lying about sexual relations.

George Will’s opposition to limiting corporate money in elections still drives me crazy.  He’s drawing a conclusion from the principle of free political speech that’s different from mine.  But he is correct when he says no law devised by politicians will ever successfully limit corporate money in elections.

Reasoned conservative voices like these are far more important than the passions of people who are looking for more reasons to hate George Bush.  Because they have impeccable conservative credentials, their criticism of faux conservative politician carries more weight.  Find them in the media, and listen to what they say.  Learn from them even when you disagree with their conclusions.  They are half of America’s conscience.