Behold the Awesome and Mighty Power of Dale Ahlquist!
Boycott Gilbert Magazine? I think not. Reshape, reform and revolutionize the failed two party system? I think so!
Share this:
About the Author
Popular Posts
Gilbert for iPad and Kindle!
ACS Blog
Boycott Gilbert Magazine? I think not. Reshape, reform and revolutionize the failed two party system? I think so!
Dale Ahlquist? Who is this puny “Dale Ahlquist” you speak of? I and I alone destroyed Mitt Romney and rang in four more glorious years of atheistic Islamic communist shariah! http://www.patheos.com/blogs/markshea/2012/12/damn-you-dale-ahlquist.html
And all without even *voting* for Obama! Behold my mighty power!
There can be only one!
Being Catholic equates the following two political responses:
1. Conservatives calling you left-wing basket case
2. Liberals calling you right-wing crony
Catholics need a real party to choose from. A Catholic Party. A Distributist Party.
Specifically, the Chestertonian Party.
Motto: Play Hard, Work Hard, Pray Hard
I remain available to be king if called upon.
Catholic,distributist, ChesterBellocian, Jacobite and a wise-arse at times. And I like Dale. Everyone wins.
Good morning, Chestertonians!
I see my controversial “tweet” has showed up in yet another Chestertonian stronghold. I started it in Twitter. Then first it went to Mark Shea’s website, then it moved to the Chesterton Facebook page and now it’s here. I’m glad to serve as your whipping boy (I may even whip back as I did on Mr. Shea’s site) but please have the courtesy to let me know where you are taking me!
It’s true, I rue the re-election of President Obama. And, yes, it is also true that I believe the flawed reasoning of Mr. Ahlquist and like-minded folk had something to do with it. We went through this in some detail on Mr. Shea’s web-site (wherein I provided a substantively more cogent argument than the summary provided by Mr. Shea above).
Let me say here that I fear that some in the ACS willingly ally themselves with the party of big government as they take a non-position when faced with the opportunity with removing it from power. And I fear that these folks don’t understand that this same party is also the party of big business. In fact, this is the party of the confluence of Hudge and Gudge. Mind you, I have never said the other party is all that great. However, (in addition to the fact that it is the party that stands for life, marriage and religious liberty – the great non-negotiables of our day) it does promote economic policy that allows small business to thrive.
We need to understand authentic social teaching. And let me say this, authentic social teaching has NOTHING to do with big government coercion. Authentic Catholic social teaching begins with gratuitiousness and works through human freedom and responsibility to a final just outcome. That is, authentic Catholic social teaching lives in our hearts and souls and is not forced upon us. Can the God who gave us free will be in favor of government policies that remove our freedom to exercise our will? Of course, there are exceptions. We must have laws to ensure that the small and the vulnerable are not crushed, are not extinguished but we must take great care that our efforts to protect do not stifle those whom we seek to protect, snuff them out before they come to be…
I love Chesterton. I love the ACS. I even love Dale Ahlquist and Mark Shea, believe it or not. This love is precisely the motivation for my comments. Any other response on my part would not be love but its opposite – hate, cloaked in indifference.
By the way I will be writing more about this stuff on my web-site, A Sensible Life. You can get there through my Twitter feed, whose information Nancy Carpentier Brown most kindly provided above.
Or alternatively Joe,
Romney lost because he wasn’t a good candidate and couldn’t convince people that he was much different than Obama. Blaming Dale Ahlquist or Mark Shea is like blaming Bush for everything. I choose to blame the Captain of the ship.
I voted for Romney as a tactical choice against Obama.
This will be my last election voting “tactical.” I will now vote strategic and with the long game in mind. Time for a new demand signal to emerge.
I look forward to a candidate out to win my vote vice trying to get me to detest the “other guy” so much that I overlook his resemblance to that “other guy.”
Joe: Sorry that I didn’t warn you that you might be sent anywhere in the blogosphere. You were the point of much mirth for us, and so, obviously, are one of us.
There is no quick and easy solution to the problem of our current government, which grows heavier by the day. Hudge and Gudge work together with their new pal Sludge (Big Science) to control and cut off freedom every day.
It is the two-party system which is broken. Neither candidate was a good choice (I think that that–ultimately–was Dale Ahlquist’s point in his editorial) and when you have two bad choices, there ought to be three or four other REAL choices to choose from, not nothing.
The whole mess is frustrating, and it won’t be fixed by the time the next election comes along. Each party is going to work very hard over the next two years to groom another person rich enough and handsome enough to face the cameras. Because that’s what they need to do. It is a sad state of affairs.
But thanks, Joe, for joining the conversation, and letting us have some fun with your comments. Please take it as a compliment that we thought your comment worthy of tossing around for a while.
Nancy said….The whole mess is frustrating, and it won’t be fixed by the time the next election comes along.
—————————–
That is the point that we need to ponder.
In having this debate with people during this last cycle, many routinely remarked that we need to vote for Romney now and we can regroup in four years for the right candidate. Aside from the fact that such a statement admitted that they knew Romney would invariably lose, the notion that it can be fixed in four years is not realistic. We have to establish a long-term demand signal that builds up over time
We are playing the long game.
“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: GOD will not hold us innocent. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.”—Bonhoeffer
My summary of the Boycott Episode here: http://shar.es/41qfI
Peace and Happy New Year!
Joe
Dale, I hope you can and will distinguish Chesterton’s thoughts from those of Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk, which I think is key to setting Chestertonians apart from contemporary “conservatives” in America.
I think there are “Joes” out there who are in essence Gudges, trying their usual best psyops to pull the wool over the eyes of Chestertonian Joneses, or who don’t really understand Chesterton and are just simply deluded by the propaganda of Gudge.
One need only to read Chesterton’s What’s Wrong with the World, especially Part One, chapters VIII to XI +, to see how Hudgian-Gudgian psyops work.
(A searchable digital copy can be had by Googling “G. K. Chesterton’s Works on the Web”)
Only a fool, someone who hadn’t read What’s Wrong…, or who has no reading comprehension whatsoever would try to claim that in America the “left” is the party of “Hudge” big government and should be opposed by supporting, aiding and abetting the “right”, which is none other than the party of “Gudge” big business.
Chesterton’s whole point about Hudge and Gudge is that both work against Jones.
That American “conservatives” who claim to be Christian would rail against Hudge, but crawl in bed and cozy up to Gudge just because he gives lip service to “anti-abortion” is beyond me. Such manipulation of Jones is something well illustrated by Chesterton in What’s Wrong With The World.
I have listened to Gudgian “christian” rationale and find it steeped in Burke and Kirk. Burk ‘n Kirk abhor the French Revolution in favor of the English Glorious Revolution that preserved the aristocracy, but Chesterton argues in favor of the opposite.
In What’s Wrong…, Chesterton refers to “Burke, a fine rhetorician, who rarely faced realities” and to Burke and Nietzsche as sophists and the “most intelligent apologists of the aristocracy”, and also to Burke as an “atheist”.
(Search the PDF of What’s Wrong.. for “Burke”)
Chesterton’s analysis shows Joes to be Gudges who ignore that their counterpart, the Hudges, are really no worse than Gudge, and in many respects one and the same.
As Chesterton reasons, much if not all the “progressive” nonsense that is traditionally associated with Hudge on the left, originated with Gudge on the right who is not interested in “tradition” as it would seem, but is really interested only in the future because the leisure class is perpetually bored with the past and the present, and always looking forward to the future for “change”.
Thank God! for the complete thinker Chesterton, a one and only veritable Moses capable of leading us out of modern slavery to “left” and “right”, to Hudge and Gudge, both of whom serve no one but the interests of monied elitism.
I find it hard to believe that any Christian who stands for Love of God as they should, could be deceived by mammon worship, from either “left” or “right”.