Bill O'Reilly is a Putz

Cartoon by BALOO

It's amazing what passes for "conservative" these days.  Bill O'Reilly completely misrepresents the whole concept of conservatism all the time, and never better than now, as he joins the unthinking herd and continues the deification of one of our most disastrous Presidents, Abraham Lincoln, in his new book, Killing Lincoln.  No, I haven't read it, because it just came out, but he talks about it in this video, and we can certainly see what his point of view is.  Lincoln, according to him, is our greatest President, and we need one just like him now, because we're so deeply divided.  He holds Lincoln up as some kind of conservative and contrasts him to the "progressive" Obama.  Note: O'Reilly betrays his own basic liberal ideology by adopting the weasel word, "progressive," instead of calling a spade a spade.  Actually, in modern terms, Lincoln himself was a "progressive," starting up some delightful progressive ideas like the income tax, fiat money, and a military draft. And quadruple the size and power of the Federal Government. The actual conservatives in those days were opposing Lincoln. Maybe a less psychotic President, like Douglas or Sam Houston, could have avoided most of that.  We'll never know.

So, if what we need is another Lincoln, O'Reilly, I guess we need a nice big fratricidal Civil War, and we need to throw political dissenters in jail, defy habeas corpus, tax everybody to death, draft all the farm boys and let the upper classes buy their way out of the draft, and violate state laws by Federal proclamation.  Go and read "The American Lenin," by  L. Neil Smith, HERE.  I'll wait.  Okay?  Well, Smith contrasts libertarians with conservatives in his essay, but I'd use slightly different terminology to come to the same conclusion.  I'd use "paleoconservative" instead of "libertarian," and "neoconservative" instead of "conservative," because I think that, historically speaking, libertarianism is a basic part of paleoconservatism, and neoconservatism is the branch that rejects libertarian thinking, and that Lincolnism is the basis, the starting point, for the twin tyrannies of liberalism and neoconservatism in the United States today.  The O'Reillys of this world, in contrast, like great big government and lots of regulation and try to scoop in the natural American paleoconservatives to support their "Big Government" conservatism, which is nothing other than New Deal liberalism, now known as neoconservatism, under the phony name of "conservatism." Further info on that HERE.

Well, listen and learn.  With "conservatives" like O'Reilly, who needs "progressives" like Obama?