City Newspaper Archives - 12/2006
LETTERS: Conservative?
Published on Dec 06, 2006
I was on board with the well-written letter by Italo Savella for a little more than a paragraph. Then the wild but not unusual distortion of the meaning of "liberal" and "conservative" got underway. Maybe we just need to drop the terms altogether, so we can reacquaint ourselves with having conversations instead of food fights.
I respect conservative values that favor fiscal responsibility, caution about entering into wars, and actually conserving the Constitution instead of trashing it. In this, neither Mr. Savella nor the Bush administration seems to be remotely conservative.
Mr. Savella refers to "extremists like Pelosi and Kennedy." The extremists here would be people like me who hate this miserable mess of a war in Iraq. We "vapid, effete, hate America firsters" worry a lot about the likelihood that Pelosi will play the usual losing game of Democratic politics. We worry that she will find some meaningless, "value free" middle ground that has drifted well starboard of what was once perceived as fringy right.
While starkly absent in recent times, there do indeed exist many examples of the US acting as a force for good. But look at the record of recent US misadventures in Indochina, Africa, Latin America (and less recently in the Philippines and Cuba), where we have too often ground both elected and unelected governments and their people underfoot. These inconvenient realities can never support serene certainty. No wonder so many are so effete.
Michael D. Connelly, Cypress Street, Rochester
