Forum… Or Against ’em

By Count Friedrich von Olsen
A touch of senility seems to have crept into my mental aspect. By that I mean it seems I am perceiving things that by normal logical bearing would seem to have no grounding in what people typically conceive of as reality. A case in point is the way I have been gripped by this idea that Fox News is fast progressing toward shedding its claim to being the voice of American conservatives…
The problem, of course, is that it is sometimes difficult to define, exactly, what a conservative, or conservatism, is. Of that, I will hold forth a bit later. For now, though, let’s perpend Fox News. Look at what has happened there already, what is going on now, and consider where it is headed. Roger Ailes was the executive producer of the Mike Douglas Show, helped Richard Nixon formulate his television ads in 1968, assisted in the reelection campaign of Ronald Reagan in 1984, directed a savvy media campaign that assisted George Herbert Walker Bush beat Michael Dukakis in 1988, and in 1996 became, empowered with Australian Rupert Murdoch’s money, the founding chairman of Fox News. For two decades he was at the epicenter of the conservative movement and last year he was felled by charges that he had “sexually harassed” some Fox News staffers. Out he went. Over the last few months, the Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly ended up on the wrong side of this sexual harassment divide himself and – voila! – out he went. Now comes word that Kelly Wright, who co-anchors the Fox show “America’s News Headquarters,” has joined with ten of his current and former African-American colleagues at Fox in a New York state court lawsuit in which they as a class maintain they were demeaned, humiliated, paid less than white coworkers, and passed over for promotions. According to the suit, this mistreatment came at least partially at the hands of former Fox News senior vice president and comptroller Judith Slater. According to the plaintiffs, Fox executives including Dianne Brandi, Fox’s lead in-house attorney, said nothing could be done because Slater had leverage over the network because she was highly knowledgeable about the behavior of Roger Ailes and Bill O’Reilly. In February, after Roger Ailes departed and before O’Reilly’s exodus, Fox fired Slater. It is hard to say whether Fox will be able to get out from under this. Catherine Foti, a lawyer for Slater, said there is no substance to the allegations against her client…
That is the backdrop. Now let us return to defining conservatism. It seems to me that what in the popular lexicon passes for conservatism is nothing of the sort. Moreover, there is, in America today, a multiplicity of areas into which the term is applied. There is Constitutional Conservatism. There is fiscal conservatism. There is social conservatism. There is, I would assert, political conservatism. All of these conservatisms can clash with one another. Constitutional Conservatism applies to preserving the U.S. Constitution. Thus, if one is a true Constitutional Conservative, he is likely to be out of sorts with current American life. The original Constitution for example permitted white men over the age of 21 who owned property to vote. That was it. There was no women’s suffrage. No men other than Caucasians could vote. Even Caucasian men who did not own land could not vote. Caucasian men who owned property who had not yet eclipsed the age of 21 could not vote. Nowadays, little or none of that applies. To a true Constitutional Conservative, this is alarming. “Where will it go from here?” Constitutional Conservatives ask. “Will dogs and cats someday be voting?” Fiscal conservatism applies to people who want to be judicious in the spending of money. Many refer to Ronald Reagan as a conservative. But, and this will anger, I am sure, many of my fellow Republicans, Ronald Reagan was not, repeat not, a fiscal conservative. He spent money on our military industrial complex like a drunken sailor. He may have done so for a good reason and with commendable results. He initiated a peacetime arms race with the Soviet Union, and when behemoth Soviet bear attempted to keep up with the economic engine that was the United States, it collapsed. This was a good thing. But it was not an example of fiscal conservatism. Social conservatism harkens to what some refer to as old fashioned family, some might even say Christian, values. Those are out of step with the newfound and even established permissiveness which allows for the distilling of liquor and other strong beverages, the use of tobacco and marijuana, horse and dog racing, gambling, licentiousness, sodomy, pornography and for what in many circles today passes for popular music, literature and art. But I know of more than a few social liberals, indeed out and out libertines, who are bedrock fiscal conservatives. Then there is political conservatism. I define political conservatism as respect for the political order. Thus, if you were a political conservative and also a Republican and what you considered to be a conservative across the board, during the just concluded presidency of Barack Obama, you had a real dilemma. You had to support Barack Obama in his administration of government because of your commitment to political stability. Conservatism can be contradictory…
It is fashionable, at present, to equate conservatism with Republicanism. But that is a canard. Two of our most illustrious Republican presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, were flaming progressives. Freeing the slaves, indeed going to war to accomplish that goal, was not a conservative course. Nor was busting the trusts…
Now let us go back to Fox News and the ongoing purge, it seems, of the so-called conservatives there. Much of this purge comes accompanied by what some refer to as “liberal claptrap,” the causes of women’s rights and racially-based promotion or entitlement. As a billionaire myself, I run in the same circles, from time to time, as Rupert Murdoch. What is going around is that his son, James Murdoch, the heir to the Fox media empire, is one of them liberals. There is a fear, that sooner rather than later, Fox News will be populated by nothing but liberals…
Everyone knows I am a tried and true Republican. If you cut me, I bleed red. I have some elements of the conservative in my make up, but I do believe, conservatism is not automatically Republicanism and I am willing to stand by Fox News as it returns to the values of Lincoln and Roosevelt, if indeed it is purposed to return to the values of Lincoln and Roosevelt…

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