Rightbloggers' Latest Enemy: That Leftist Bastard Teddy Roosevelt
Back during the 2008 Presidential race, John McCain described himself to the New York Times as "a conservative Republican... to a large degree in the Theodore Roosevelt mold."
Many liberals didn't buy the self-comparison to Teddy Roosevelt. But some conservatives said McCain was, too, like Roosevelt -- and that was a bad thing.
"Is Roosevelt a proper model for today's conservatives?" asked Max Boot at World Affairs. "That question isn't easy to answer." Boot, a fan of the Moro Massacre, had no trouble with TR's jingoism and foreign adventuring, but was sensitive to the charge that the 26th President "was a 'statist' and a tax hiker," though he finally judged that Roosevelt "always tried to maintain a balance between government activism and a vibrant private sector." Still, Roosevelt didn't really tax and regulate that much, said Boot, and his conservatism "represented one strain of conservatism among many."
An outsider unconnected to the ideological purity wars of the conservative movement who came across Boot's article -- or the related ravings of someone like Classic Liberal ("The tendency of our government to micromanage everything began with Teddy Roosevelt's administration") -- might wonder why anyone in his right mind would care about this. OK, there are conservatives who would drum several Republican Presidents out of the movement: Abraham Lincoln for overriding habeus corpus and suppression of the Confederacy, Dwight Eisenhower for being a Communist agent, etc. But surely these were cranks and fringe figures, not regular Party men.
Then, the weekend before last, at the venerable CPAC convention, after the delegates named Ron Paul their preferred Presidential contender, Glenn Beck gave a speech in which, among other things, he indirectly denounced McCain for admiring Theodore Roosevelt, and denounced Roosevelt as part of "the cancer that is eating America" -- that is, progressivism.
Some rightbloggers defended the late President from Beck. But -- perhaps understanding that their movement had a greater need to preserve the popularity of Beck than that of a dead historical figure -- they did so gently, conceding that there was much sense in what Beck had said
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