Showing posts with label lists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lists. Show all posts

Monday, January 25, 2010

My List of Best Conservatives

Would you like to know how I formulated this list? The list is based on two variables: influence and righteousness. Thus if I were ranking conservatives by who is the best on the issues and stating their views I might include myself in this list and Christopher Hitchens wouldn't be in it at all but that would to boring like being a communist.

1. Steve Sailer


2. Patrick J. Buchanan


3. Micheal Savage


3. Paul Gottfried


4. John Derbyshire


5. Peter Brimelow


6.Mitt Romney


6. Peter Hitchens


7. George Will


8. Antonin Scalia


9. Peter Schiff


10. Thomas Sowell


11. David Frum
David Frum has some defects on some of the policies he wants (give in on carbon taxes, etc.) but thats not his self-realized role in the GOP. Frum has taken on a crucial crusade, he was and remains the leading and sometimes, seemingly, the only Republican critiquing Sara Palin during the 2008 campaign. Quite simply he pointed out the obvious, or what should have been ovbious truth about Palin, that she was a yokel, a embarssment and catosphere for the GOP that reinforced all the worst sterotypes of the right that Bush had enforced for 8 years in which the GOP became a laughingstock because Bush like Palin can't speak and is not up to far for high office intelllectually. Frum wants to David Cameron-ize the Republican Party in a sense which is to say he wants to
reform the Republican Partys terribly managed image from jesus-freak, unsophisticated, uncultured, anti-intellectual yokels to smartly dressed conservative urbanites with nice suites and Evelyn Waugh by the bedside which is the image of the new Tories lead by David Cameron. This is crucial because the current GOP image has blocked the conversion of millions of Americans, paticularily young people and city slickers to the right for converting to the party of Palin and Bush is social society and too embarsing for millions who would move right otherwise. If America woke up tommorow to find a GOP, un-changed policy wise, but which looked like, dressed-like, was as clearly euridite as the British Conservative Party I gaurnetee that in the course of 6 months of re-adjustment tens of millions of Americans, mostly located in urban areas and under 35, would quitely move to the right. This would entail, there being no Sara Palin, no George Bush as face of the GOP but David Frums insteads (he is, in person the model of what the new Republican showuld look like). It would mean that rather than old, dreary, senile, out of touch, old geezers with white hair like John McCain and Newt Gingrich running the GOP and always having a monopoly on the nomination that conservatives in their 40's who look like David Cameron or Scott Brown should be the GOP presidential candiates. This is the good part of Frum's rigetous crusade there are just a few down sides policy wise. Frum seems to make dumb moves to the left on the enviorment, taxes, and so fourth (though this might not be as bad as I describe it, anyways its not anywhere near the fore front of his crusade). David has also been notable on the right side of history when it comes to immigration which is more important than one might think considering that David Frum has kind of supplanted David Brooks as the favriote or preffered Republican of the Left which is usually a indiment of a respective Republican's oppurtinism but with David is the product of the very image-related subjects that I write of. Frum, as i say knows how to do what the GOp needs to learn how to do, and what Sara Palin doesn't know or try to do, which is how to talk to not just the left, the young, the upper middle class, the urban, the well educated who revile the ignorance of Sara Palin.


12. Christopher Hitchens
So Christopher Hitchens makes the list because, although he is wrong on foreign policy, religon and much else and is a intertionalist to the bone, he has morphed in the last 10 years into one of the best critiques of the more masochist elements on the left. He is read by the media and political and ruling classes so his influence is huge. If anything he is injects a crucial self-conciousness into the left that makes the Democratic Party ignore the Nation magazine (his former employer somehow) more which is always a good thing. He has admirable integrity and has displayed it by recently checking movements and groups on the left that need checking especially by a polemcist with the gifts of Hitchens, recent victims include: the religous Global Warming movement, the inane-sheep like audience of the Daily Show, Al Franken, Obama worship, the leftist pussyfooters who won't even try to stop jihadist terrorists in airports, etc. He also has been the most brillant critique of anti-Americanism and sympathy for jihadism on the left.


13. Rush Limbaugh


14. Rich Lowry


15. Mark Steyn


16.Taki Theodoracopulos


17.Victor Davis Hanson


18. Tom Tancredo


19. Jonah Goldberg


20. Ron Paul


21. Thomas Woods


22. Niall Ferguson


23. Robert Bork


24. Mark Sanford


25. Mike Pence


24. Peter Robinson


25. Mitch Daniels


26. Clarence Thomas


27. Ramesh Ponnuru


28. Supreme Court Justice John Roberts


29. Richard Brookhiser


30. Steven Hayward


31. L. Brent Bozell III


32. Paul Rahe

Monday, January 18, 2010

Books Acquired Recently




1. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Adventures of a Curious Character) by Richard Feynman
2.Democracy in America by Alexis De Tocqueville
3. The Book of Basketball by Bill Simmons
4. Have You Seen My Country Lately? by Jerry Doyle
5. Captilism: The Unknown Ideal by Ayn Rand
6. Kipling: Everyman's Poetry Collection
7. How to talk about Books you haven't Read by Pierre Bayard
8. Anti-Illectualism in American Life by Richard Hofstadter
9. Intellectuals and Society by Thomas Sowell
10. The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin
11. Bright Star by John Keats
12. Longfellow: Poems & Other Writings
13.Woodrow Wilson by John Milton Cooper Jr.
14. Samuel Johnson by Peter Martin
15. American Orginal:The Life and Constuition of Sumpreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia by Joan Biskupic
16. Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill at War by Carlo D'este
17 "Only the Super-Rich Can Save Us!" by Ralph Nader
18. Andrew Carnegie by David Nasaw
19. Bright-Sided by Barbara Ehrenreich
20. Snoop by Sam Gosling
21. Albion's Seed: Four Folkways in America by David Hackett Fischer
22. Washington's Crossing by David Hackett Fischer
23. American Nervousness by George Miller Beard
24. The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard by J.G. Ballard
25. My Dark Places by James Ellroy
26. On Classical Economics by Thomas Sowell
27. The Quest for Cosmic Justice by Thomas Sowell
28. Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell
29. Applied Economics by Thomas Sowell
30. The Housing Boom & Bust by Thomas Sowell
31. A Man of Letters by Thomas Sowell
32. The Ascent of Money by Niall Ferguson
33. On The Wealth of Nations by P.J. O'Rourke
34. The Six Pillars of Self Esteem by Nathiniel Branden
35. The Collected Poems of A.E. Housman by A.E. Housman
36. Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
37. Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac
38. Avoid Boring People by James D. Watson
39. Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed
40. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
41. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
42. Anthem by Ayn Rand
43. Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right by Jennifer Burns
44. Ayn Rand and the World she made by Anne C. Heller
45. The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand
46. Philosphy: Who Needs It? by Ayn Rand
47. For the New Intellectuals by Ayn Rand
48. Ayn Rand Answers by Ayn Rand
49. The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini by Benvenuto Cellini
50. "They Have Killed Papa Dead!" by Anthony S. Pitch
51. The Broken Compass by Peter Hitchens
52. Encounters by Paul Gottfried
53. A Country of Vast Designs by Robert W. Merry
54. History of the United States: 1801-1809 by Henry Adams
55. TR: The Last Romantic by H.W. Brands
56. Start-Up Nation by Dan Senor & Saul Singer
57. A Time to Speak by Robert Bork
58. Booknotes by Brian Lamb
59. The Quatable Calvin Coolidge by Calvin Coolidge
60. The Autobiography of Calvin Coolidge by Calvin Coolidge
61. Ex-America by Garet Garret
62. The American Civil War by John Keegan
63. A Patriotic History of the United States by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen
64. The Oxford History of The United States by Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison
65.The Age of Reagan: The Fall of the Liberal Order by Steven F. Hayward
66. The Age of Reagan: The Conservative CounterRevoultion by Steven F. Hayward
67. Empire of Liberty by Gordon S. Wood
68. We Are Doomed by John Derbyshire
69. Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson by David S. Reynolds
70. The Conservatives by Patrick Allit
71. Founding Brothers by Joesph Ellis
72. What Hath God Wrought?: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 by Daniel Walker Howe
73. What Would the Founders Do? by Richard Brookheiser
74. 33 Questions about American History you're not supposed to ask by Thomas Woods
75. What The Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell
76. Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy
77. His Excellency: George Washington by Joesph J. Ellis
78. The Conservative Mind: from Burke to Eliot by Russel Kirk
79. The Almanac of American History by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
80. Forge of Empire by Micheal Knox Beran
81. A Conservative History of the American Left by Daniel J. Flynn
82. The Education of Henry Adams by Donald Hall
83. Who Killed the Constuitition? by Thomas Woods
84. Alexander Hamilton, American by Richard Brookheiser
85. "I Can't Believe I'm Sitting Next To A Republican" by Harry Stein
86. Revoultionary Charcters by Gordon S. Wood
87. The Vision of the Anointed by Thomas Sowel
88. A Conflict of Visions by Thomas Sowell
89. The Victorians by A.N. Wilson
90. Dutch by Edmund Wilson
91. Titan by Ron Chernow
92. Star Money by Kathleen Winsor
(and more to come.....)