During Ronald Reagan’s 1966 campaign for governor of California, Republicans established the so-called Eleventh Commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican.”
It was proposed by State Republican Chairman Gaylord Parkinson to help prevent a repeat of the liberal Republican assault on Barry Goldwater that laid the foundation for Goldwater’s trouncing in the 1964 presidential election. Just as Nelson Rockefeller and his East Coast cronies had branded Goldwater as an “extremist” who was unfit to hold office, so candidate George Christopher and California’s liberal Republicans were leveling similar personal attacks on Reagan. Party liberals eventually followed Parkinson’s advice, and the rest is history.
All the Republican candidates have invoked the name of Ronald Reagan numerous times. It seems they all want to be associated with the Reagan legacy. But most have forgotten Reagan’s eleventh commandment. It is one thing to contrast one’s record with that of another candidate. it is quite another to resort to character assassination and that is precisely what some have done.
The pundits are even worse and they don’t seem to realize the risk they are taking. The quote above illustrates why Reagan was unwilling to speak ill of his Republican opponents. He stuck to issues because he understood that it was important that Republicans won in the end the constant assaults in the primary process made that less likely.
The lesson holds true today but you wouldn’t know it listening to the pundits. I have to admit that I have been guilty as well. I’ve made my views on John McCain, for example, very clear. But as I said in my last post, I have to think about the possibility that McCain will be the eventual nominee. What do I do then? Can I reasonably blog in support of McCain at that point after all the negative posts I’ve written about him? I’m not sure anyone would take such post seriously but I’m quite sure some would use my older posts to argue in favor of whoever the Democrat nominee is.
Therein lies the problem. I need to tone down my rhetoric against McCain, Romney, et.al. in favor of arguing for my candidate. I think others need to do the same thing. otherwise we all contribute to making the Democrats’ job easier and our nominee’s job tougher once the nominees are chosen.
Today I learned that a great mil blogger was killed in Iraq. Andrew (Andy) Olmsted was a Major in the Army stationed in Iraq. He was killed on January 3rd, along with Cpt. Yom Casey while attempting talk three suspected insurgents into surrendering. Both were victims of sniper fire.
Andy wrote a blog at www.andrewolmsted.com. It was on my blogroll for a long time and I was a regular reader. In February of last year Andy announced that he had to stop blogging because he’d discovered he was in violation of a DoD rule. I was disappointed at the time because I really enjoyed his blog and I removed him from the blogroll since there would be no new posts.
Andy’s blog is still up and well worth reading. I’ll be adding it back to the blogroll as soon as I finish this post and it will stay there as long as it remains up. Andy also sent a final post to hilzoy of Obsidian Wings, to be posted in the even of his death. That post went live at andrewolmsted.com on January 4th. I encourage you to go read it. It’s long but it will give you a pretty good insight into who Andy was.
One thing Andy requested is that no one use his death for political purposes either on the right or the left. I will certainly honor that request. Suffice it to say Andy was a quality individual. He died doing what he chose to do. He is survived by his wife Amanda, his children and he parents. Please remember them in your prayers.
A while back, after much complaining without a response, I elected to remove the TTLB ecosystem code from my site. It wasn’t working or updating properly and all support requests went unanswered. So I replaced the TTLB code with a little snippet that indicated how whacked out TTLB had become.
Just yesterday I received an email from TTLB stating that they were now responding to support requests. I immediately put in a request and, sure enough, I received a response almost immediately. So I’ve reinstalled the TTLB code in the sidebar. With a little luck, NZ Bear will keep TTLB updated now. Indeed, he says there is another big announcement coming in the next week or so.
So if you’ve been struggling with TTLB lately, you might want to give it one more try.
This is a little tricky but I seem to be making progress. I hope this is the last test.
UPDATE:
It works! bbPress integration has been successfully implemented at Ron’s Musings!
Give it a try. Click on the Discuss in forum link below to go to the forum. That link was created automatically along with the forum thread when I posted this article.
I’ve been searching for a solution that will allow me to integrate a message board into the blog. What I want is for comments to be handled by the message board as well as other discussion taking place there. Until now I’ve found very little.
But today I found bbPress. bbPress is a message board pretty much designed to integrate into Word Press. I’ve installed it and so far the database integration seems to work. If you are registered here, you are also registered on the message board.
Additionally, when I create a new post, a corresponding new thread should be created in the message board and a link to that thread should appear at the end of the post. This post will test that.
If this doesn’t work, this post will disappear. If it does, let me know what you think.
UPDATE:
Well, no joy so far. The message board works and the users were brought over but the thread was not created when I posted this post. I’m going to leave this here for now and do some more research. I really hope I can make this work.
If you’ve already made this work on your blog, please let me know about it.
Does anyone know what’s going on with the Truth Laid Bear? There are errors all over the site and stats haven’t been updated in weeks. As well, it seems that no support requests are being responded to. I know this is the case on at least a dozen blogs.
TTLB has been a defacto rating standard for blogs since well before I started blogging. But if this keeps up TTLB will end up losing that position. I hope that doesn’t happen. The service provided there is invaluable to hundreds or thousands of bloggers. It would be a shame to lose that.
If anyone has any information about what’s going on, I’d love to hear it.
I’m in a number of online groups at Google, Yahoo and MSN. One of those is a group of conservative bloggers and some of us like to promote our posts within the group. I’ve done it and I’ve pretty consistently helped promote the posts of the other bloggers in the group. The activity was lovingly referred to as “post pimping.” Well, predictably, some members of the group complained about it. They didn’t want notifications in their email about conservative blog posts coming from their conservative blog group!
It occurred to me that we should have a group expressly for the purpose of conservative “post pimping.” People who want to promote their posts on conservative blogs could join along with those who are interested in being notified of new posts on good conservative blogs. Thus has been born the Conservative Post Pimp group at Google Groups. The URL is http://groups.google.com/group/postpimp and anyone can join. So if you’re a conservative blogger wanting to promote your posts or if you just like reading conservative blogs, this group is for you.
I imagine some liberals will be tempted to join this group as well. If you are joining to see what the opposition is saying, fine. But don’t expect to promote liberal blogs in this group. That is decidedly not its purpose. If you decide to do it anyway, you’ll be removed from the group.
Regular readers of this blog are aware of the sometime struggle I’ve had trying to balance politics and my Christian outlook or worldview. I’ve at times tried to make this blog something it never was intended to be and the result was always that I came right back to pure politics.
My solution comes in the form of another blog entitled Universitas Veritas. If I got my Latin right it means universal truth or total truth and it is a blog about the Christian worldview. I think you’ll find it interesting.
The modern worldview denies the existence of truth or confines the idea of truth to what can be demonstrated empirically. But there is much in each of our lives that we accept as truth with absolute faith even though there is no empirical evidence for it. That is as much true for the atheist as it is for the Christian. Even the die hard naturalist scientist finds that he can’t live his personal live by the “truths” he espouses in the lab.
This new blog will explore worldviews. It will compare and contrast the Christian worldview with other worldviews and attempt to give some substance to how the Christian worldview can and should be lived out.
I hope you’ll check it out. It will be a journey and I have by no means figured out in advance where it will lead. That’s why I need you to come along. I’m open to all kinds of discussion on this topic and I hope you’ll contribute. Atheist or Christian, all are welcome. I don’t want to fight with anyone but I do want to examine and discuss some of the hard questions of life. Lets do it together.
The blog move has been successfully completed. All files appear to be working properly, the database pulls up all my old posts and I can find nothing misbehaving. All seems well. So, I’ve gone ahead and pointed www.rongoodwyne.com back here to www.ronsmusings.com. That allowed me to make corrections to my blog email MX record. The email is also back up and running now. So feel free to send me email at ron@rongoodwyne.com again.
In the relatively near future I will turn off forwarding for rongoodwyne.com. For them moment you can get to this blog using that address but as I said, I have other plans for it. So, if you want to get back here reliably, please update your bookmarks or favorites to reflect the new address.
If you spot anything not working properly, please let me know. I’ve tested most everything I can think of but that doesn’t mean I didn’t miss something. There is one problem I am aware of and I haven’t found a solution yet. My RSS feeds don’t seem to work properly with Internet Explorer 7. Firefox has no difficulty with them and it appears this is a known issue with the latest version of WordPress. I’m looking for a solution. If you happen to be a WordPress guru and already have a solution, please let me know about it.
It appears the blog is moved. As far as I can tell at this moment, everything has been moved over and works. I’ll wait until probably this evening before I forward www.rongoodwyne.com here. In the mean time, if you go to www.rongoodwyne.com, you will not be able to post comments. That keeps me from having to import an odd comment here or there. You can, however, comment here!
Try the new host out and see if you find any problems. If you do, please let me know in a comment. The email is still down and will remain so until I forward the old domain here. I can’t access the MX record until I do that.
