Jay Carney offered more excuses on the question of the Benghazi disaster, and this time, he explained it away as having “happened a long time ago.” This corrupt administration continues to stonewall, and after listening to their Secretary of State ask the question “What difference does it make,” we now see the new talking point emerge that Benghazi happened a long time ago. I suppose on that basis, we should simply forget it.
Watch this remarkable example of White House AssClownery:
The Immigration Reform bill pending in the US Senate is monstrous document, and the results of its passage would be catastrophic for our nation. Politically, it’s the death-knell of conservatism, but fiscally, it will accelerate the demise of our economy and usher in a new condition we might call: “Third World America.” You might be skeptical of this claim, and I’d understand if you asked for some kind of evidence. According to the group Numbers USA, this bill enacted would bring at least thirty-three million people to our country over the next ten years, but it may be far worse. At the same time, it has been admitted by the US Department of Agriculture that their foodstamps program does not check the immigration status of applicants, actively advertising in Spanish in borders states and even in Mexico. As if this is not bad enough, the traitorous Attorney General of the United States, Eric Holder, is now professing the view that immigration to the United States is a human and civil right. This legislation comprises an attack on our birthright, our financial health, and our political sovereignty. The costs of this bill are too high to be borne by any people,and we must fight like Hell to defeat it.
Ladies and gentlemen, this really is the moment to draw a line. As many as ninety-five percent of newly minted American citizens vote for one party: The Democrats. I would like for you to understand that if thirty-three million people are added to our voter rolls over the next decade, chances are exceedingly high, a virtual numerical certainty, that they will add thirty-one million new Democrats. What will happen to your “Red States” under this circumstance? The answer is simply: “Think Blue!” Republicans, never mind conservatives, will find themselves unable to be elected in any place at any time. Remember in 1995 when the avalanche of Democrats changed party affiliation to Republican? All of those and more will be going back. With them will go what remains of your principles of limited government, individual liberties, and fiscal responsibility. We will see the nation as a whole become like California, and locales like California will become political analogs to Venezuela.
Your birthright is being stolen by the process of political dilution. You will on some future day awake to find yourself in a foreign nation. These ruthless bastards in Washington DC are intent upon stealing your nation from you. In imagining US citizenship as some sort of human or civil right, what they are really saying is that they are going to throw open the doors to any who will come. How many of the world’s billions of desperately poor will flood to our nation under the rules these people now imagine? How will we feed them? How will we feed ourselves? This immigration bill isn’t a recipe for reformation of a broken system, but instead a recipe for radical transformation of a civilization.
Some will insist that I am too harsh or caustic in my appraisal, but what would they have me say? Shall I pretend that this bill represents only a “speed-bump” in the language of our President? Shall we accept the claims of Senator McCain who tells us these illegal immigrants come only to “pick our lettuce?” Let me explain to you what the sell-out anti-Republicans in favor of this bill are really trying to obtain: You demand they behave and vote as conservatives, but they wish to be freed from those constraints. In their states and districts at present, a Democrat could not win. Therefore, before they can change party and flip the bird at conservatives for good, they must set up a circumstance in which a Democrat could win in their states or congressional districts. It is at this point that you must think very carefully and clearly: The easiest way for them to make conservatives irrelevant is to out-number them. You’ve stirred-up so much trouble for them with your Tea Parties and your conservative activism that the only way to ignore you is to import a political force larger than you. That is the purpose of these millions of immigrants they wish to bring to our country: To replace and supplant you as the dominant political force in the nation.
Who will insist now that I had been too harsh? Could it be that I’m over-stating the political impact of this mass migration bill? According to Byron York, writing in the Washington Examiner, this legislation includes a number of loopholes that will fast-track many illegal aliens to full US citizenship. Writes York:
“A little-noticed exception in the Gang of Eight bill provides a fast track for many — possibly very many — currently illegal immigrants. Under a special provision for immigrants who have labored at least part-time in agriculture, that fast track could mean permanent residency in the U.S., and then citizenship, in half the time Rubio said. And not just for the immigrants themselves — their spouses and children, too.”
“A second provision in the legislation creates another fast track for illegal immigrants who came to the United States before they were 16 — the so-called Dreamers. The concept suggests youth, but the bill has no age limit for such immigrants — or their spouses and children — and despite claims that they must go to college or serve in the military to be eligible, there is an exception to that requirement as well.”
Have I been unnecessarily caustic in my appraisal, or does this bill offered by the “Gang-of-Eight” constitute a treason against the people of the United States? Imagine if you will, my own state of Texas, under the constructs of this legislation: Inside five or six years, it will have become impossible for any office-holder at any level of government to maintain his or her position while remaining in the Republican Party. The whole miserable lot will either retire, or merely change parties as happened in 1995. Do you see it now? Do you understand the dire meaning of our current situation? We are headed for one-party rule, and your conservative principles will be swept aside in the building of the new Democrat hegemony. If rank-and-file Democrats had any discernment, they too would be terrified, because they would understand that the only thing that offers any possibility of keeping their politicians honest is the competition of at least two vital parties. For conservatives and Republicans, this immigration bill is a death warrant not only for the sake of politics, but for the sake of the nation. Do you like losing? If this bill passes, you had better become accustomed to the concept. It will become a permanent condition for what will become a rapidly declining number of conservative office-holders, and indeed, for conservatives across the country. What you had known as America will be left in ashes.
This bill represents a threat against the American people far worse than that of al-Qaeda, because it will demolish the United States from the inside. Those who have advanced and advocated this bill knew or ought to have known its implications. It’s intentional, and it is far worse than we had dared to imagine. This one really is for all the marbles: We can be a sovereign nation that stands some chance of remaining a constitutional, representative republic, or we can fall into the abyss of a century of one-party rule and Third-World devolution. The choice is ours, but if we permit them to enact this bill, it may be the last substantial political choice we are ever permitted to make.
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Call, write, and fax your Senators. Emails are nice, but they go largely ignored. Visit their home-state offices. It’s time for you to show up, again. Call your Congressmen. Tell them that if they pass this bill(or any like it,) they won’t be left in office long enough to switch parties, because in 2014, you will send them home, while you still can. Tell every person you know what the game is, and what is being done. If we are to preserve this nation, this must be stopped.
The following is a list of United States Senators who today voted for cloture on a bill in the Senate they have not yet seen. The bill purports to impose new background check requirements that will act to infringe on your right to keep and bear arms. I consider these people to be traitors to the US Constitution, each and every one of them. These people decided that your rights are open to periodic diminution at their whim, irrespective of the guarantees of the US Constitution. I don’t care what other issues these turncoats are said to be “right on,” or “good on.” From this day forward, this list of tyrannically-minded dim-wits will be known collectively as the “anti-republicans” on this site. These people have lined up with the likes of Charles Schumer(D-NY) even though at least one of them explicitly didn’t want to be seen with the vicious NY schmuck. Why won’t they seek to amend the constitution, the legitimate process? They know you wouldn’t let them. Instead, these snakes are slithering around to attack you from behind:
Lamar Alexander (Tenn.)
Kelly Ayotte (N.H.)
Richard Burr (N.C.)
Saxby Chambliss (Ga.)
Tom Coburn (Okla.)
Susan Collins (Maine)
Bob Corker (Tenn.)
Jeff Flake (Ariz.)
Lindsey Graham (S.C.)
Dean Heller (Nev.
John Hoeven (N.D.)
Johnny Isakson (Ga.)
Mark Kirk (Ill.)
John McCain (Ariz.)
Patrick Toomey (Pa.)
Roger Wicker (Miss.)
(And Boehner promises to take up the Senate bill.)
The cowards listed above voted to open up Harry Reid’s gun control bill for debate even though most will walk away from the legislation in the end. This is a procedural trick. Understand: Allowing this bill to come up for a vote means it will pass because the Democrats hold a majority. The only way this bill could be stopped is to prevent it from coming to the floor, but these worthless Senators made sure this bill would pass the Senate, but as of this moment, they don’t know what’s in it. There could be ANYTHING in it.
On that future day when your Second Amendment rights are cast aside by a tyrannical Federal government, you can thank the people on this list for screwing you, your children, and all posterity. I don’t want to hear excuses. I don’t want to hear “the NRA rates me 95%” (because the NRA won’t count this cloture vote against them.)
Ladies and gentlemen, don’t be swayed by the apologists: These people hate you. They hold you in contempt. They fear you, so they seek to disarm you as they work together with Democrats to bring about the kind of world in which they would have every reason to fear you if you’re armed. They are collapsing the country together with the Democrats. In 2014, most of these people are not up for re-election, and that should be your key indicator. There are plenty of other cowards who would have joined with them if they weren’t up for re-election in 2014. These people will either retire, or will not come up for re-election again for 3-5 years, meaning they have time for you to forget their betrayals. I’m not forgetting.
Neither should you.
There is still some chance to defeat this bill in the House. That said, Boehner will do as he always does: He will bring it to the floor for a vote, and some weasel anti-Republicans along with the whole body of Democrats will vote for it. You’d better burn up your phone lines as these rotten bastards attempt to burn your constitution.
Hollow-Points
As a military veteran and firearms owner, I find it unconscionable that the United States Federal Government continues to mislead the American people about its activities and its intentions. The Geneva Conventions of 1949 outlawed hollow point ammunition for use on the battlefield because of the particularly cruel nature of the round. It does not merely incapacitate or kill, but inflicts gruesome injuries, maiming living targets in a manner that can be best described as catastrophic. It’s designed to impact, penetrate, and expand, essentially mushrooming out to deliver tremendous damage. Prohibited in war, our combat troops deploy with standard ball ammo instead, (known as Full Metal Jacket,) that has a clean ballistic profile. While it penetrates and is certainly lethal, it does not do additional damage by virtue of its construction. Claims by government agencies and their lackeys in the media that the 1.6 Billion rounds of hollow-point ammunition is intended for target practice simply isn’t credible. For whom is this ammuntion intended? One needn’t be a rocket scientist to do this math. The government is bound to abide by the Geneva Conventions in wars with foreign enemies, but there is no explicit prohibition against the use of hollow-point ammunition by civilian agencies on a nation’s own citizens.
I go to the range a few times per year, both to keep up my skills and to re-zero the sights on various weapons. This is a common practice, and our combat troops do this routinely in order to keep their weapons combat ready and practice their skills. While durable and resilient, even modern combat arms need to have their sights re-verified periodically because all of the jostling and bumping and dropping means that the sights can be off, meaning the strike of the bullet may not match the point of aim. This is best practice with firearms of any description. When I go to the range, I generally take enough ammunition that I will be able to [re]zero my sights if necessary, and get in a little target practice. Since clean ballistic performance is what you’re seeking for such circumstances, consistency being the basic object and necessity of setting up one’s sights, I use standard full metal jacket rounds at the range. Unless I’m attempting to discover performance differences for a particular ammunition type, that’s ordinarily all I will shoot at the range.
There are some valid reasons to use hollow-point ammunition for some training, but the difference in cost alone would demand that one make sparse use of the more expensive types, opting instead for plain FMJ. A high quality HP round will generally be between 180-300% of the price of a comparable quality FMJ round. Until the recent price spikes, it was not uncommon to buy fifty rounds of .45 ACP in FMJ for $15, but to spend upwards of $35 for comparable HP rounds. The price difference alone dictates that at the range, one shoots primarily FMJ, because it’s foolish to use expensive ammo to shoot at targets. Never mind this reality, the leftwing media lackeys insist that the government is stockpiling billions of rounds to shoot at paper targets. According to one federal agent with whom I spoke, there’s no real reason to use anything but the less expensive Full Metal Jacket ammunition in most training. Frankly, it’s just not believable that all of this high-priced hollow point ammunition is intended for training purposes.
Let us be blunt about the numbers. Let’s consider how many rounds of ammunition the average federal agent needs to shoot annually to maintain his or her proficiency. According to my sources, it’s likely that the average federal agent/officer is expending many fewer than 1,000 rounds per year in training, most less than half that number. It may vary somewhat from agency to agency, but as a general rule, that’s a generous average number. Compare this with our soldiers, for whom Army rifle qualification involves forty shots at forty targets at varying distances, from fifty to three-hundred meters. Once a soldier has been through basic training, apart from a few practice ranges here and there, and the zeroing ranges, a soldier is going to re-qualify twice per year. That’s eighty rounds for record-fire. Even if the soldier uses an equal number in practicing, and another twelve to eighteen in re-zeroing his sights(generally fired in three-round sets,) there will be fewer than two-hundred live rounds fired per year unless the soldier is a special operator, who do many more live-fire training exercises, or is deployed in combat. I am sure a number of federal officers spend a good deal more time at the range. Still, let’s consider the math. 1.6 billion rounds to Homeland Defense is a sizable delivery, even admitting that half these rounds are to be delivered over the next five years. How many federal agents are there anyway?
In order for Federal agents to consume 1.6 billion rounds in five years of training, even at the generous rate of 1,000 rounds per year, the number of officers needed to expend this amount of ammunition would be around 320,000. The most recent figures I can find suggests that as of 2004, there were roughly 105,000 armed federal agents in all civilian agencies. That would mean that the government and its media lackeys expect us to believe the average federal agent is shooting up 3,000 rounds of ammunition per year at the range, but remember that this purchase of 1.6 billion rounds represents only the Department of Homeland Security. It doesn’t include the purchases of other federal agencies, but only the subordinate agencies of DHS, including the US Border Patrol, ICE, Secret Service and the Coast Guard, among smaller agencies.
I find that preposterous on several levels. If it were true, it’s a colossal waste of money and a bunch of trigger-happy baloney at tax-payers’ expense, but I doubt it’s true or even close to that number. If it were true, the government is expending colossal sums on firearms practice that should not be necessary, and is not necessary for our soldiers, generally speaking. If a couple-hundred rounds per year in training is good enough for our soldiers, I cannot fathom how it wouldn’t be enough for federal officers, generally speaking. 1.6 billion rounds is a fantastic number and would represent training ammunition for at least 15 years, if not longer.
Ladies and gentlemen, we’re being fed a colossal lie. There is no rational explanation for this number of rounds in the realm of training. This story has been out for some time, with little comment from the administration, until Sarah Palin mentioned it in a Facebook post last week, covered here by Gary Jackson. Jackson offers another post to debunk the various attempts by the lapdog media to explain away the purchases. The media would have you believe that this is all very harmless, and that there’s nothing sinister in this number of rounds, that while seemingly fantastic, is easily explained away by the government trying to get a good deal on ammunition, acting therefore as budget-minded guardians of the public trust.
No, this is something else, and I have two possible bits of speculation in mind. One is less diabolical, but would make perfect sense with the current administration. As Breitbart suggested, the government may be trying to induce a shortage in the market and drive up prices. We’ve certainly seen rapid price increases for ammo, even before the mad rush that commenced after the Sandy Hook tragedy. Some in this administration may be thinking that if they buy it up in huge contracts, there will be a good deal less out there for the populace to stockpile, and such ammunition that is available will come only at a premium price.
The other explanation is more sinister, and I believe entirely possible, because the condition of the economy is unraveling much faster than expected. There’s no doubt that we are being engineered to economic collapse on the basis of a fundamental monetary breakdown that will result from the endless money-printing habits and debt accrual of this president. It’s the Cloward-Piven strategy, being played out in living color. When this happens, there will be chaos in the streets and in the towns and villages of the country, and there will be a move by government to suppress the violence by any and all means necessary. They won’t discriminate much either, because if you are armed, you will be seen as a threat, even if you’re doing no more than defending yourselves. In that light, it makes a good deal of sense for the government to procure vast stores of ammunition now. It reduces the amount available to the rest of us, and it provides a ready stockpile…”in case of emergencies.” The best part from the point of view of the people in government driving all of this is that the people who they expect to “suppress” are the same people now finding it difficult to find ammunition at any price, but they’re the ones paying for it. It’s win-win-win. You don’t get the ammo, you pay for theirs, and they have a ready stockpile for use against you. If you’re a statist in the Obama administration, what’s not to love?
Besides, remember this guy:
Leader?
If there’s one thing I hate, it’s when the national audience that is conservatism gets distracted by stories that seem outrageous while ignoring stories that need their immediate attention, and a goodly dose of their activism. Yes, if it’s true that some unnamed White House official told Bob Woodward that he would regret telling a truth about Barack Obama’s negotiator as the source of the “sequestration” rather than Congress, it is an awful abuse of power and it bodes ill for the future of the freedom of the press. Horrible! Unbelievable! Now that we have this out of our system, remembering that Woodward is a leftist, which means in the long run, he’s apt to recant or later minimize the impact of the story anyway, let me offer that conservatives are paying attention to the wrong damned threat. Woodward will have no problem finding defenders, but you may, and you’re probably going to need them. Why? Unable to push gun control through directly, the Obama administration and the GOP leadership in the House are setting you up to lose your guns by a much more indirect route. As NRO’s Katrina Trinko reports, Eric Cantor is now threatening conservatives with civil war in the GOP caucus.
As Mark Levin explained, under federal law, those convicted of domestic violence lose their right to keep and bear arms. You may be thinking that this doesn’t apply to you, but I would urge you to reconsider. If the Senate version of the Violence Against Women Act(S.47) passes the House, as Eric Cantor is currently twisting Republican arms to do, “unpleasant speech” will be considered a federal crime qualifying as domestic violence. Are you still more concerned about the alleged threat against Bob Woodward? You see, the Senate version of the bill now includes a number of chilling provisions that would turn mundane arguments among couples into the grounds for the loss of one’s second Amendment rights. If you think this is a joke, or that I’m going over-the-top, I would ask you to consider what sort of jurisdiction the Federal government has in domestic violence anyway. Isn’t this an issue for states and local governments? Federalism? Tenth Amendment? Conservatives? Anybody? The only reason to make this sort of law on the federal level is to use it as a vehicle for its legislative side-effects. You are going to be disarmed, and this will be the vehicle.
One might wonder why Republicans like Eric Cantor would go along with such monstrous, probably extra-constitutional legislation, but the answer remains what it has been since Boehner and Cantor took over leadership: They’re not on our side. They would be only too happy to ban weapons, but they know they’ll get clobbered in 2014 if they go that direction, so instead, they’re looking for the back door to registration and eventual confiscation. The Violence Against Women Act is the path to taking everybody’s guns, because it even changes the burden of proof effectively from the accuser to the accused. That’s right, under this act, if you are accused, it will be nearly impossible to avoid being found guilty because almost anything remotely unpleasant can be considered as “abuse” or “violence.” So much for “sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.”
Perhaps as insidiously, it adds more classes of people to the legislation, including homosexuals, transgendered, and men too, begging the question as to why it is labeled “Violence Against Women Act.” The answer is clear, however, considering this bill constitutes a continuation of the Obama strategy of denouncing Republicans’ “War Against Women.” As RedState’s Daniel Horowitz observes, it’s impossible to see where this is anything but a social engineering package. With the added implications for gun ownership, it becomes an even darker tool. Again, as Horowitz concludes:
“Yes, they should vote against this ridiculous rule, which is politically motivated. There is no reason they should be considering this bill anyway. Why is a GOP-controlled House taking up leftist legislation instead of bills to block grant Medicaid, repeal ethanol mandates, or reform the Fed? Even if they choose to bring up bad legislation, they should do so under an open amendment process.”
Ladies and gentlemen, such legislation is an abomination to our constitution, and while we may be upset about threats against Bob Woodward emanating from this despicable White House, we mustn’t lose sight of the fact that the threat against Woodward is just one more small token of Obama’s lack of esteem. The Violence Against Women Act should be called the Violence Against the Constitution Act, because it offers to set aside the whole notion of “innocent until proven guilty,” as well as expanding the meaning of “violence” to include “unpleasant words.” If you value your liberty, you must act to stop this bill by calling your House members, and calling Eric Cantor’s office, though I’d suggest the former will do more good. Nevertheless, make those calls. It’s such a despicable situation that Mark Levin announced a “Levin Surge,” and to the degree I am able, let me add my outcry to his: We must stop this act, because it will be used to further destroy the constitution while setting you up for easy removal of your Second Amendment rights. The worst threat this day isn’t the one aimed at Bob Woodward, or even by Cantor against conservatives in the House Republican caucus, but instead the one aimed most squarely at you.
Note: Eric Cantor can be contacted here:
Eric Cantor
303 Cannon HOB
Washington, DC 20515
Phone: (202) 225-2815
Fax: (202) 225-0011
In 2003, Ronnie Barrett of Barrett Rifle fame sent a notice to California saying that he would no longer sell guns to government agencies in that state because that state prohibited sales of his company’s rifles to ordinary citizens. Barrett has been an outspoken industry leader in the fight against gun control, and lately, his general tactic has been spreading through the industry, and this past week, he added the State of New York to the list of jurisdictions in which his company will no longer do business. More and more companies are deciding that as a moral concern, they can no longer do business with institutions of government that are attempting to limit the rights of law abiding citizens to keep and bear arms. This is a hopeful trend, but I’m afraid there’s more to this than a list of smaller companies making such pronouncements. Few of the big players have gotten aboard, and it’s time for you to know about them. Large firearms and ammunition manufacturers continue to rake in government dollars, many of them having large government contracts. It’s time for ordinary citizens who purchase firearms to begin applying pressure by way of their wallets.
One website has actually created a form letter that can be used to send a message to firearms companies. Naturally, the large companies like Winchester, Glock, Smith and Wesson, Glock, Remington, Colt and others comprises a vast majority of firearms sales throughout the country. You can see a more complete list of the big outfits that haven’t joined in the boycott of sales to offending jurisdictions here. It’s time the big manufacturers and sellers began to get the message, and it’s imperative that we begin to deliver it. In the current mad rush among many to acquire more firearms and related items, it’s high time to begin to temper this with some discerning examination of the nature of the companies with which we do business. Large manufacturers are relying upon their name and contracts with government to sustain them against any backlash, and it’s for that reason that I would urge you to do business with companies that are openly adopting a policy to refuse to sell to governments seeking or enforcing encroachments on the Second Amendment. There is a more thorough list of those companies supporting your right to keep and bear arms as a matter of policy located at FreedomOutpost.
It’s high time that the large firearms manufacturers begin to get the message. On that basis, it is my pledge (for what little it may be worth) that I will not do business with any company not appearing on the list of those interested in upholding the rights of ordinary citizens to keep and bear arms. My next firearm will certainly come from somebody on this list. It’s time we smarten up and realize that by feeding the beast, we’re making it stronger, and if large(r) firearms companies need to learn from whence their bread is buttered, so be it. They need to feel the crush of a people who have realized that to do business with them is to support their own oppressors. We who assert our Second Amendment guarantees of our natural right to keep and bear arms must begin to put our money where our mouths are on this issue, if we haven’t already.
On Saturday I refused to sell a AR-15 rifle to a police officer from California. He came into my shop and wanted to buy his duty gun in AZ because the same gun in his home state would cost him more. I told him that I would not sell him the gun even though he had his department letter saying he was able to buy it. I told him that if the gun was not legal for law abiding men and women in CA I would not sell it to him. After he told me that “civilians don’t need them type of guns,” I asked to leave my shop. He stomped out mad.
I have made a decision to not sell to any gun to police department that are not legal for civilians. We build custom AR-15 and have sold more then a few to cops in a few states. I am not sure how this will effect us but as we grow and our name gets out there more we will not change this policy.
You see, it is the small(er) companies that understand that it is the principle of the matter that underlies all of our freedoms. It is one thing to say that one supports the Second Amendment, but it is entirely another to demonstrate the measure of that commitment by virtue of actions. I am gratified to see larger or at least more prolific companies joining the list. LaRue Tactical, from right here in Central Texas, has been among the stalwarts, and I really appreciate their bumper stickers.
We as consumers and advocates of freedom have a choice, and it’s a critical one. We can simply buy from an unlimited list of manufacturers and sellers, or we can restrict our purchase decisions to the smaller list of companies that support our liberties. Placed in this context, it becomes clear that we have only one rational choice, and that we must at long last begin to discern among our options with a sharper focus. It’s also time to bring heat on those companies that are not committed to our liberties. If you’re in the market for a firearm or accessories, it’s high time to begin looking closely at those with whom you will do business. High quality firearms are available that will fulfill your needs while also supporting your moral position. Reward those who understand the Second Amendment and who realize that their future is tied to the liberties we enjoy.
Note: In addition to the form submission available from the Firearms Policy Coalition, there is an editable letter you can customize and send to the large firearms manufacturers here, in Word format.
Conservatives should not be swayed by theatrics. whether they are born in the bowels of a Rove operation, or inside the Obama administration. Open collusion with Republicans on “comprehensive immigration reform” isn’t necessary, and in fact, it’s not desirable. Obama understands that to get Sen. Marco Rubio’s proposal through the Senate, and also the House, it will be a matter of positioning. It’s not as though the two proposals are substantially different, but that conservatives around the country will be treated to the few ways in which they are dissimilar as the critical differences that have caused Senator Rubio to come out and call the President’s leaked proposal “dead on arrival.” If you ever fall for the belief that there’s no bipartisanship in Washington DC, think again, because the two parties are quite capable of coordinating, not for the good of the American people, but strictly against them.
According to Charles Krauthammer, the only substantive difference between the proposals is when the alleged “enforcement” provisions kick in, but the truth is that enforcement will never arrive if either is enacted. You’re being set up, and that’s all there really is to that. These proposals are simple reiterations of the Simpson-Mazzoli Act of 1986, when Ronald Reagan was deceived by pro-amnesty sorts in his own party. Just as with that Act, either of these two proposals will provide for a virtual Day One legalization of illegals already in the US. It’s made cosmetically more acceptable by pretending the legalization consists of two steps, but the fact remains that a legal status to remain in the country is conferred on the first day. There will be no enforcement of any law against the scoff-laws already in the country, with only a legislative head-fake in that direction.
If conservatives were fully aware of the details of Senator Rubio’s bill, they would flee from him as though from a leper colony, but the whole point of the Obama administration’s leak of their own plan is to present one against which conservatives can rally, so that Rubio’s will be seen as the more conservative bill. It’s funny to hear news analysts contend that Obama getting into the middle of this is a mistake because he’s such a polarizing figure, and that his involvement will poison the well of “good faith efforts” being made by Rubio and others. That too is a misdirection, and a false narrative you’re supposed to swallow, hook, line and sinker. If either of these plans makes it through, Washington DC and the Democrats win, as well as a handful of GOP establishment types.
You see, the thinking in Washington DC goes that anytime they wish to put something over on us, they must make a big show of the fight between them, so that we’re tricked into believing every one involved made their best efforts, and that whatever the result, somebody was fighting the good fight on our behalf. Nonsense! In fact, in Washington DC, the only thing that happens to the benefit of your best interests is when the Congress goes out on recess, and the President takes off for some foreign destination, because these are the only times they may not be acting from a legal footing to harm you.
Senator Rubio’s proposal is a sham and a lie because of the provisions that create an amnesty, but they intend to give us a good show and stuff it down our throats. If Rubio’s plan passes rhe Senate and the House, going on to be signed into law by the President, you can bet he will happily sign it. Much like the maneuvering over the debt ceiling in 2011, the deal has been done for some time, and all that remains is to put it over on you in such a way as to prevent conservatives from discovering that they have been had. Be prepared for some last-minute wrangling that will lead to the ultimate bait-and-switch in which Obama’s plan winds up being the one to go forward, though in real terms, it makes damnably little difference.
Obama’s slightly more radical plan is intended to make Rubio’s plan more palatable. There will be much apparent gnashing of teeth, as Republicans attack the President’s proposal, but in the end, they will be duped into supporting Rubio’s bill as the lesser among evils. If you think that’s a stretch, ask yourself how many times the opaque Obama administration has ever leaked anything to its actual detriment. How frequently does the media report on leaks detrimental to the Obama administration’s agenda? Isn’t it stunning that the typically flat-footed Republicans had in place a ready response in the person of their State of the Union responder whose big issue is currently “comprehensive immigration reform?”
If we are to believe these are coincidences, and that Marco Rubio wasn’t waiting for the leaked story he knew would come, I think we may have problems with what might be termed “excess gullibility.” In short, we’d need to be suckers. Just as with the debt ceiling, and the deficit, it’s understood in Washington DC that the Republicans alone cannot pass the bill, so that in order to get something in front of the President, a piece of legislation will need bipartisan support in both Houses of Congress. Washington DC intends to win this round, and they’ll play upon the partisan reflexes of the grass roots, when the truth of the matter is that both plans are abominable. Conservatives should begin assailing both plans now, focusing their efforts on House members as well as Senators. The real fight will be in the House, if there’s to be a fight at all, and only the House stands even a slim chance of stopping this. They’re doing it to us again, but this time, we have no excuses to pretend we hadn’t seen it coming.
Who?
It’s time for some blunt talk among conservatives. The fact is that we’re losing the country, and in one election after another, we continue to seek out a conservative savior who will put things right. The problems with this approach are extensive, inasmuch as we assume we can find one person who will so perfectly embody conservatism that we can stop worrying about the direction of the country. It may be understandable, given the dire condition of our economy, the wreckage of our culture, and the endless parade of disappointments to which we conservatives have been witness, but I’ve begun to think it’s largely our own fault. We want to go on about our lives and mostly leave the running of the country to some honorable man or woman who will do what is right without further involvement from us, but that’s simply not going to happen. The truth is that we conservatives have become too obsessed with a savior and too impatient to build the kind of movement that would make one possible but ultimately unnecessary. If you think I’m overstating the attachment among conservatives to this notion, I offer into evidence the GOP’s own 2012 savior trap.
Consider Michelle Bachmann’s entry into the 2011 primary scene. Popular with some of the Tea Party wing, for a time, she did well, but then she made a few verbal missteps just as Rick Perry entered the scene. In a matter of days, Bachmann plummeted in the polls, and Perry’s elevator began rising toward the top. While she stuck around quite a long while, she never recovered from that point forward. It didn’t take long, perhaps the span of a month or so, and Perry stumbled badly in a couple of debates, and his numbers tanked badly. Sensing the end, and realizing Perry was not their savior after all, conservatives held a clearance sale and abandoned him, leaving him to spend the next couple of months in a sliding finale ending with his return to Texas and his endorsement of Newt Gingrich. Rick Perry would not be the conservatives’ savior any more than Bachmann had been.
At about this time, both Chris Christie(who broke Ann Coulter’s heart) and Sarah Palin(who broke many more, mine included) announced in rapid succession that they would not join the fray. Two more potential conservative saviors (although calling Christie a “conservative” is admittedly a stretch) went by the wayside as Perry’s meteoric rise was matched only by his apocalyptic fall from polling grace. The Texan didn’t fulfill conservatives’ search for a savior, so the quest moved on to its next failure.
Enter Herman Cain. Remember him and his “9-9-9?” Who could possibly forget? I enjoyed Cain’s plain-spoken rhetoric, and his ability to speak in sensible albeit general terms to a set of issues that were important to conservatives across the board. Then something happened, and some allegations were brought forward by all the usual suspects, and before he could shout “9-9-9″ one more time, Herman Cain was gone, knocked out from a rapidly rising lead by the false hope that he could be the next conservative savior. He was not.
Then came the circumstance of Newt Gingrich’s double rise and double-dip. He came forward and began to create momentum the first time as Herman Cain began to falter. The two shared a stage at the Woodlands near Houston for a one-on-one debate, and the one thing it made plain was that Cain was out of his depth, nice man though he seemed to be. Gingrich owned the stage in terms of thoughtful policy ideas, and his command of the issues outgunned Mr. Cain substantially. Suddenly, conservatives who had dismissed him earlier on in the season began to take note. He was making the case, and he was making it well, and many people dreamed happily of Gingrich facing Obama in debates. Gingrich came under hammering attacks in early December.
Then there was the first brief double love-affair with Rick Santorum, who seemed to attract social conservatives who felt put-off by some things in the former Speaker’s personal history, and the two dueled back and forth, but Gingrich managed to come back on top. By the middle of January of 2012, with the South Carolina primary victory, Gingrich had debate performances that put him clearly atop the heap. Then came the accusations about him, and one flat debate performance, and though he battled back and forth with Mitt Romney, Florida’s primary was won by the former Massachusetts Governor. Santorum also managed to capitalize on Gingrich’s fall, but it was going to be a two-horse race, and neither of them would be Newt Gingrich. Conservatives dismounted and went on to find their next ride.
After Gingrich, Santorum made a valiant effort, trying all he could to upset the Romney apple-cart, but by then, too many conservatives had hopped from one horse to the next, and Santorum just wasn’t going to do. Conservatives were simply too deeply divided, and thus conquered, so that in the end, Santorum too went down when the money wouldn’t come and the Romney machine gathered steam. The last conservative savior then faltered and went by the wayside, or so we thought.
At long last came Mitt Romney, and while some hoped for something dramatic at the convention, most had by now accepted the fate of the GOP: The Republican party would put Mitt Romney forward to face Barack Obama and pretend to themselves that he had been a conservative all along. We all know how that came out, and there’s no point in re-hashing it, save to say that we conservatives permitted ourselves to go off in search of a savior who never arrived. By the morning of November 7th, we all knew the miserable failure, but we weren’t finished quite yet.
Three months later, we have now the spectacle of Sean Hannity posing the question to Dr. Benjamin Carson about the possibility of his presidential ambitions. As ever, and hot on the trail of anybody who might save us, somehow, a number of conservatives departed on the path toward seeking a Carson candidacy. As I detailed earlier, there are any number of reasons to be a bit more cautious about how we will throw our political support around. Dr. Carson may be a skilled physician, and he may run an excellent foundation, but that’s hardly a reason to consider him for the presidency, particularly in lieu of more thorough examination.
So it is that conservatives left 2012 behind, and with it, an understanding of the causes of their recent disappointments. Already, there is a slate of possible or potential candidates for 2016, but while conservatives run headlong into another round of the savior trap, Obama and his cronies are doing real damage to the country. Conservatives seem fixated on the notion that they can somehow elevate one person to the presidency who will undo all of Obama’s damage, but I must insist that this is not the case. Absent a conservative majority in the House and Senate, Obama’s will be done, come Hell or high water. As one examines the array of Republicans already being batted around as potential presidential candidates in 2016, one can see the same scenario arising, and it ought to jog some conservative memories of 2011-12, and with them, some caution.
I’m not suggesting that conservatives should ignore 2016, but the truth is that we have a good deal of work to do before we get on to that campaign. Besides, if conservatives are to find such a leader, it will likely come in the heat of the battle of the next two years, when we will begin to form a sense of who is able and willing to lead a conservative movement. In 2010, one conservative voice lent to the national discourse in a significant way, a voice that had a strong influence over the outcome, helping conservatives send many new members to the House. She stayed out of the nomination fight in 2012, but without her leadership in 2010, making the campaign stops, and pressing the issues with voters, I doubt we would have had the beltway-blasting success of taking back the House.
As conservatives begin again to seek out another savior, I wonder how many of them are paying attention to the lady who had been in front of them all along. Let us be clear about how important Sarah Palin’s influence had been in that election season, particularly before we go off in search of another would-be savior. Whether she will seek the presidency at some point in the future is anybody’s guess, but I would keep an eye on Wasilla, if not for a candidacy, then at least for a bold leader who helped us to retake the House in 2010. In 2012, voters agreed with her endorsements in nearly seventy percent of those races in which she offered one, suggesting that if somebody in the greater universe that is conservatism understands the electorate, it may well be Governor Palin. More importantly, however, she has exhibited the ability to lead on issues and rouse the base while making a strong stand in defense of the republic.
Whomever we may choose to carry our banner in 2016, I hope we are a good deal more persistent than we had been in 2011-2012, a season in which conservatives leaped from one horse to the next with little hesitation. It’s more important than ever to identify a candidate who can lead, but leadership will be about more than great speeches or rousing debate performances. A goodly portion of our attention must be aimed at identifying those who will step up to lead now, as we embark on four more years of the Obama agenda. Who will rise to oppose him? Who will push hard in the midterms of 2014? Who will rally conservatives? Who will be able to put a shattered party together again, if it can be put together again at all? With whom will conservatives stand in unwavering support? These questions may well be answered in the next two or three years if we have the discernment to recognize it.
It is time that conservatives re-think this entire savior mentality. No fruit was borne by that tree in 2012, and I doubt the outcome will be different in 2016 if that is our sole focus. We must build conservatism not by electing a President first, and then hoping wistfully to achieve success, but instead by building a movement that is positioned to elect a President. Short-cutting our way to electoral victory cannot and will not work, as evidenced by the miserable results of 2012. When one places the question in this context, it is true that it exposes the daunting enormity of the task before us, but at least it offers an honest view of the fight we have ahead if we are to salvage the republic. Wild-eyed but temporary enthusiasm for one candidate or another will not rescue the country, but building a movement can. At long last, we must stop seeking the one person who alone can save the country, recognizing instead that an able leader can only arise when by our own tireless efforts, we’ve laid the groundwork and made the country capable of salvation.
Dr. Benjamin Carson
Last week, I brought you a video from the National Prayer Breakfast speech of Dr. Benjamin Carson. His words were heartening in many respects, and many in conservative media leaped at the notion of his political potential as a candidate. I thought at the time that it was a bit of a fad, and I was therefore surprised to see Hannity run a full hour-long show on FoxNews devoted to talking with Dr. Carson. (You can see the full video, here in parts 1 and 2.) I am glad Hannity had him on because my own caution seemed justified by something Dr. Carson said. As I listened to him address the question of health insurance, it struck me as odd that he sees an inherent conflict of interests between an insurance company seeking to make a profit and its customers seeking health coverage. When I hear such things said, I often dismiss them as the vapid utterances of mindless politicians, but since Dr. Carson has been receiving so much press, including on this site, it’s time to address the matter. What Dr. Carson the practitioner of health-care seems to think about insurance is a common misconception, and it offers one more reason why conservatives must be cautious in their choices of leaders.
Dr. Carson said on Hannity’s show that there exists an inherent conflict of interests between health insurance companies and their insured clients. This is not true. The actual conflict begins a good deal sooner in the process, and as I think you will see, exposes a wider misunderstanding of the problem. Ask yourself this: Who are the majority of purchasers of health insurance? If you said “individuals,” you’re wrong by a mile. The truth is that the largest purchasers of health insurance are institutions, including the Federal and states’ governments, and corporations. The problem here is that the people who consume the service are not the people directly paying for it. Any time you break the connection between the end user and the provider of goods and services, you effectively destroy likewise the natural market signaling that provides feedback in both directions.
As an example, imagine you are a smoker looking for health insurance. If you were approaching insurance companies directly, they would undoubtedly quote you a price many times higher than the one they propose to a non-smoker. Obese? Same thing. This would mean that as a matter of natural market forces, you would either amend your behaviors and condition, or you would bear the burden of higher prices. Insurers would naturally consider everything about you in determining what they would charge for a policy, but perhaps more importantly, you would be free to shop for insurance among many providers. This would act as a restraint upon overcharging, and would also cause them to offer special discounts if you lived an exceedingly healthy lifestyle. In short, personal responsibility would have a good deal to do with how much you pay for health insurance, as it should in a free market. At the same time, a particular company’s profitability would hinge on making consumers happy with their coverages.
What many people ignore is that if one had to pay cash for the whole bill each time one became ill, or injured, most of us would go untreated indefinitely, because few of us have the resources to pay cash for extensive or invasive health-care procedures. Dr. Carson talks a good deal about Health Savings Accounts, but such plans are more useful for mundane purposes of a less critical nature than their utility in life-threatening circumstances. While I support Health Savings Accounts, I believe insurance is a necessary hedge against calamities. If we change our focus from health-care insurance for ongoing maintenance, to a paradigm in which what we insure against are catastrophic circumstances, while letting things like HSAs pick up the slack for ordinary health maintenance, in a market environment, one would see the market begin to perform in a natural fashion. Unfortunately, this means that people would need to shop for insurance like they do any other commodity, and seek out the best deals on their ordinary health maintenance and preventative care, and most Americans have become far too complacent about such matters, expecting it all to be automatic.
The truth of the matter is that if Americans want health-care to improve markedly in the United States, while restraining the growth in costs, without resorting to some sort of death-panel or other government-mandated rationing mechanism, there is a mechanism, however imperfect: The free market. Unfortunately, since the advent of Medicaid and Medicare, and even widespread employer-purchased health benefits(prompted by government wage and price controls,) we haven’t had a free market for health-care in the United States, never mind health insurance. The government is now the largest consumer of health-care services in the country as a direct payer, by many times over, and yet there is still an illusion held by many who receive health-care services paid for or otherwise subsidized through government payments that they are in control of their health-care. They’re not.
If Dr. Carson’s criticism of corporate health insurance providers were true, then it must be even more thoroughly the case that no institution more than government would wish to avoid costs by denying care. Do you need evidence? Consider Paul Krugman, longtime leftist economic propagandist and one-note statist, quoted as follows in a piece at Western Journalism:
“We’re going to need more revenue…it will require some sort of middle class taxes as well…And we’re also going to…have to make decisions about health care, not pay for health care that has no demonstrated medical benefits…death panels and sales taxes is how we do this.” -Paul Krugman
What Krugman is saying is entirely true, but only if government becomes the source and payer for health-care, because otherwise, the free market would regulate prices in the same manner it does for virtually everything else. Some will object, insisting that “health-care is different,” just as they have insisted that every other human need is different, from food to housing to education to Internet service to cellular phones. All of these claims are equally wrong, and equally immoral. These claims all begin by demanding that some basic human needs be met, and all of them end with a gun to tax-payers’ heads. All of them.
I admire a number of positions taken by Dr. Carson, and I have no objections whatever about his participation in the public policy debate, but at some point, if he wishes to keep my attention, he will be required to offer more than platitudes and generalities about Health Savings Accounts. He devoted several lines of rhetoric to the attack of ideologues, but I am always cautious when people attack broad sets of philosophically bound principles in vague terms. I am curious to hear more from Dr. Carson, but I hope there will be a good deal more specificity. Talk of presidential runs and other such notions are fanciful and premature at best, and while I’ve heard a number of truncated statements about various topics from Dr. Carson, what I’ve not heard is a guiding philosophy that informs his opinions. Absent that, I have no grounds upon which to base any opinion of his suitability to any office, much less his qualifications to be President of the United States, and I find it unseemly that Hannity and others would talk of Dr. Carson in presidential terms given that we know so little about his positions. It may turn out that Dr. Carson is wonderful in all respects, but we already have a President who sailed into office through the propagation of vague, nice-sounding generalities, and I do not believe we can afford another.
Enough said about that.
Dear Mr. Fitzpatrick:
I have read the announcement made by Magpul Industries on February 15th via Facebook, and I wish to discuss it with you further. I realize that you do not wish to leave the state of Colorado, and that if the state enacts laws making your products illegal for purchase by customers in your state, as a matter of moral and philosophical consistency, your hand will have been forced, and that you will uproot your company and move it to another state more amenable to your enterprise. This is a commendable stance, and you are to be credited for taking it, as far too many people in business see only dollar signs but not the underlying principles that support their existence. I hope you are not forced to move Magpul, but if you find that you must, I’d like to offer you a new home where your company and its purpose are welcome.
Recently, my Governor went on a tour of California trying to drum up businesses to move to the Lone Star State, and while it seems he failed to find any takers, let me suggest to you that it is because he was looking in the wrong place. The problem with his approach was that he looked in a particular geographic location, but I think if Governor Perry had wanted more success, he would have looked to business owners who had arrived in a philosophical place, much like the one in which it seems you have arrived. Amoral and immoral lawmakers of the sort who would impose such legislation on the people of Colorado(or any state) help to create an environment in which men and women of good will are unable to continue in good conscience in their present circumstance. If such a condition arises anywhere, it constitutes the precise destination to which our Governor(or any Governor) should turn to look for businesses to bring to their states.
On that basis, let me make you an offer your conscience may find difficult to refuse. If the laws of Colorado are changed so as to make it unsuitable for Magpul Industries, I would very much like to see your company relocate to our state. More, I would suggest to you that within the vast expanses of Texas, there are particular places that would suit your company more than others, and that would offer the moral climate in which your operation would likely feel at home. Specifically, I would offer you Central Texas, and most specifically, Bell County. Bell County is home to Fort Hood, the U.S. Army post that is the home of III Corps, and it offers a variety of advantages to your operation should you be compelled to choose out of sad necessity to relocate your company.
Our largest two cities are Killeen and Temple, respectively, and our County seat is Belton. Temple and Belton are located directly on the I-35 corridor, while Killeen and Harker Heights, further west in the county, have access to I-35 via US-190, an improved four-lane, divided highway. Temple is home to a number of companies large and small, and it also feature Scott&White Hospital, as well as a Veterans’ Administration hospital both of which serve this region. Our climate is necessarily warm, but there are few work stoppages due to winter weather, and we are generally far enough inland from the coast that direct impact from hurricanes is minimized.
More importantly to your operation, we have many qualified prospective employees, many of them veterans skilled in the use of products you manufacture. Because we are home to Fort Hood, we have many veterans who decide to settle here(as I did more than two decades ago,) because Texas is a place of liberty and opportunity. More, Central Texas is a place that has a deep and abiding understanding of the moral purpose of self-defense, and its residents are quite aware of all the reasons your products are vitally important to a free people. So many of our residents having served in the Army, or having had loved ones who served, there is a reverence in our community for the Constitution, and for all it implies about limited government.
Taxation is relatively low here, and you would find a locale happy to embrace your business. Texas has fared better than many states under our current economic conditions, but as you are doubtless aware, no place has been entirely immune to the economic predations of big government except perhaps Washington DC. Due to this grim reality, there exists here no small number of potential employees who have skills of the sort for which you would be looking should relocation become necessary. We have shipping facilities and probably the sort of facilities you would need in order to set up operations here, and I offer you also this: Texas must be among the larger of your company’s customer states, so that a large share of the products you manufacture would actually be purchased and used by the people in whose state your company would then reside.
Having now shamelessly offered you my home state, and indeed my adopted home county as a new locale for your operations, let me explain to you that it is precisely because I am proud of our little slice of a big state that makes me certain about its inherent suitability to your enterprise. While you go about the business of giving your customers an “unfair advantage,” I would assert that Central Texas would provide your company a similar competitive advantage in a market segment full of innovators with whom you compete for business. It is difficult to overestimate the importance of location, but it is similarly difficult to overstate the importance of a welcoming community that will embrace a company’s philosophy and purpose. I realize that that such a decision would not be taken lightly, so please permit me also to state for the record that I understand a good deal about the torturous struggle you are enduring that would lead you to consider relocating your company.
I realize that you will have been beset by thousands or millions of such offers in the wake of your company’s announcement. I also realize that relocating is in fact the last thing on Earth you would choose, but for the circumstances that may arise now, well beyond your control. It is easy for those of us who would be the beneficiary of your prospective relocation to offer our respective areas, but I realize that it is much more a matter of heart-rending consideration for you, who must calculate the costs not only of moving a business entity, but of the dislocation and hardship that would attend those who work for you now, who might well not be able to relocate with you. I understand what it is to have one’s company undermined by stupid laws, and to have one’s dreams shattered by bureaucrats. I realize that much more is at stake here than simply picking up and moving a company. You would be moving the site of your great aspirations at the point of lawmakers’ pens.
The truth is that I hope sincerely that your fight in Colorado for rational law is victorious, and that you are able to overwhelm the proponents of bad law so that Colorado can remain the home of Magpul Industries. I also understand why you are making your stand, and why the demands of logical consistency will demand that you leave Colorado, should the legislature and Governor of your state act with such tempestuous reflexes against objects that are no more the source of violence than a pillow used to suffocate a sleeping victim. Objects don’t commit murder. Lawfully manufactured and distributed products do not commit murder. Only people commit crimes. Those politicians who use objects or products as surrogates for their alleged anger against criminals instead create a whole new class of victims, comprised of legally disarmed people who have not the ability to oppose in force the attackers who do not abide by the very laws that restrain their victims. I believe we should consider such politicians criminals by proxy.
I wish you well, both in your business, and in your life’s pursuits, and also to all of your employees who have with you provided so many Americans such excellent products. You should be proud of the company you have built, and all the things you have made that continue to revolutionize your market niche. I know that wherever you and your company land, you will continue to be leaders in innovation and reliability, and I want to thank you in advance for all you will yet do, not only for your customers, but on behalf of a people who understand the necessity of the right to keep and bear arms, and why taking a stand in favor of that right is essential not only to the future of your company, but indeed, the entire country.
Best Wishes,
Mark America
Proud Texan and Owner of several Magpul Products
Will We Take Another Beating?
We ought to become acquainted with how we conservatives must appear to GOP establishment politicians, analysts and strategists. At every instance of their serial abuses of the grass-roots, conservatives “go wobbly” and buckle, ultimately returning to the fold. They know how to pull at our heartstrings and seize on our desperation in order to get us to back down from our outraged, uppity high horses. They play the loyalty card, the race card, the poverty card, and anything else they can contrive in order to convince us to return their waiting arms in order to comply with their wishes, but it’s the whip they hold to which we ought pay more attention. They don’t see us as equals, but as a herd of inferiors to be managed, and in order to do so, sometimes they recognize the need to grovel a little. It should sound familiar to conservatives any time they listen to the latest establishment attempts at re-framing their disgusting behavior into something born of the “best intentions.” Just like serial domestic abusers, the establishment always make a rationalized, dishonest appeal in order to avoid charges of abuse, and just like the real victims of domestic abuse, we conservatives keep going back when they offer their excuses:
“I didn’t mean any offense. I didn’t want to hurt you. It was all just one big confused misunderstanding. I’m sorry you took my actions as a sign that I meant you harm. Nothing could be further from the truth. Can’t we just get along and make it all better? We can seek counseling. I’ll enroll in AA! You know I really love you, and I only do these things because I love and need you so much. I didn’t want you to make the choices you did because I only wanted to protect you[from yourself.] Baby, this will never, ever happen again.”
Of course, that’s what they say, but it’s not what they mean. For example, Karl Rove is trying to undermine Iowa Congressman Steve King in any attempt to run for Senate in the next election cycle, and he’s happy to point to dishonest statistics about King’s re-election campaign in 2012. What Rove won’t tell you is that King’s re-election bid was as narrow as it had been because Democrats made his district a priority, dumping millions of dollars of anti-King advertising into the district. As Mark Levin pointed out during the second hour of his Friday show, Rove wasn’t satisfied with mere distortion when availing himself of the podium of Sean Hannity’s radio show. Instead, he resorted to outright lies. Here’s audio from Dr. Levin’s show:
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This process by which the establishment wing of the GOP attacks grass roots targets should seem familiar to readers. It should also sound familiar to anybody who has ever worked in law enforcement, social services, or even listened to a few tapes of 9-1-1 calls. Millions of women and not a few men have lived through the self-imposed nightmare of returning again and again to an abusive spouse(or significant other) in order to retain some semblance of normalcy and predictability in their lives. They just want the beatings to stop. They just want it to end, but so desperate to hold onto some part of their lives, they frequently return for another dose, often ending in tragedy. After all, haven’t we conservatives behaved with freakish precision like sufferers of what had been known formerly as “battered wife syndrome?” Do you doubt me? Imagine Karl Rove in a plain-white sleeveless undershirt. You get the picture.
Many people ask the obvious question about battered spouses: “Why do they keep going back?” If you’re a member of the Republican party, but also a conservative in principle and philosophy who has become annoyed or offended by the direction of the GOP, it’s time for you to ask that same question of yourself. Some will say I have been too crass in posing such an analogy, but I think it’s fitting because it seems to me that when it comes down to the point at which rational people would flee for the sake of self-preservation, too often, we stop and return to the scene of the abuse, knowing what must be coming eventually, despite all the promises of reformation. We’ve heard the rationalizations:
“It’s better now. Fault has been admitted, and we’re seeking counseling, and I’m treated much better now.”
All of these are preludes to the real confession of helplessness that follows:
“Besides, what else was I going to do? Leave? Where would I go? What would I do? Better to stay put.”
With respect to the Republican Party and its miserable, corrupt establishment, who among conservatives hasn’t contemplated some version of these notions in order to trick themselves into holding the nose and walking back in to the booth to pull the lever for the GOP’s preferred candidates? Right. Me. You. Virtually all conservatives have gone through this one or more or even dozens of times, and each time, we knew with virtual certainty what would be coming: Another attack by the establishment on the grass-roots, or another surrender by party leadership to the leftist agenda would soon be in the offing. Once the electoral objectives are met for the cycle, we and our issues are discarded and off we go with the next Republican-led effort at big government statism, and further support of a purely leftist agenda. It happens so often that we cringe now when a Republican hand is raised, expecting it to smash down on us as it has done so many times before.
Many were outraged by the actions of the GOP establishment in 2011-12, but in the end, how many of us did their bidding anyway? We keep coming back. Even a dog learns that if you recall him, only to bash his nose with a rolled-up paper, approaching you is something to be done at his peril. Eventually, the dog won’t come back at all, and no amount of false praise or treats will make him return when called because he has learned recall is the prelude to another beating. Are we conservatives not more able to recognize our antagonists than are dogs? Do we not possess the requisite self-esteem to leave?
What we have done is to reinforce the behavior of our batterers. It’s gotten so bad that fleeing for a night or a week to the political battering victims’ shelter of the blogosphere or talk radio to voice our displeasure will no longer be enough. It’s time finally to press charges and stand up for ourselves and go, never to return. Yes, there will be hard times as a result, but the long-run dangers of staying are worse, and at some point, for people who claim to be concerned with the welfare of their children, shouldn’t we correct the environment in which they will be growing?
I say “we must go.” Otherwise, how many black eyes will we endure? How many betrayals? How much infidelity must we accept? We might claim that we had no choice but to stay, or to return, but after the tenth 9-1-1 call to Rush Limbaugh, our whining begins to lose its impact. Do you think the GOP establishment hasn’t noticed our regular return to the fold, irrespective of what they do to us next? We fall for their sweetened tone because we want to, and because it’s harder to strike out on our own than to come back and live in terror of our next beating at their hands. It’s time to recognize that it is our fear of the uncertainty that fuels our repeated returns, but also that in so doing, what we are guaranteeing instead is a certain result that will only grow worse. We must ask instead how much we value such predictability, if it amounts only to the certainty of our next beating. It’s time for conservatives to reject the continued abuse at the hands of their tormentors in the Republican establishment. It’s time to break the cycle.
Note: It’s not my intention to minimize domestic abuse, but instead to demonstrate how conservatives have responded to their abusers in the same way many victims of real domestic abuse react to their plights. I don’t intend to compare the horrors inflicted on such victims with the political victimization that goes on the Republican party, except as an illustration of how dependent conservatives have become on their abusers. The immediate results of the political context I’m discussing in no way measure up to the terror under which victims of domestic violence live, but I will point out that in terms of the country and its future, the dire consequences of permitting the abuse of the GOP establishment to continue will be no less severe on a national basis.
Who Me?
On Friday, Karl Rove was further exposed as misleading and disingenuous. In an email response to his appearance on Thursday’s O’Reilly Factor, in which Rove claimed to have been the Director of Reagan’s 1980 Campaign in Texas, Reagan Biographer Craig Shirley responded via Daily Caller, explaining that Rove was no such thing. In point of fact, Karl Rove ran Governor Clements’ effort for Reagan, but only after George W. Bush was defeated in the primary. Do you understand? Rove was a George H.W. Bush supporter, as was Texas Governor Bill Clements, for whom Rove worked at the time. You see, Clements was a strong Bush supporter throughout the primaries, but there’s more to consider in this story. First, watch Rove plead his case on Bill O’Reilly’s softball show:
You might wonder, watching Rove misrepresent his role in the Texas campaign for Ronald Reagan, whether it’s such a big deal that he first supported George H.W. Bush. After all, it’s not that unusual for a candidate’s supporters to move over to the nominee’s campaign in some role after the primaries. That said, there’s something very important I want you to consider, and it’s obvious as the spin flowing from Karl Rove’s lips:
In 1980, Rove chose Bush. Consider his dubious argument about supporting “the most conservative candidate who can win.” It seems the most conservative candidate did win, but it wasn’t Rove’s choice in the primary in 1980. Instead, Ronald Reagan won, and he was far more conservative than Rove’s choice. Of course, that’s not all you need to know. In 1976, Ronald Reagan was fighting with Gerald Ford for the GOP nomination, and Karl Rove chose a horse to ride in that race too. Ronald Reagan? No, ladies and gentlemen, Karl Rove was all aboard for Gerald Ford. Gerald Ford lost to Jimmy Carter, and so it was true that once again, Rove apparently picked “the most conservative candidate who could win,” though neither did.
That’s the truth about Karl Rove. In 1978, Karl Rove ran the losing George W. Bush campaign for congress. In 2000, his candidate nearly lost, and did lose the popular vote. In 2004, his candidate barely squeaked by a very weak John Kerry. In 2006, his strategies lost the House and Senate. In 2012, he backed Romney early and often, and Mitt Romney lost. Karl Rove’s record of picking winners is abysmal. He clearly doesn’t know a conservative from a turnip, never mind a winner. You must stop falling for his strategies, and as Mark Levin pointed out on Friday evening, Rove is attacking Steve King(R-IA) incessantly and dishonestly. I repeat my sentiment to those who hope to reclaim leadership in the GOP: If you want any hope of winning, Karl Rove must go.
Who’s Behind the Mask?
Discussion over the last several days has focused on the implications of Karl Rove’s Conservative Victory Project, but if you think he and Steven Law are the only people in the Republican Party seeking the defeat of conservatism, you haven’t been paying attention. The conspirators are everywhere, and many of them don’t even realize their part in this insidious scheme. Knowing participants like Mitch McConnell and John Boehner are just the beginning. Realizing how deeply the Republican Party is infected, and considering how easily it has been corrupted and overwhelmed by a force of fifth-column Democrats in Republican clothing, you might wonder why we’d bother to save it at all. The stunning part of this conspiracy only becomes apparent once one recognizes the true source of their devious power, seeing the real force that has been arrayed against real conservatism on behalf of the Republican conspirators, because if you’re still a Republican, the identity of their true power brokers is staring us in the face each time we gaze into the mirror: The indispensable force upon which the various conspirators rely is ours, expressed in terms of all the times we did not walk away. It’s time to unmask and take our share of the blame.
We shouldn’t feign ignorance at the suggestion. You know it must be the case. Each and every time they have led us to electoral defeat, we’ve returned to them nevertheless. We could have walked away from them, and while we complain that it’s so hard to begin without them, the truth is that too often, Rove’s critique of our actions has been correct: He has said many time before and in many forms that we are the RINOs, because while he’s hustling campaign donations and concocting SuperPACs on behalf of the Republican Party, we’re nowhere to be seen. We show up on election day, but we leave the running of the party to him and those like him, who are charged with the legwork of making it come together according to some kind of strategy that we leave to them to formulate. Let me make this more clear: Rove believes we are the real RINOs because in his view, we’re only part-time participants, and we’ll consider walking away or staying home. He and his set are in the game all the time, without fail, and with relentless strategies, to which we are a party only when we’re expected to turn out and vote.
In all my years observing and participating in politics, I have seen instance after instance when the conservative grass-roots have become righteously enraged by some action or other of the party elite, forswearing further donations to the party apparatus, and going off on a pouting tantrum. I call it that, because the moment passions cool a few degrees, most come marching right back in to carry out the party’s bidding. In 2011, I heard the oaths and the promises, and made a few of them myself, about how I would not support another liberal or moderate Republican for President, but in 2012, despite the huffing and puffing, on election day, desperate to oust Obama, most of us (myself included) went rushing back in to try to prop Romney up and push him over the top. What do you suppose Karl Rove had expected us to do? Most of us complied with his plan right down the line. He wasn’t out to win, but merely to put on a good show to justify the massive expenditures.
Now I suppose it must be said that if it is a sign of insanity to do the same thing over and over again, expecting different results, so too must it be a sign of schizophrenia to behave in the first moment as if there is no going back, only to go back anyway. The only other way to describe such behavior is to suggest that we had been bluffing, and that the GOP establishment had called our bluff repeatedly. In the end, here we stand exposed, having made a holy spectacle of things, but in the end evincing none of the fiery resolve we had claimed at our initial offense. Is it any wonder that the GOP establishment marches over us at every turn? We keep letting them win, and in the end, supporting them, because we’re either too afraid or too lazy to strike out on our own.
There are those who will immediately chastise me, because as they will point out, building a new party cannot be done overnight, and cannot be done in time for the next congressional elections. That may or may not be true, but extenuating the matter will not improve our predicament. One of our laments in the face of leftist obstructionists to oil drilling who claim our goals will not be attained for a decades is that we never reap the benefits because we never begin. We point out rightly that if we had begun drilling when they first opposed it, we’d have acquired that new source of oil by now. The same thing can be said with respect to our talk about replacing the Republican Party. If we had begun years ago, we’d be done by now, but we always permit the lengthiness of the task and the attending difficulties dissuade us from commencing. We’re Americans, for goodness’ sake, and if we can decide to put a man on the moon inside one decade, ultimately completing it, and if we can decide to defeat the Soviet Union by out-producing and out-smarting them, and do so in a decade, surely we can likewise build a new party and toss the Roves and his ilk briskly to the curb in two or four years.
What then prohibits us? Yes, they have an open conspiracy against us. Yes, for all intents and purposes, they are in alliance with the Democrats. Yes, between those two elements, they all but own exclusive control of the media. So what? Look around. We outnumber them if only we’d have the good sense to realize it. They cannot put a single establishment candidate into office without our active participation and support. Cannot! The fact is that it is we who put the Republic in the name “Republican,” and it’s about damned time we act as though it’s ours to control. We must ditch them, or ditch the party, but either way, we must go no further down this path together with them, because they are leading us to a destination we cannot abide. Where will go? How will we get there? What must we do?
I haven’t any of the answers save one: We must separate or be stuck in this awful union in perpetuity, complicit conspirators in our own demise, losing election after election until there is no country and there is no way to make one from the ashes. We must separate ourselves from them or bear the stamp of the appraisal we will have earned by our alignment with them. Many people these last few days have made much of the Twitter hash-tag: #CrushRove. As bad as he is, and as malignant a force as we may take him to be within the Republican establishment, that entire concept possesses only so much power as our compliance and our votes lend to it. Every time you think of him and his white-boards full of scrawled propaganda on Fox News, remember that it is in large measure your willingness to serve his conspiracy that gives him the power to defeat you. It’s true that he is able to acquire large sums of cash in his efforts, but without the promise of ultimately delivering your votes by leaving you no alternative, Rove would be powerless, the money would dry up, and we would be finished with him.
We need to become better citizens, all of us, or pay an incredible price. This will demand of us not merely the swearing of oaths against a vague Republican establishment, but a commitment to seeing this through. For years, decades in fact, we have largely turned the operation of the Republican party over to those who haven’t our interests at heart, and who do not share our principles. If we are to do no more, we mustn’t complain when they run us to ruin. It is with our silence and compliance that they have purchased the power to decide who our candidates shall or shan’t be, and it is with the unchallenged ignorance of much of our flock that they have been able to persist. Conservatives mustn’t permit either any longer. I understand the reluctance of those few who would earnestly leave the Republican party behind, but have resolved that it’s their party, because I have felt much the same, but the fact is that given the activities of establishment Republicans for at least two decades, it hasn’t been our party for a long, long time.
We are fast approaching a time in American history when we will be judged for our diligence in speaking out truthfully on the state our union. When the collapse comes, as it almost certainly must, I will not be associated with the Republican party. It has been complicit in our national undoing, and conservatives who had worked so tirelessly against it shouldn’t be saddled with the blame, but their continuing association with a morally bankrupt party ensures that they too will be discredited in the ensuing debacle. It’s time then for me to commence, on my own if I must, but in its present form and under the current chief influences, or any like them, I am done at long last with the Republican party. If our founders could carve a rough-hewn nation out of the wilderness that had been the American continent, I should consider myself lucky to be an heir to their exertions, but I will not let their republic wither and die for my own lack of diligence. The only remaining alternative before us is to join the conspiracy against her by silent assent, surrendering to the bogeyman who will have been revealed: It was us all along.
Shrugging-Off Levin
Karl Rove appeared on Hannity on Tuesday night to deflect criticism that he’s an agent of the establishment at war with the Tea Party. I don’t buy it, and I believe his own professions in this clip should give you a sense of how he views the rank-and-file conservatives in the country. You see, he explains that it’s the goal of his “Conservative Victory Project” to support “the most conservative candidate who can win.” You may well notice that there exists a mile of wiggle-room in that statement, and it’s made from a deeply held sense of arrogance that is simply undeniable. If you watch carefully, at roughly 3:43 into the clip from Hannity’s show, as Sean asks him a question about the reaction to the Time article, you will see what “Tokyo Rove” thinks of Mark Levin, shrugging him off in derisive dismissal(screen-capture at left.) Watch the segment:
Rove attacked the motives of a wide range of people in the Tea Party movement, both in the blogosphere and in activist endeavors, as seeking some financial end. The irony of such a claim is galling. Mr. Rove insists that his new group exists to support “the most conservative candidate who can win.” This prompts a few questions in my mind, and I’d like to see them answered by Mr. Rove or any of his numerous establishment apologists:
You see, when I answer these questions, I come to several conclusions, and none of them support Mr. Rove’s fanciful explanation on Hannity’s show. Karl Rove has shown no understanding of conservatism. His relentless appeal for immigration reform, his attacks on other conservative causes, candidates or efforts, and his involvement in the Bush administration with the passage of very liberal programs suggest to me quite strongly that Karl Rove is not an appropriate or even qualified judge of conservatism in any respect.
Since when is Mr. Rove the final arbiter on who is able to win? He told us throughout the primary season that only Romney could win, and through the general campaign that Romney would win, and that it might be a big win(though he did not quite go down the fantastic rabbit-hole with Dick Morris who predicted a Romney landslide.) Still, if 2012 is the measure of Mr. Rove’s ability to pick winners and losers, I’d say he did pretty poorly, and on his performance in 2012 measured against his own predictions and his own direction of funds, I would suggest that a blind-folded ape flipping coins could have done as well, and probably much better. For somebody who now indicates he supported Steelman in Missouri, it’s funny that he twice refers to her as “Deb,” though her name is Sarah. I can’t say it adds much to his credibility.
Hannity’s apologetic interview with Karl Rove does nothing to convince me that Rove intends anything but that which has already been said. His history of efforts against the grass-roots of the Republican Party are evidence enough for me that what he’s after is not conservatism, and certainly not victory. Translated, “the most conservative candidate who can win” means: “Vote for the people we recommend, or we’re going to destroy your candidate, depriving your candidate of just enough votes to make them lose.” It’s clear to me that Rove and his bunch would just as soon lose as have an actual conservative win office, and I’m not inclined to believe a word Mr. Whiteboard has to say in his own defense. Sure, the article at the beginning of this latest flap appeared in the New York Times, and I’m certain there’s a bias there, but it hardly excuses Rove’s past actions, and doesn’t explain away his current ones either. One of these days, conservatives will begin to catch on that an “R” following somebody’s name doesn’t necessarily imply the first damned thing about their philosophical leanings.
22nd House Speaker
There’s no denying the fact that as we watch the behavior of the Republican insiders, every action and proposal is aimed at shifting the party toward the left. More and more, Republicans have ceded the ground on so-called “social issues,” where questions of right vs. wrong take precedence over matters of right vs. left. On such issues, they would rather not engage, preferring instead to avoid the ugly potential fall-out with moderate and leftist voters if some candidates uses the clumsy or foolish language to describe their views. They support old bulls of the Senate like Dick Lugar(R-IN) over upstarts like Richard Mourdock(R-IN,) but when Lugar could not win the primary, like saboteurs, the establishment wing arrives on the scene to campaign for the Democrat. It’s not accidental that the establishment Republicans seem to agree so frequently with the statist left. After all, they know who butters their bread, and it’s obvious that they’re gaining more than their congressional retirement benefits. They claim leadership over a party largely composed of people they detest as “purists,” and you might wonder about the character of those who openly mock purity. You might ask yourself what kind of Republicans these are, and as Jeffery Lord writes in the American Spectator, history holds the answer: Rove and his ilk are modern-day “Cotton Whigs.”
As Lord reminds us, the “Cotton Whigs” had been that branch of the powerful Massachusetts Whig Party that acted in most respects like today’s Republican establishment. Their opponents, the “Conscience Whigs,” opposed slavery and were uncompromising in that pursuit. In issue after issue, and election after election, the Cotton Whigs did all they could to undermine Conscience Whigs, often siding with the pro-slavery Democrats out of a desire to forestall addressing the slave trade. Like our contemporary Republican establishment, they claimed to sympathize with Conscience Whigs, but underlying that sentiment, they wanted to hold the country together and continue making money indirectly through the continued use of slaves. It was this divide that ultimately led to the building of the Republican party, and the abandonment of the Whigs. Lord’s conclusion is that modern-day Cotton-Whigs are making a similar error, and that Karl Rove and his fellows in that group may soon find themselves kicked by history against the political curb.
It is also fitting that one of the so-called Cotton Whigs had been Robert Winthrop, who served as speaker of the House, whose close ties to the textile industry in Massachusetts made him a less than enthusiastic supporter of abolition. You see, much like modern day Republican establishment types, he couldn’t or wouldn’t take a firm stand against slavery, not because he agreed with it in principle, but because in practice, he profited from it. Fast-forward to John Boehner and the rest of the Republican establishment, and you find the same sort of principles of convenience that cannot be tolerated if they interfere with profits. I warned my readers in 2011 that there were any number of Republican establishment types who were fine with Obama-care, because a.) they wouldn’t be affected personally, and b.) they had figured out a way to profit from it. These are your putative leaders, and they bear an eerily resemblance to the Cotton Whigs of Massachusetts.
I agree with Mr. Lord’s appraisals of the modern-day Cotton Whigs, because much like their political forerunners in pragmatism, establishment Republicans are not interested in conservative approaches to social issues because they threaten to undermine the status quo. Let us be blunt in admitting that the GOP establishment is comprised of people who have figured out how to make substantial fortunes from the growth of big government, and that they have no concern for underlying issues of morality so long as the cash continues to run freely from the treasury into their accounts through various devices of public expenditure. They have sold their souls in exchange for ill-gotten loot, and they are willing to destroy “conscience conservatives” in order to continue on their way. They side with Democrats in every issue in which their money or power comes up against doing what is right.
There are some who will interpret this as an attack against wealthy Republicans, but such is not the case. It is a matter of examining who is enriching themselves not by entrepreneurial endeavors, but instead by graft and rampant cronyism. In most respects, the modern day Cotton Whigs are the frequent beneficiaries of government expenditures. What do they care if tax rates go up if their take from the treasury increases many times over? Just as the Cotton Whigs were happy to profit from slavery, thus turning away from consideration of the moral aspects of the issue, so too are today’s “Cotton Republicans” willing to ignore the bondage into which you and your children are being cast. The Democrats play roughly the same part they played a century-and-one-half ago, happy to take such assistance as Cotton Republicans will offer while dividing and destroying Republican strength in opposition to their pro-bondage agenda.
Jeffrey Lord must be credited here with seeing an accurate analog to our current political troubles, reaching back to the founding of the Republican party to make it plain how rank-and-file conservatives, concerned as much with the long-term social and moral aspects of our country are again being overwhelmed by well-heeled interests who continue to profit from the bondage we must in good conscience oppose. Whether the particular issue is abortion, crony capitalism, immigration, or an outrageous health-care mandate, the “Cotton Republicans” live on the wrong side of every issue, not wanting to stop the gravy train to which they’ve hitched their caboose. What these charlatans offer is that one can gain the whole world, and to devil with one’s soul. There is one other person who deserves a hat-tip in all of this, because it had been Sarah Palin warning the GOP establishment that they might well end up going the way of the Whigs. Who better than the Alaskan crusader against crony capitalism and corruption to have pointed out the similarities between our modern Republican establishment and the Whigs? The time may have arrived in which her unheeded warning will be made fact by the intransigence of the Beltway political class.
There’s no sense pretending that the GOP establishment is on our side. In fact, it’s so bad that we ought to stop considering them as Republicans at all, or abandon the party to them, as had been the ultimate result with their philosophical forbears, the “Cotton Whigs.” One thing about which we must be careful is that some of them don’t manage to infiltrate our movement in order to co-opt it. Given the opportunity, they will quickly set up shop and begin all over again, leaving us right where we started. If you don’t think they’re willing to stoop to that tactic, I’d urge you to think again. Wise conservatives will observe the actions of some of our newer brethren, judging their actions rather than merely listening to their words. If Mr. Lord is right, and I must admit that he has struck a chord with me, a single defeat or a string of them will not banish these Cotton Republicans from our party, whether in six weeks or six years. We will be required to practice resolve and vigilance to keep them at arms length, because I believe that if one can keep them at bay for long enough, they will shed their masks and simply join up with Democrats who are their natural allies. If the GOP establishment wants to find unity with the Democrats, I strenuously suggest we let them. Put another way, as Jeffrey Lord aptly reminds us, from the historical precedent he offers:
Briskly remarked a young Charles Sumner, another Conscience Whig (whose defiant anti-Cotton Whig leadership would eventually make him a Republican U.S. Senator from Massachusetts) of the differences with Cotton Whigs: “Let the lines be drawn. The sooner the better.” Said Sumner: “Thank God! The Constitution of the United States does not recognize men as property,” adding at another point “I am willing to be in a minority in support of our principles.”(emphasis added)
We should heed Lord’s analogy, but we should be willing also embrace Sumner’s advice. In order to clean out the Cotton Republicans from our midst, we may need to be willing to briefly remain a minority party. That will be the immediate cost of ejecting or abandoning the GOP establishment, but it is a cost we can’t afford to avoid for much longer. They are unifying with the Democrats, adopting their arguments and their tactics, and isolating conservatives while claiming the mantle of conservatism. It’s time we give up our fixation on winning at any cost. If we stick to the fundamentals of our principles, rejecting statist arguments outright, victory will come in due course. If we stand on principle, the American people will ultimately notice, and when the Republic begins to collapse, they will remember who refused to yield. If we don’t believe that much at least, for what are we fighting anyway? I am calling on all of my conservative brethren to reject the GOP establishment no matter the short-run cost, so that we may go on about the business of saving the country. We must be a people of no lesser a character than our predecessors, the “Conscience Whigs.”
Naked Contradiction
This is a subject that comes up frequently, as the GOP establishment attempts to drive out actual conservatives time after time. It’s nauseating, really, because under the light of the first bit of logical torture-testing, this concept fails miserably. Let me once again address the foolishness of this proposition, this time in light of various current legislative priorities, with the understanding from the outset that there can be no way to square the two positions. One simply cannot be both an actual fiscal conservative and an adherent of a liberal social agenda. The latter cancels out the former, in the same fashion anti-matter annihilates matter. The two cannot share the same space. Translated, their proposition suggests approximately that while one is concerned with the fiscal condition of the country, one need not be concerned in the least with the fiscal costs of one’s social advocacy. Confused? I suppose there are still a few people who are tricked by this self-contradictory hogwash, but I think it’s important that it’s finally clarified. The two concepts stand in direct opposition to one another, and if you claim to be a conservative, it’s time to speak out against this blatant philosophical pollution that having successfully wrecked the GOP, is now destroying our country.
Let us take the occasion to point out that in various times and places, conservatives are tricked by DC insiders, and beltway establishment Republicans into believing there can be a way to have one’s cake while having eaten the baker before he could commence his baking. In the case of “comprehensive immigration reform,” the bait-and-switch game is being carried down the field by Senator Marco Rubio(R-FL,) who insisted in multiple interviews on all the big conservative radio and television talk shows that no consideration could be given to immigration reform unless and until border security had been addressed in the first instance. Unfortunately, the real legislation will not focus on security even slightly, relying on the Secretary of Homeland Defense to merely certify the border as secure. Since Janet Napolitano has already effectively done so, with our tightly secured border(?), let the amnesty commence in earnest!
Let us imagine for the sake of argument that the advocates of this social policy would do as they say, and that they would actually secure the border first(which they won’t.) What will be the cost in real terms of this social legislation preferred by the moderates and liberals? In short order, all of these newly certified “guest workers” and their families will find their way into eligibility for welfare, and other entitlements, just as legal immigrants do now. despite the fact that it’s not supposed to happen that way. All of this “social moderation” will simply lead to more spending. All of the rotten promises will be broken just like they’ve been in every previous iteration of this garbage. Worse, for every one potential voter the GOP establishment hopes ultimately to gain, there will be two in the Democrats’ column. In this issue, we have not only the galling spectacle of social liberalism negating any claim to fiscal conservatism, but in fact negating conservatism itself.
Next, let us imagine the beginnings of other social programs, like food-stamps, that were invented without respect to their fiscal costs, and continued despite the fact that they had exploded well beyond anything imagined at the time of their original enactment. Food-stamps were presented as a way to alleviate the social problem of poverty, specifically hunger, and also promised as a way to reduce crime, but such programs have had neither promised effect. Poverty has never shrunk, and indeed, the government and the politicians and bureaucrats who populate it have done all they could to expand eligibility requirements and grow the roll. While crime statistics have moved up and down, none of the change can be attributed to so-called “poverty programs.” What started out as a modest social program now serves one-sixth of our population at a staggering cost in real dollars. We are borrowing those dollars, so let not the advocates of these programs posture as fiscal conservatives in any measure.
So-called fiscal conservatives who are merely liberals in disguise also prefer abortion rights. It is said that they prefer to let women do as they will with their own bodies, as if that was the question at issue. What they will not acknowledge as they plead for the increase in available workers to be provided by their amnesty plans is that if the United States did not have an abortion-on-demand policy, it is likely that our population would have grown by a net additional thirty million or more people, first subtracting the estimated twenty million illegal aliens. These “social moderates” in fiscally conservative costumes pretend on the one hand that abortion is an individual liberty issue, but that illegal immigration is not, ignoring the liberty stripped via taxation and borrowing. As they whine over the lack of new revenues to the treasury borne by forty years of abortion, they instead blame the lack of tax-payers on an “antiquated immigration policy” they’ve never really enforced in the first place. The social costs are obvious, but the fiscal costs are gargantuan. If even half of those fifty million aborted children had by now attained working age, they would be prospective tax-payers helping to prolong the life of the Social Security Ponzi scheme for which the social liberals in the Republican Party now propose amnesty as the answer.
Let us consider a few other “social issues” in rapid-fire form, thinking about their fiscal impact. Irrespective of how you may feel about gay marriage, will including homosexual couples in the entitlement to spousal benefits for government employees cost the government more, or less? Naturally, more. Will the provision of abortion and contraception by government programs as a part of various government health-care initiatives cost taxpayers more or less? Naturally, more, and by the way, they’re also cheated of help in paying the bills. Will permitting women in combat, whatever your view on the issue may be, cost the services more, or less? More. Absolutely. As you begin to take inventory in this fashion, you will quickly realize that this business about “fiscal conservatism” is a complete farce once combined with the contradictory notion of “social moderation/liberalism.” The latter simply destroys the former, making it clear that the claimed notion of fiscal conservatism had been a mask for rampant statism all along.
This applies nowhere more than in the examination of our federal fiscal disaster. Consider the farce of Paul Ryan’s budget plan, that promises to reduce the rate of federal growth but assumes a preposterous five percent rate of growth in the GDP for as far as the eye can see, while doing approximately nothing to reduce federal expenditures, instead promising to grow our way out of our current fiscal morass while slowing the rate of spending growth. Ryan and his fellow advocates of this plan pretend to us that it is a serious proposal that can offer us a way out, but that is a dishonest calculation based on highly deceptive number-rigging, and it is offered to us as a way to preserve all of these entitlement programs ad infinitum, in answer to the charge that Republicans are extremists who care not for the social good. One time after the next, the Republicans have shown us their true colors as they have repeatedly capitulated to Obama and the overt statists at the expense of American not yet born. Naturally, since they’re willing also to fund abortion, they’re be fewer of those anyway. The thing to notice is that when the system collapses under the weight of these entitlements, nobody, neither recipient nor payer, will be spared by the calamity.
In fact, this has been the basic pattern of conduct by so-called “fiscal conservatives” over the last four decades. In virtually every social issue, they go along with the leftists, and each time, we pay not only a horrible social cost, but also an incredible fiscal burden, both measured in the lives and exertions of real people. At each new increment, we are promised they will go this far, “but no further,” until the next occasion to surrender to the left. Rinse and repeat. They have been slowly increasing the temperature on the pot that is the social cauldron, asking us to accept a little more, and some more, and eventually the whole agenda. Virtually all of our fiscal woes owe to the growth of “social moderation,” as expressed in the endlessly growing pile of debts accumulating in our treasury.
At some point, Americans, particularly conservatives, ought to stop falling for this nonsense. Statism has grown by virtue of this sort of dereliction of fiscal conservatism in favor of social liberalism. Education. Health-care. Prescription drugs. The list goes on and on, from colossal costs to smaller ones, but always, without fail, at some cost, somehow, for American tax-payers to bear. The entire budgetary deficit would be wiped out, and much of of our debt would not have accumulated but for all the times some allegedly “fiscally conservative” Republicans had gone along with social liberals in pursuit of some advertised social aim. As people such as Karl Rove set out to create subsets of the Republican Party designed to finally vanquish actual conservatives, it is critical to understand how they have succeeded in stripping the party bare of all its former principles, remaking it to resemble the Democrat Party in every way, to include the long-maintained pretense of concern over fiscal matters.
It’s not as though any sober adult would believe the claims of these alleged fiscal conservatives, but that presumes a good deal too much about their intended audience. As one final proof of the sort of idiocy explicit in this claim of the fanciful combination of fiscal conservatism and social liberalism, I offer you the Super-Sunday tweet of one Geraldo Rivera, Fox News “correspondent” and professional purveyor of every tragedy into which he can insert himself, who has now said he is considering a run for the United States Senate, as a Republican(?) from New Jersey. Given the ascendancy of Chris Christie, I hadn’t been aware that New Jersey had a viable Republican Party, but Rivera wasted no time in leaping into the sphere of social issues, predictably at a substantial cost:
“If elected I would propose a bill to make Super-Monday a national, no school, no work holiday/day of community service” – Geraldo Rivera via Twitter
Here then is the final abomination of “social liberals” who pretend to be fiscal conservatives. Ready to give every Federal worker and most everybody else a day off, irrespective of the colossal expense to the economy at large, never mind the taxpayers and businesses, Rivera is willing to ignore all of that in order to buy votes. As if to further the absolutely idiotic meaning of this proposal, he then offers it as a day of community service! Does anybody believe that having abandoned paid “community service” for another day, the government workers would then spend this “free time” laboring on behalf of “the community? “ Only the crudest idiot could buy into such a scheme, but then again, to whom do you think these social moderates make their appeals? To those who would pay for such things? No, these are aimed solely at those who would derive some benefit at a cost to others.
Only children or child-like minds are able to erect a wall of dissociation sufficient to separate policies from their fiscal costs, and yet this is the aim of every one of the self-described “fiscal conservatives” who abandon fiscal concerns at the first indication that they can use the treasury to buy votes with real or imagined social concerns as their excuse. In the real equation from which they hide in abject fear and with loathsome evasions, one may be a fiscal conservative, or a social liberal, but one may never under any circumstance be both.
The New York Times is reporting that long-time establishment insider and Bush confidante Karl Rove has created a new political action committee called “Conservative Victory Project,” an exercise in Orwellian doublespeak if ever there had been one. Since there’s only the slightest hint of conservatism in Rove’s past, and since we know he has no intention of permitting real conservatives to win anything, sabotaging and undermining them at every opportunity, it’s laughable that he and Steven J. Law, (President of Crossroads GPS, President and CEO of American Crossroads, as well as former Deputy Labor Secretary under George W. Bush, among postings of lesser note) have combined forces in order to play a bigger role in selecting Senate candidates. Breitbart is also reporting this as an effort to fully undermine the Tea Party’s influence, and as I and other conservative have long suspected, implied in all of this is the role Rove played in helping defeat various Republican Senate candidates in 2012. Rove is part of the reason the GOP is a feckless, useless gaggle of insiders who do not serve their constituents, but more than this, he and his ilk are part of the reason conservatives continue to lose. It’s not accidental.
Let’s be blunt about Rove’s activities, and admit that he is no friend to conservatives. According to the Times article’s opening lines, the “Conservative Victory Project” is being created with a single purpose, and it isn’t conservative victory:
“The biggest donors in the Republican Party are financing a new group to recruit seasoned candidates and protect Senate incumbents from challenges by far-right conservatives and Tea Party enthusiasts who Republican leaders worry could complicate the party’s efforts to win control of the Senate.”
With the Times inserting the descriptor “far-right,” what we’re really talking about is mainstream conservatives, who are regarded by the New York Times as extremists. Less obvious is that Rove and his band of merry moderates see conservatives in precisely the same way, substituting their own version of statism for the concept of conservatism. It became plain to me that this would be Rove’s direction once he appeared on Fox News this week to explain conservatism in terms solely of fiscal and economic considerations. He’s trying to re-cast “social moderates and fiscal conservatives(a contradiction in both ideology and terms) as “conservatism” (Full stop.) By claiming the mantle of conservatism as their own, the hope is to scavenge and cannibalize the unaware and uninformed who tend to follow the Republican crowd, but who are not exactly devoted students of political philosophy or ideology, and so may not realize that there can be no such thing, in fact or in logic, as a “fiscal conservative and social liberal/moderate.”
As Ben Shapiro, writing for Breitbart explains, much of this is Rove’s fight for relevance and credibility in the wake of the 2012 disaster:
“But victory for conservatives isn’t Rove’s goal. He’s a political insider par excellence, and he’s playing for his political life in the aftermath of 2012. If that means declaring war on the Tea Party, so be it. “
Rove once thought to use the Tea Party, but when they didn’t particularly respond to his strategy, he decided they were more trouble than they were worth. His decision to submarine Christine O’Donnell was a calculation in favor of demolishing the Tea Party, and from that point forward, Rove has done nothing but undermine actual conservatives at every turn, while propping up long-time DC insiders and establishment hacks. Rove represents the well-heeled, nanny-statist wing of the Republican party, a group of people who generally feel more at home among liberals than with anybody who meets the definition of “conservative.” Through various Super PAC activities in 2012, Rove and his friends spent more than a quarter-billion dollars in pursuit of their agenda. They lost big, but only insofar as their candidates lost. What they succeeded in doing was to assist a number of Republicans in losing, but more importantly, in putting up another place-holder into the Presidential nomination who they fully expected would not win, despite their fairy tales to the contrary.
Conservatives won’t be surprised at any of this, but what they must not do is to permit Rove and his pals to claim the label of mainstream conservatism, because they represent no such thing. If Rove had any integrity, he would relabel his latest effort “the Moderate Victory over Conservatives Project,” or “The Mini-Dem Victory Project,” because the only win they’re likely to obtain is one against conservatives, particularly if they fall for his siren’s song again. Rove is poison to actual conservatism, and despite all the money and prestige, we should at last come to view him as a destructive force of the liberal faction of the Republican Party. He doesn’t speak for conservatism, he doesn’t like conservatives, and he would rather that Democrats win than to let actual conservatives achieve victory. After all, if he can see the defeat of a few conservatives in traditionally red states, he may be able to defeat the Democrat with any old RINO in the next cycle. Consider Indiana the model, as you can bet that come 2018, he’ll have Mitch Daniels or some other popular Hoosier-State moderate ready to challenge the first term Democrat incumbent who his pals in Indiana helped to defeat Richard Mourdock.
As Breitbart’s article points out, they’re after Steve King(R-IA) who they will try to paint with notions of extremism. It’s the Rove way: Attack and defeat conservatives so their former seats can be later back-filled with GOP establishment types. The “fiscal conservative and social moderate” schtick of the GOP establishment is a demonstrable loser, and only Rove and a few like-minded DC insiders seem unconvinced by that fact. We mustn’t permit them to lead conservatives astray once more. It’s time to send Rove packing. He’s the persistent architect of conservative defeat.
Dying Cockroach Party
By now, it should be apparent to every conservative that the Republican Party wants to ditch the whole slate of social issues. Establishment Republicans aren’t comfortable discussing them, and as we know well by now, the reason is frequently that their opinions are at odds with most conservatives. Abortion is one of the issues they are only too willing to abandon, because they’ve adopted the belief that the issue is a loser for Republicans. Increasingly, however, Americans are beginning to shift toward a more pro-life view. This new poll, part of the Republican Party’s new Growth and Opportunity Project, is aimed at creating one impression, and that is to drive people away from so-called social issues, and to justify banishing the touchy subject from the party. The GOP establishment is at war with its conservative base, and this is one way they’re trying to silence social conservatives and evangelical Christian in the party. Consider the following questions, captured from their poll(I’ve screen-captured the entire poll, here.) Pay particular attention to the third question:
Obviously, the third question is devised so as to force you to choose which alternative to abandon. It doesn’t take a genius to see that the first two questions will probably receive the same answer. Most people will say that the issues most important to them are those which the GOP should spend more time talking about. The first two questions really serve as filler, however, because the question they wanted answered is the third. This is effectively a push poll question. It’s used to drive opinions and derive a preconceived result. In this instance, the GOP leaves respondents no choice but to choose one issue to be abandoned. The question is aimed at leading you to an answer, easily revealed by asking it as they intend it:
Once viewed in this way, the object of the poll becomes clear, and it is precisely this sort of manipulative garbage that should make conservatives’ skin crawl with disgust over the sleazy nature of the GOP establishment and the National Republican Committee. If they had actually wanted to know something useful, rather than attempting to drive opinion and creating the theoretical justification for abandoning “social issues and family values,” they would have asked the question differently, perhaps asking you to number the choices, but also making the range of choices more specific with a longer list. Instead, you can’t even skip the third question on this page, but must make at least one selection for every question.
Unlike those in the Republican establishment, I realize that social issues are actually significant drivers of fiscal and economic issues, ultimately endangering our national security through fiscal effects, if by no other means. I also realize that our government spending and taxes, as well as the debt all wind up being drivers of the economic issues, particularly including those listed. The Republican Party thinks we are all stupid, and that we’ll fall for their idiotic poll. I answered the poll, and in part because I know the economic problems owe largely to the fiscal ones, on the third question, I selected “Economic issues” with the primary motive of frustrating the GOP’s attempt to ditch the social issues.
The Republican party hopes we’re all too stupid to understand the manipulative tactic being employed, but this is the sort of thing we need to expose. This poll was designed to derive an answer that will justify ditching the so-called “social issues,” but in some respects, consequences of social issues are the biggest and most intractable problems our nation faces. More than that, however, those who think the Republican party can be rescued must acknowledge that this makes plain the GOP’s desire to remake the “big tent” in their own image, and it’s something conservatives ought to abhor. After all, even if you hold National Security as the most important single issue, does that mean you are unconcerned by the others?
Can we really be limited to just four choices on which topics to exclude from discussion? What if we added another choice, like “Environmental issues, like Global Climate change and CAFE standards” How many would choose to exclude that, ahead of so-called “social issues?” It’s despicable that the Republican party views us as cattle to be herded, and it’s the reason why I am now contemplating seriously the increasingly popular alternative of replacing that dying, corrupt party. While the GOP downplays the importance of social issues like family values, here’s a little primer by Steven Crowder at Fox News in that vein that demonstrates why social issues can have a vast fiscal and economic impact.
This poll had one goal: The justification of ejecting social issues from the Party’s platform. The DC establishment Republicans simply don’t wish to touch these issues, because to do so requires clear-headed thinking and a strategy for countering bankrupt Democrat arguments favored in media, but by now, we should all understand that the Republican party will sell out conservatives at every turn. It may be time for conservatives to make plain their displeasure with the GOP leadership, leaving that broken party behind forevermore, relegating it to the status of contemporary Whigs.
Not Afraid to Stand
I’m accustomed to being the odd man out when it comes to political opinions, and I’ve become accustomed to taking some flak on that basis. I’ve read a number of very good articles offering the reasons why Sarah Palin should run for President, and given her departure from Fox News, there are many who are already speculating about a 2016 Palin run for high office. Various writers have mentioned her blue-collar appeal, her record of fighting corruption, and her ability to stand apart from her party when doing that which is right had demanded it. As a campaigner, she’s an undeniable phenomenon and her record of endorsements turns out to have been much better than those who claimed her endorsement wasn’t “worth snot”(as Steve Flesher reminds us,) but with all of that in mind, there’s something that has bothered me about the idea that she would run. You see, even as I watched her deliver a barn-burner of a speech in Indianola, Iowa in the September of 2011, and again as I watched CPAC 2012 via C-Span, while each crowd broke out into chants of “Run Sarah, Run,” I looked at the humble but forthright soul standing alone before the multitudes, thinking to myself that despite her fitness regimen, she isn’t really the running type. In my mind on both occasions, the words echoed: “She won’t run. When the time comes, she will do as she’s always done: Sarah Palin will stand.”
Politicians talk a good deal about running for this office or that, and since the election of 2012, I’ve noticed a number of politicians making some noise about running in 2016. Running is something politicians seem to do quite well, but in evaluating Governor Palin’s record, what I’ve noticed is that she stands. It might seem to be a trivial distinction, but I believe there’s something to be said for the difference. She stood against corruption from her earliest days in politics until the day she left public office in 2009, but even out of office, her stance on such matters has not changed. She stood on her record of opposing corruption when she decided to stand for election in her state’s gubernatorial race.
It was Sarah Palin on a field in Iowa who raised the issue of “crony capitalism” that rattled the primary season’s entrants as they all scurried to avoid branding with that label. The corrupt President also felt the heat on the issue as the Solyndra scandal, along with others related to his phony “green jobs initiatives” were exposed. She still warns of the corruption that seems to multiply where governmental power and money intersect, but as much as that may mean to we conservatives, having stood firmly against corruption on both sides of the political divide, she hasn’t earned so many friends in Washington. That hasn’t deterred her,as stand she does, irrespective of her detractors, even when it has meant standing alone.
Many politicians love to talk about compassion, but when it comes to acting it out, they employ the coercion of government as the means to their allegedly compassionate ends. Governor Palin is one of the very rare politicians who has said on numerous occasions that it is the voluntary compassion of Americans that she favors. Thinking about the difference inherent in this notion, permit yourself to wonder at what a better world it would be if compassion in America was once again restored to the province of personal choices made by millions upon millions of individuals acting out of love, rather than coerced by statist goons at the point of a gun.
Some politicians run on notions of “compassion” that rely in the first instance upon a government boot on the necks of all Americans, irrespective of their personal travails of the moment, or the strains under which individuals find themselves in the pursuit of their daily lives. Instead, Sarah Palin stands for a compassion that is real, and unifying, but against the fraudulent “compassion” that divides so much of our society. She speaks to the true compassion in the hearts of conservatives, a form of generosity that rings like Reagan’s message that compassion isn’t measured by the number of people languishing on government programs, but instead by the number who no longer need them.
Governor Palin stands for constitutional principles, and whatever one thinks about the wisdom of this bit or that piece of our US Constitution, her vigorous defense of it all makes her quite unlike most politicians who merely run for office. Having been the governor of a rather unique state among the fifty, she was determined to see that the programs she worked to implement met the letter and the spirit of her state’s unique writ of governing authority. Any politician can run for office telling voters what they want to hear, but how many are willing to stand on principle for that plain old notion of first following and adhering to their respective departments’ highest laws? Governor Palin stood for the rule of law.
In these dark days, we have instead a lawless President who ran for office promising to work around the law. It’s one thing to make empty or devious promises while running for office, but it’s another thing entirely to stand as a guarantor of the rule of law. Governor Palin recognizes that to undermine the supreme law of the land is to undermine its legitimacy, thereby endangering the republic it had forged, such that without this solid foundation, a people are left with no firm ground upon which to stand in their darkest hours.
One theme on which Governor Palin has stood unabashedly firm is that the Republican Party’s establishment must ultimately bend its will to the interests of the country, or find itself displaced. It’s no secret around the country that so many in the grass-roots of Republican Party activism frequently feel betrayed, not only by the elected politicians, but also by the vast consultancy and the bureaucracy that likes things just as they are, however they may be, so long as the music continues to play and they can continue to cash their paychecks.
Together, these comprise a healthy segment of that which she has termed the “permanent political class,” because no matter who is in power, whichever party may prevail in a particular election, they never go away, or never very far, because they have their hooks set so deeply into their victim: The American people. Her willingness to stand against the establishment of her own party, and indeed the entire sick machine that is Washington DC, has set her apart from all those others who run for office, run again, and then again, but who seldom seem to accomplish much of anything to merit their respective tenures.
In an earlier time in our republic’s history, it was common to speak of politicians “standing” for election. These days, “running” seems all the more appropriate as most simply kick our nation’s can of troubles down the road one election cycle at a time, as they run for political cover. When I think about “running,” the next word that enters my mind is usually “away,” and in our modern political discourse, it seems all too frequently to have been the tactic of so many politicians to run from difficult issues, instead of standing for the principles previously espoused, with damnably few exceptions. When I think about the word “stand,” it has an entirely different meaning. To stake out a position and defend it, against the shrill critics and the maniacal media is a much harder thing to do, and yet throughout her career in public office, that is precisely what Sarah Palin has been doing all along.
Take a stand. Make a stand. Stand your ground. I’m still standing. Stand and be counted.
These are all phrases that come to mind when I consider Sarah Palin’s record. She has stood for her faith, her family, and her country, purposes she puts first in her life every day, but if this country is to recover from the Hell that’s been and the Hell that’s coming, it’s going to take leaders who are willing to do more than merely run for office. Mitt Romney ran. In the minds of many, in the final debate, he ran and hid. Contrasting this against the sort of defiance against corruption one witnesses from Governor Palin, and her continued willingness to take on her party, it’s hard to place the Sarah Palin into the context of running except as exercise. In my mind, playing over the chants of “Run Sarah, Run,” on an Iowa field, it’s never been more important to understand that what this country really needs is a leader who will stand.
Some people simply aren’t suited to the sort of running in which most politicians engage, and I’ve long held that Sarah Palin is one of those political rarities who breaks the mold of the ordinary. I hope you’ll forgive me if indulge my own hopes for a country reborn, as through the din between my ears, I hear instead the chant of “Stand Sarah, Stand,” knowing that if she is called to stand for our republic, I, along with millions more, will cheerfully take our places standing alongside her in the battle for our nation’s future, whatever form it may take.
Follow-Up: I began this posting when I learned of the departure from Fox News, and needed only to clean it up a bit, planning to do so before being called in to the office where I spent most of the day and evening, Saturday. As if in advance answer to this very post, Governor Palin gave responses to a Q&A with Stephen K. Bannon, now posted for all to see over at Breitbart. Here’s a taste, and I believe it supports my thesis:
“I was raised to never retreat and to pick battles wisely, and all in due season. When it comes to defending our republic, we haven’t begun to fight! But we delight in those who underestimate us.”
Whatever form it may ultimately take, she will stand.
Good of the Service?
One of the most frustrating things revealed about American culture these days could be seen in the wake of Defense Secretary Leon Panetta’s move to include women in front-line combat. Media outlets immediately sought out comments particularly from women, and particularly from veterans and current service members. The responses portrayed were almost uniformly positive, but most of the responses I saw or heard in media were entirely vapid. In local media, one younger man was asked his opinion, and his response was approximately that it’s “a good thing that women will be treated equally.” Two things about this exercise are particular despicable to me, and I don’t know which is worse: The degree to which the media helps drive public opinion, or the simple fact that public opinion is so easily driven. To me, it’s obvious that far too many of our citizens no longer think before speaking, because that sort of assessment misses the entire point of military service, and the purpose of the military altogether. Simply put, service in the military isn’t at all about you.
To those who may be somewhat confused, let me preface the discussion with a few simple facts. The purpose of the military is to be the war-fighting appendage of the nation, and its role ought to be nothing more or less than to obtain victory in the missions into which the chain-of-command thrusts the services, with the goal of victory at minimal cost. Victory first, cost minimization second. Everything else the military does is pointless if it doesn’t accomplish these things, in this order. We could have a much larger military spending our entire GDP in support of it, but that would defeat the purpose of defending the country, since nobody would have the funds for any other purpose. Let us admit then that we wish to spend roughly that which it takes in blood and treasure, but no more, in defending the country and carrying out the war-fighting missions of our nation.
Naturally, a military unable to defend the country, or to obtain victory, is pointless in most respects. If the military force we fund is unable to protect the nation, one must ask: Why fund it at all? Do we like parades so well that we will support them with hundreds of billions of dollars, in perpetuity, with no hope that the force we’ve built can defend the nation and win its wars? This would be preposterous, both from an economic and a moral standpoint. Let us then admit that the first mission of the military, and the most critical end for which it is formed is to fight our battles, win our wars, and to do so while spending as little in blood and treasure as we’re reasonably able.
Having said this, let us examine the notions advanced by the vast bulk of those approving publicly the notion of women in combat as a matter of fairness and equality to women. Let it be noted at the outset that the purpose of the military is not fairness, and not some contrived notion of radical egalitarianism, but the defense of the nation, and any policy imposed on the force must meet the singular test posed by the premise that the purpose of the military is to win our wars, and to defend our country while exacting the lowest reasonable cost in lives and money.
If a policy is implemented that doesn’t serve that end, or improve that goal, we must ask why our leaders would undertake it. I would like for one military logistical analyst or one combat veteran to explain how either of the two goals explained above are augmented by including women in front-line combat. There may be a good deal of emotionally-charged political grandstanding, but the factual answer is that combat effectiveness of units will be degraded by the mass-inclusion of women in combat roles. You may not like reading these words, but they are no less true for your opposition.
Women do not meet the same rigorous physical standards as men. Don’t take it from me, but instead take it directly from the Army’s Physical Fitness Test scoring system. For the purpose of this discussion, I have built a table with data from the scoring tables available elsewhere. This table is a condensed representation of the difference in standards between male and female soldiers, aged 17-21, as currently in use by the United States Army. The Army uses three events to rate the fitness of soldiers, being the push-up, the sit-up, and the two-mile run, performed in that order by official scorekeepers. The first two events are time-limited to two minutes each. I have placed the top and bottom passing scores possible for each sex, in each event. Please direct your attention to this table:
|
Push-ups
|
Sit-ups
|
2-Mile Run
|
||||
|
Repetitions
|
Points
|
Repetitions
|
Points
|
Time
|
Points
|
|
| Male Maximum |
71
|
100
|
78
|
100
|
13:00
|
100
|
| Male Minimum |
42
|
60
|
53
|
60
|
15:54
|
60
|
| Female Maximum |
42
|
100
|
78
|
100
|
15:36
|
100
|
| Female Minimum |
19
|
60
|
53
|
60
|
18:54
|
60
|
The entire APFT(Army Physical Fitness Test) is based on a minimum passing score of 180, and a maximum of 300 points. In the Army, this has a bearing on promotions particular from E-4 to E-5 and from E-5 to E-6. I would like readers to observe particularly the vast performance disparity in both Push-ups and the 2-Mile run. Notice that the Maximum Score for women is obtained in Push-ups at the minimum passing score for men, and that the Maximum Score in the 2-Mile Run for women is just eighteen seconds faster than the slowest time acceptable for men.
One can argue over how much these differences would matter in support units(although they could, and probably do,) but on the battlefield, and in combat units, this is an unmitigated disaster. What’s worse, the actual difference in the Push-Up event is much greater than these scores reveal, because the average woman is shorter and lighter, both qualities placing the individual at mechanical advantage in the event. A 5’10″ male weighting 170 lbs. will on average find it easier to obtain a high score in the push-up event than a 6’2″ male,perhaps slightly more muscular, but weighing 190 lbs. Due to physiological differences between men and women, these vastly differing standards describe a significant disparity in capacity. We can wonder about how much that might matter in a rear area driving a truck, but in a forward area, heaving 100-lbs 155mm artillery projectiles around, it is bound to be quite inhibiting. Climbing in and out of the foxhole, pulling oneself up over walls and barriers, or having to carry a wounded comrade would quickly expose the difference.
What one cannot seriously argue is that the average woman serving will always obtain the top scores, or that the average man serving will only obtain the bottom. This disparity describes a vast variance in capability that can be lethal on the battlefield. It is not to say that there is no variance among men, but it is to say that the difference between the average man in the force and the average woman in the force is certain to be substantial. Since the military can only make rules that ultimately describe the average, perhaps rewarding those substantially above the mean, while ejecting those well below it, we must deal with the average, but not the exceptions.
The question then becomes: What does a military combat unit gain and/or lose by including women in direct combat roles? The simple truth is that in terms of the mission, and the likely costs of achieving it, this is an equation that spells potential or even probable disaster. The notion being advanced by those who advocate the idea is that the rewards achieved are social and/or individual. It is said by some that women add something intangible to the force by virtue of their presence, that justifies the additional losses in blood and treasure that their presence will on average impose. That may seem like a nifty argument unless it’s your blood or your treasure being unnecessarily expended, in which case it’s not such a good idea after all, and all the mystical-sounding social “wisdom” loses its ephemeral sheen.
The other argument is purely individual, and it is made in terms of notions of equality of opportunity. Let me explain this in simplest terms so that the brutally thoughtless might grasp it: The Armed Services do not exist to hand out opportunities for self-actualization, career advancement, personal gratification, or anything else of the sort. One might obtain some or all of those things through military service, but at the very least, this is and ought remain a tertiary concern for the chain of command. Again, chief concerns must be mission accomplishment and minimal cost, and in that pursuit, the services ought to retain every tool of discrimination at their disposal.
Some will misunderstand my usage of “discrimination” as meaning wanton, arbitrary rejection of some people for irrational cause(s.) This is not the meaning I intend, instead applying the usage that describes making a rational choice for rational purposes in the manner one shops for automobiles or smart-phones. In this sense, we all discriminate daily, many times over, and to good effect because it generally results in improved products or services since we will tend to opt for those most likely to satisfy our purposes.
Constructing a fighting force is no different, in fact, but just as Samsung can’t sue you for discrimination because you opted for Apple’s “iPhone” instead of the former’s “Galaxy,” the military is usually immune from lawsuits by merely stating their decisions in the context of the best interests of the service involved. What so many people don’t seem to understand is that military service is not an ordinary workplace, to which one can apply at will, and resign at whim. In the civilian sector, one has every remedy under the sun available if there is irrational discrimination, but under the martial authority that is the military, and as an institution for the nation’s defense, such concepts are foreign and irrelevant.
It highlights the misunderstanding of what military service is, and isn’t. Too many people in our culture are now possessed of an entitlement mindset, a notion that they too readily apply to the most farcical situation. There is no entitlement to be an infantry soldier. You can sign up for the infantry if you like, and if the Army will let you, but if after completing your initial training, the DoD decides that for the moment, they need more cooks, you’d better prepare to learn the ins and outs of a DFAC(Dining Facility – formerly known as the Mess-hall) because irrespective of the MOS(Military Occupational Specialty) for which you enlisted, you serve the needs of the Army first – not your own.
How many very good and able persons have wanted to be pilots in the military only to be told that since their vision requires corrective lenses to be at least 20/20, they are ineligible for that role? Will the Americans With Disabilities Act now be taken to apply to military service? There are people advocating such notions already, but what mustn’t be lost in all of this is the reason the military is given extraordinary power to discriminate on the basis of factors that would not be legally acceptable or morally proper in the civilian population: The function of the military is to keep the rest of us safe.
This is why I am so thoroughly disgusted by the coverage of this change in policy given by the media. It ignores the fact that this is a politically-based decision that merits no consideration whatever in a professional military. A professional military would study, objectively – without subservience to politicians’ whims, the impact of replacing approximately half of its combat forces with the average female enlistee. It would not consider the exceptional few who would describe the upper tail of the bell-curve on physical performance, but instead the median performer. Under that scrutiny, this entire notion would be abolished in one minute, because it does not serve the interests of the mission, or the minimization of the mission’s costs in blood and treasure. Our forces must accomplish their missions with as many as possible able to come home alive and in one piece, and that should be the enduring criteria of every person charged with command over troops in combat, from Lieutenant to Commander-in-Chief.
What we must not do is to permit the armed services of the United States to be degraded further in its capabilities for the sake of contrived notions of equality that have no relevance on the battlefield. We don’t seek equality on the battlefield with our enemies, but instead seek every advantage, as they do. That’s the nature of war, where a single moment in a single battle can change the fortunes of nations, so that every advantage is precious. How many advantages do we wish to yield to our present and future enemies in pursuit of a nonsensical notion of equality? After all, the only real equality that exists on a battlefield is the one obtained in death.
Sadly, if we adopt policies that place more service-members in disadvantageous positions in combat, we will see more equality of the fatal sort too, but that must be the inevitable result when policies are not based on the realities of war, but instead on the basis of the wishes of some impractical, egg-headed “constitutional scholar” in the ivory tower at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and the legion of nit-wits he has convinced to believe that military service is about them. There’s a reason it’s widely considered a “sacrifice.” Notions of equality that interfere with or hamper the military’s mission are among the things one voluntarily surrenders.
Editor’s Note: You should not be surprised that this story broke just in time for the Wednesday evening news cycle, because the whole purpose for which this story was pushed to the media at that time was clearly to remove Hillary Clinton’s wretched testimony in the Senate from the position as top story. This is naturally an important issue, but it is news only in the respect that it’s been pushed to the surface as a way to change the subject. Period. Now we’ll argue over this instead of the disgusting dishonesty of Hillary Clinton on behalf of the Obama administration.
As usual, Mr. L is on point. He takes on the same moderate Republican whiner I took on here. It’s ridiculous to think that guys like James Arlandson comprise any more than a tiny fraction of Republican thought, but somehow, they always manage to get the press. Always. Meanwhile, as Mr. L rightly points out, the RINO, Mini-Dem, Neo-Liberal front continues to pretend it’s our place to submit. Endlessly. Check out Mr. L’s rebuttal to James Arlandson below. Be sure to let him know what you think over on his website. Here’s the video:
Best Use of Your Times
There’s something a bit more than preposterous about the premise of the NY Times Op-Ed suggesting that for the good of the party, Republicans leaders should ignore Ted Cruz and other conservatives in their caucuses because in that publication’s view, they’re too rigid and inflexible, and they have all the lies in the world ready to prove it. Given that this is published in the NY Times, conservatives will likely conclude as they should that the paper probably doesn’t exactly have the best interests of the Republican Party at heart, their contrived concern aside. Of course, it’s one thing to offer an opinion, but it’s a damnable shame to validate one’s opinion with lies and half-truths, but once again, the NY Times has little else to offer its readers. Remembering that this is the outfit that hid the holocaust, and covered for Joe Stalin and Fidel Castro(h/t MarkLevinShow,) it’s really not surprising to see the paper resort to this tactic. The Gray Lady sees no black or white, and holds in contempt all who do. The paper’s motive is transparent: Marginalize conservatives in the Republican Party.
Their screed against Cruz is fundamentally wrong, in large measure because it’s based on a number of lies and distortions:
“Unlike 85 percent of the Republicans in the Senate, he would have voted against the fiscal cliff deal. He says gun control is unconstitutional. Breaking even with conservative business leaders, he would have no qualms about using the debt ceiling as a hostage because he believes (falsely) that it would produce only a partial government shutdown and not default.”
I realize it is the contention of the Times editors that gun control is constitutional, but the simple fact of the matter is that the Second Amendment protects the right of citizens to keep and bear arms just as the First Amendment protects the right of the NY Times to publish lies presented as fact. The Op-Ed relates that Ted Cruz is willing to use the debt ceiling in order to force cuts in Federal spending, but the conclusion(a.k.a. propaganda) is that he believes a falsehood about the results of such an action. This contention is a lie. The government of the United States takes in roughly $220-230 billion in revenues each month, and from that amount, paying the interest on the debt, paying for Social Security and Medicare, as well as paying our military can be accomplished.
What is not easily accomplished under such a scenario is to continue funding the endless string of other government programs and departments, some of which are simply bureaucratic fluff, but many of which comprise things like corporate welfare and crony capitalism, along with outrageous spending on items of dubious necessity to the operation of our government. In short, the Times is lying. Default is only a necessary result of a Debt Ceiling freeze if the President is unwilling to comply with his duty to pay the debts of the United States and thereby intentionally throw the country into chaos. This is the truth the NY Times does not want you to know. We should be so lucky as to have a Congress willing to put a stop to the out-of-control spending. The Times wants the President to retain the propaganda tool of claiming that a Debt Ceiling impasse would lead to disaster. It’s simply not the case.
Not satisfied with the growing influence of conservatives with a Tea Party flavor, the Times continued its farcical rant against Cruz:
“Considering the damage that this kind of thinking did to the country and the Republican Party over the last two years — a downgraded credit rating, legislative standoffs, popular anger, a loss of Republican seats — it might seem obvious that the party should marginalize lawmakers like Mr. Cruz. Instead, they continue to gain power and support. Party leaders named Mr. Cruz vice chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee”
Does the NY Times really expect readers to believe that Republicans had been to blame for the credit downgrade? The only degree to which the GOP may be blamed is that in the final analysis, they compromised with President Obama, giving in and accepting a spending binge that caused credit rating services to downgrade the nation’s credit-worthiness, and before it’s over, will prompt more credit rating agencies to push the rating down. The popular anger in the country isn’t directed at Cruz, or other conservatives, unless “popular anger” is an expression used to describe the sentiment among the board of editors at the NY Times. A winning presidential candidate is always expected to pick up seats for his party, thus the long-established political term we call “coat-tails,” just as it is long-held political convention to expect a President to lose seats in an off-year election, much like 2010.
The fact of the matter is that the NY Times is taking a shot at Ted Cruz because in his early popularity, they see the potential for damage to their left-wing agenda. They want the Republicans to compromise with the President, but if truth be told, they’d rather there were no Republicans. This is why they continue their campaign to marginalize conservatives, and it’s also why they apparently feel compelled to carry off an unconvincing pretense of concern for the Republican Party. The Times isn’t interested in making the Republican Party a viable political force, but they know Republican leaders in Washington read their paper, actually believing some of the paper’s hogwash. Let’s concede that when it comes to propaganda that influences policy, the NY Times is an undeniable leader, but that doesn’t mean we must accept it as a permanent condition. Their claim that Cruz is too rigid is simply another way of saying that he intends to keep his word to voters in Texas, where standing on principle isn’t an entirely foreign concept.
RINOism Dead!
There should be no mistake about what Mark Levin believes, or even the vast reach of his influence over the debate about government. Many left-wingers and not a few establishment Republicans accuse Dr. Levin of being a yelling mad-man, but that ignores the extent to which he influences the public debate. At an event last year in support of Ted Cruz, in the run-off that made him the Republican candidate, one attendee asked quite simply: How can we stop the construction of Ameritopia? What was stunning wasn’t the fact that the Senate Candidate knew full well what the questioner meant, being a friend with Dr. Levin and a campaign season guest on his show, but that all around the room, heads nodded up and down, because they knew the meaning of the question too. When the Senator answered, he demonstrated an understanding of the implications with respect to the US constitution, but unlike your typical rally of Democrats, the audience understood his points in part because some of them are lifetime students of our civil society, but also because among them were many listeners of Mark Levin’s show.
On Tuesday evening, frustrated with the talking points and narratives of establishment Republicans who wish to blame conservatives for last November’s losses, Levin launched:
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Dr. Levin holds a special contempt for so-called RINOs, or as I have recently dubbed them, “Mini-Dems.” They don’t believe in conservatism, or near as one can tell, much of anything. Instead, theirs is the worship of a brand of vague pragmatism that ends in Republican defeats. Of course, Dr. Levin realizes the RINOs aren’t going away, but here I think the larger point is that the underlying strategies and arguments that comprise RINOism are dead, as demonstrated by their repeated failures in election after election.
Levin’s reach into the blogosphere is deep and wide, as almost daily, some blogger somewhere, much as I’m doing now, is posting a vital clip from his show, and this acts as a spark for debate, not merely between left and right, but more importantly in the wake of last November’s election defeats, between and among Republicans and conservatives. This is because Levin spares no feelings, or at least not many, in making the essential and incisive points that establish the conditions of the debate. This may explain more than anything else why Levin’s show has grown while others have remained fairly static. He engages one’s mind, and he demands you follow the logic. He makes no apologies for supporting the Tea Party, or the conservative wing of the party, as Levin came up in politics in the watershed year of 1976, campaigning for Ronald Reagan. Though Reagan lost that election, it set the stage for his nomination and election in 1980, and Levin was there to learn the critical lessons.
Most listeners to Levin’s show comprise a group of studious, committed pupils, attending a a constitutional classroom in which the principles behind the founding of the country and the framing of its constitution are the daily lesson plan. What’s more, while it’s relatively early to draw this conclusion, as conservatives are searching for answers to their current political morass, it seems as though more are turning to Levin for the answers. It’s not as though Levin claims to be an all-knowing font of wisdom on what ought to be conservatives’ course, but his determination to fight and keep moving is enough because what becomes plain to his listeners is his unfailing commitment to see the battle through, whatever form it takes. Part of this may owe to the fact that in the wake of the 2012 election, conservatives are looking for a strong, articulate leader to make their best case for liberty, but I believe it’s a good deal more substantive than that. Levin seems almost instinctively to understand what the left will try next, which may explain why the stories he reads on one day so often become the topic of discussion throughout the blogosphere on the next day.
It’s been true on this site, almost from its inception, and on many occasions, I have brought readers audio from Dr. Levin’s show. My readers will have no idea on how many occasions Dr. Levin had stolen my thunder by covering a stories that I had in draft form as Levin’s show began, only to later discard them because on topics of substance, he generally leaves so little to be explained. That’s fine by me, but it highlights another important point about Levin: He’s plugged-in, and he works tirelessly outside the confines of his show, not merely to prepare for his daily three-hour lesson in liberty, but because in other efforts, he’s at the tip of the spear. The Landmark Legal Foundation is his other instrument of our republic’s defense, taking up cases of constitutional import on behalf of a grateful people. This level of involvement means that unlike so many other talkers, he’s in the trenches with us, and often as the point-man out ahead of us, spotting danger and directing the initial engagements.
Given all this, you’d think more Republican politicians would heed his advice, but where Dr. Levin is fearless, all too often, elected officials won’t follow his lead, out of a fear frequently masquerading as an overabundance of prudence. Levin understands this, and he often asks politicians questions that he then suggests they not answer, instead completing the thought on his own, knowing the precarious state of any official’s office. Levin’s show is probably also the largest network of plugged-in conservative activists in the general right-wing sphere, and his audience is unashamed to lean on politicians and to begin with the phrase: “I heard on Mark Levin’s show that you were going to vote for…” It is for this reason that so many of the DC Republican establishment tunes into his show, and while most won’t admit it, the fact is that they are well aware of Levin, and they feel his electoral influence. Politicians on the receiving end of his support love to hear the phrase “Levin surge” pronounced on their behalf, just as they cringe when they pop up on Levin’s radar for the sake of a well-deserved critique. They know they’re about to find their email and voice-mail full, and they’re going to get it both from Levin on the radio as well as from their constituents.
What may make Levin the most compelling and influential of the talkers and political media figures is that he expresses his contempt for the malfeasance of politicians and parties in the context of legal concepts on which he daily refreshes his audience. Apart from this blog, and rare few like it, you will not often witness a discussion of the principles underlying our supreme law. Law can be a minefield as any layperson will know, but there’s something precious about the ability to breath life into the collection of words, explaining their meaning and the context in which they were formulated in a manner that both educates and engages listeners. Very often, listeners to Dr. Levin’s show evince a reverence for our republic’s charter that is both touching and sincere, but also ironic in light of how easily their alleged “betters” dispense with both its words and spirit inside the beltway.
This kind of reformation movement isn’t religious, but its most ardent supporters would contend that while they may cling to their guns and their bibles, they haven’t turned-loose of their constitution either. Listening Tuesday evening, as Levin mentioned the effect he suspected his show might have on the national dialogue, I wondered aloud in response to my deaf computer screen as to just how many of the people I know are now loyal Levin listeners, and the truth is something staggering. I may live in rural Texas, where we tend to value liberty more than the average, but even friends from the distant large cities, in this state and out, all seem quite familiar with Levin’s show, his daily “lesson plans” frequently filling my morning inbox: “Did you hear what Mark [Levin] said last night?” There’s no denying he’s a bold and entertaining talk radio phenomenon, but more than this, he’s also the commander of constitutional defense headquarters on a national scale. When people seek the low-down on the latest Obama executive usurpation, they tune to one show on the dial and in streams across the Internet, because for better or worse, they know they’ll find the answers.
Dr. Levin can be heard Monday-Friday, 6-9pm Eastern, both on terrestrial radio and streaming from his site, as well as affiliates. If you miss the live show, he also offers free downloads of his podcasts here.
Readying His Assault
I hope conservatives are up for a battle, because they’re about to find themselves in one. President Obama will waste no time attacking Republicans, particularly conservatives, as he intends to go for the throat on guns through a legislative agenda. As I reported to you earlier, David Plouffe is telling the press that Obama has the votes for some kind of gun control measure in Congress, but if you think that all there is to this is some sort of political prognostication, you’re in for a surprise. It’s time to get proactive, so I’m going to tell you what I think the Democrats and their leftist cabal intend to do. You will remember that President Obama said in his speech on “Gun Violence Reduction” that pressure should be put on Congressional members from districts that don’t ordinarily favor such measures. Don’t doubt that this President is now preparing to lay siege to your liberties, and that the next four years will make the last four seem almost pleasant. He’s readying his forces, and they’re now ready to attack.
Let me tell you what I believe they are planning, because the left is nothing if not well-organized and shrewd. They mean to make it very difficult for your House members to stand, and they intend to make a spectacle wherever they are able. Between now and whenever the legislation already sitting on Feinstein’s desk is brought to the floor of the House, Obama expects that various members of the Republican caucus in the House will go home at some point to hold town hall meetings with constituents. Remembering the effectiveness of such events when used against Democrats in 2009, on the subject of Obama-care, you can expect leftist groups to fill these town hall meetings in order to put on embarrassing shows from which the previously steadfast members will quickly retreat to contemplate surrender.
This must be prevented, but since town hall meetings should happen, there being nothing wrong with that form of communication with constituents, we must flood the meeting places with our own number, and be prepared to loudly jeer any gun-grabbing malcontents. Most of these members will only take questions from their own district’s constituents, but that won’t stop the left from simply lying about their residency. While we shouldn’t lie in order to ask questions of congressional members in whose districts we do not live, there is nothing that says we can’t loudly jeer leftist questioners irrespective of their residency.
It’s hard to make a good YouTube moment out of an attempt to ambush some congressional member with some set-up question if the moment it becomes plain what you’re up to, the rest of the crowd loudly voices its disbelief and disapproval. If you want to know at least part of what Obama’s minions plan, you should expect variations of this sort of thing. More, your members should be forewarned of this potential and be prepared to answer idiots with the answers they deserve, while remaining respectful and clear-headed about the intent behind the questions. A community agitator like Obama will never miss an opportunity to make the most of such situations, but being prepared for the onslaught is the best way to blunt its impact.
The other thing we ought to consider, particularly those of you who live in districts where members are so-called “blue dog Democrats” is that you have a similar opportunity. In fact, there’s nothing that says a Democrat shouldn’t have to answer your pointed questions about a gun control agenda, and if the members’ answers are asinine, there’s no reason they shouldn’t get a verbal dose of your ire. After the left got pasted with the negative coverage from town-hall meetings in the summer of 2009, they immediately recognized the value of the tactic and began to try to turn tables on the Republicans. They met with mixed results, but they haven’t given up, and on an issue so fundamental to the political divide in this country, you can bet they will be putting maximum effort into their propaganda operations. You shouldn’t permit it, and only your presence at such events offers the chance to deny them their propaganda victories.
Expect them to go so far as to haul out children, and tempt you to “boo” little kids asking their congressional members a question about school shootings. I’m telling you that the left will stoop that far, and if any Republican member thinks he or she may be unable to withstand such tactics, they ought to quit and go home. Again, the members must be forewarned, and prepared to answer carefully and respectfully, and the way we can blunt such things is not to jeer children who have obviously been put up to this garbage, but to cheer the members who manage to fetch a proper response from the pits of their bellies.
Of course, Obama won’t stop with these sorts of tactics, but given his predilection for conflict engineering, you should expect the worst. To pretend that liberty is not under siege in America is a dangerous self-delusion we cannot afford, but there is nothing yet etched in stone that demands our capitulation, and it’s time we began to make our presence felt once again. Obama will not cease, so it must be accepted from this moment forth that we will need to man the ramparts of freedom from now until he leaves office. We must prepare Republicans for the onslaught lest they surrender liberty on our behalf.
Naturally, gun control is far from all that is on Barack Obama’s agenda, as he is still seeking some kind of comprehensive immigration reform that will doubtless consist of amnesty, however they will disguise it. As you know, he’s already taken a number of measures through the use of executive orders in a constitutionally questionable fashion, but now he wants to cement this into law so that a future President couldn’t just as easily undo it. For those who come to think of this as one of the issues where Republicans must modify their position in adjustment for changing demographics, I’d beg you to reconsider. Many of the people presumed to be the target of this legislation are in fact opposed to it. What conservatives must by now recognize is that attempting to pander on this issue is more likely to lose them support than to gain any.
Once again, the media will be compliant, and since the RINO wing of the party is much in favor of this, there may be no way to stop an aggregation of liberal Republicans and the Democrats in Congress from pushing legislation through in the same manner as the fiscal cliff deal was passed. As all of this goes on, we’re hurdling toward another moment for choosing, when Republicans will be compelled to decide whether to stand on principle or abandon them over the Debt Ceiling. There are already many rumblings suggesting the leadership is looking at surrendering on this issue again, and if so, it will mark the death of a viable Republican majority in the House, at least with the current cast of characters. Obama knows this, and will push the House Republicans to a sudden fracture.
Part of Obama’s tactic is to carry on as if he has every advantage, and to pretend as though he’s winning every argument, but whatever the weak-kneed Republicans in the House may do, you mustn’t concede the point. If true character is revealed in moments of crisis, may we find the best within us now, for America is slipping into a deepening crisis, but if it is to be saved, it will be done by the tireless exertions of patriots who will not permit themselves to fail. Obama will now raise the stakes, and we must contest this all the next four years with a resolve that would make our founding fathers proud. We mustn’t permit the greatest country mankind has ever known to slip easily through our fingers. It’s for all the marbles now, and anything less than our best effort may well end in disaster.
Obama’s preparing. Are you?
