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My Response to Senator Rubio: Not Good Enough

Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013

The Hard Sell

On Tuesday, FoxNews published an op-ed by Senator Marco Rubio(R-FL) discussing his views on immigration.  I have some thoughts on what Senator Rubio has discussed, and I find some of his article misleading and disappointing.  Rather than simply summarize his column, I am providing a link to its full text as well as taking it on, point-by-point here. The article is entitled Here’s the Truth About My Plan for Immigration Reform, and I suppose I could start with the title: Senator Rubio’s column does much to characterize his plan in a generous light, but those characterizations do not seem to match the bill’s substance. He opens:

“Americans believe in the value of immigration. We are the most generous nation on earth to immigrants, allowing over one million people a year to come here legally. They come here in pursuit of what we recognize as the American dream – the chance to live in freedom and have the opportunity to work hard to make a better life for themselves and their families.”

Like Senator Rubio, and most Americans, I too believe in the value of immigration.  My own wife is an immigrant, as were my grandparents and great-grandparents.  The United States is the most generous nation on Earth toward immigrants, but this may be part of the problem.  Sometimes, our naive generosity leads to policies that permit people who have malevolent designs land on our shores.  Not all native-born Americans recognize the American dream, much as they might like to, in part because they are forced to carry the burdens of politicians’ generosity with the public treasury.  The chance to live in freedom is a glorious thing, but I suspect that if one were to survey immigrants who have come here legally over the last three decades, liberty is in marked decline in part because our immigration policies have and continue to inflict a serious burden on the American people.  It is the job of Senator Rubio and his cohorts to explain why Americans ought to bear more burdens on the behalf of immigrants. Such explanations should come in terms of concrete legislative language rather than flowery prose. Senator Rubio continues:

“The problem is that our legal immigration system has been broken for decades. It has enabled 11 million people to come here illegally or overstay visas. It is a bureaucratic and inefficient system that does not address the needs of our economy.

All this has further deepened the American people’s mistrust in the ability of their government to perform basic functions.”

Our legal immigration system has been broken for decades. It is not, however, the laws that are malfunctioning, but instead the bureaucracy that is entrusted with executing them. There are only 11-20 million illegal immigrants because this government has taken no concrete steps to enforce the laws already on the books. To the contrary, this president and his predecessors have intentionally undermined those laws, or in the case of the current president, actively set out to ignore them by issuing orders preventing their enforcement.  The purpose of the immigration system is not to address the needs of the economy.  Its purposes are to serve the needs of the nation in all aspects, not merely economic, but also security, cultural, and moral.  Senator Rubio seems focused on the economic aspects at the expense of even our national security, much as the recent attacks in Boston demonstrate.  That our current system permitted those two to gain entry to the nation and to remain is a damning rebuke of our current system, but unfortunately, because Sen. Rubio’s bill is more focused on economics than on security, this is not likely to be addressed by his bill. Sen. Rubio warns us:

“Leaving in place a broken immigration system -– and the millions of people whose identities are a mystery to us –- is simply not an acceptable option. This must be fixed.”

Our current immigration system is broken, but what is more broken is our immigration enforcement systems.  As examples in opposition to Senator Rubio’s claim, the Tsarnaev brothers were legally in the country and we knew who they were.  The 9/11 hijackers were legally in this country and we knew who they were.  It is not merely the identities of illegal aliens that is a problem, but it is critical to remember it is a separate problem from legal visitors who overstay visas, or legal immigrants who are permitted to stay despite convictions for crimes and applications to welfare systems.  The problems born of the bureaucracy are clear, but they are separate and apart from the conscious decisions by those responsible for carrying our laws into execution who for whatever reasons or pretenses simply fail or even refuse to do so.  Senator Rubio’s bill does absolutely nothing to address a bureaucracy and an executive branch that refuses to carry out the law.

“That is why I am advocating for securing our borders, improving enforcement, modernizing our legal immigration system and changing it so that it prioritizes welcoming people to the U.S. based on skills, not just on whether they have a family member already living here.”

Senator Rubio says he is for securing our borders and improving enforcement.  If I take that on faith, let me suggest that the Senator could do a good deal to remedy the distrust he laments by taking these steps first.  As in medicine, when addressing something one claims is an emergency, one must evaluate the problem.  We cannot assess the true scope of the problem until there has been a good faith effort on behalf of the United States Federal Government to improve enforcement and to secure our borders.  Otherwise, what Senator Rubio herein promises is a preposterous reiteration of existing law that condenses to the sentiment: “We are going to pass a law to tell our government to more forcefully enforce existing law.” This is an absurd proposal, inasmuch as a government that cannot be entrusted to enforce existing law certainly cannot be entrusted to enforce a more stringent one.  It’s akin to claiming, “OK, well, we’re really, really serious this time.”  As much as anybody, I think immigration ought to include certain tests as to what skills a person brings to the game, but is Senator Rubio seriously suggesting that people from India are less-skilled than those from Central and South America?

Senator Rubio continues, ticking off a laundry list of measures:

“And that is why I support a process to identify and register those who are here illegally. They will have to submit biometric data in order to pass multiple national security and criminal background checks, pay $2,000 in fines, pay taxes, and learn English and American civics. They won’t be able to get any federal benefits like welfare or ObamaCare.

Fines?  Most of the people immigrating to this country can’t afford $2.00 in fines, much less $2000.00. Will there be waivers for the fines?  Will President Obama simply sign an extra-statutory waiver to fines, like he did with Obama-care?

“Before they can even apply to become permanent residents, they will have to wait at least ten years. They will have to get in line behind those who are trying to come the right way.”

Why should they be permitted into line at all? After violating the laws of the United States, why aren’t they prohibited? More, what is the real chance that somebody who is told they won’t get permanent resident status for at least ten years deciding voluntarily to “step out of the shadows” and be liable for fines and a ten year wait?

“They will have to wait until we have a system in place to prevent illegal immigrants from being hired.”

What will make them wait?  The same farcical enforcement exhibited by the Obama Administration?

“They will have to wait until we have a system in place to track people who overstay their visas.”

People who overstay their visas?  Those are people who started out with legal status, having arrived here legally. That’s an entirely different law enforcement problem from the immigrant who had sneaked into the country in disregard of our laws from the outset.

“And they will have to wait until we implement plans to spend at least $5.5 billion dollars to secure the border through more border patrol officers, more technology and more fencing.”

We’ve been promised all of this before.  In 1986, and several times since, we’ve been promised all sorts of improvements, and yet despite a mass amnesty in 1986, the Federal Government has managed to let another 11-20 million people come into the country. The truth is that the number may be even higher, but we can’t know, since in 1986, and all the years since, this government has not kept its promises.  What Senator Rubio here offers is another promise.  I’m afraid that I must insist that government finally fulfill its past promises before we consider any more, in the name of decency, and in the name of holding my government to its word.

“I thought long and hard before taking on this issue. I understand how divisive it can be. I’ve seen how the left has used it to accuse opponents of their version of reform of being bigots and racists. And I would much rather be having a debate on the more fundamental ways we can grow our economy and get our debt and spending under control. But with or without us, the president and the Democrats who control the Senate were going to bring this issue up.”

Sadly, even Senator Rubio’s spokesman uses the language of division. As many noted on Monday, your own spokesman, Mr. Conant, abrasively and dishonestly compared the status of immigrants to that of slaves.  Is the Senator seriously suggesting that his spokesman is a leftist, or only that his spokesman has resorted to the dishonest tactics of the left? The President and his friends in the Senate do not control the House, so that any such bill could be stopped there if Republicans weren’t insisting on shoving bad legislation down the throats of an unwilling American people.

“And I believe conservatives need to fight for the ideas and policies we believe are critical to fixing our immigration system.”

I agree that conservatives need to fight for the ideas and policies that are critical to fixing our immigration system, but they must be the right ideas, and they must conform to conservative principles and the rule of law.  Sadly, Senator Rubio’s proposal does no such thing. I am anxious for the day when we can eliminate undue burdens inflicted on lawful immigrants, but I will not flex or move so much as one inch on the legal liabilities of those who have already broken the laws of our country. More, before I will accept any movement on this, there must be a good faith enforcement of the laws of our nation, and a keeping of promises already made.

“The opponents of reform raise important points about not rewarding the violation of the law. I, too, have felt the frustration many feel that our nation’s generosity has been taken advantage of by some.”

Indeed.

“But policy-making is about solving problems. And to pick the right solution, you have to weigh the realistic alternatives. Deporting all illegal immigrants is not a practical solution. But ignoring the fact that they are here is just as bad.”

Are we to take from this that while the Senator finds those points raised by opponents to be important, he’s perfectly willing to dismiss them?  One needn’t talk dismissively of the idea of deporting all illegal aliens immediately and at once, but one must explain why a good faith effort isn’t being made to deport as many of them as reasonably possible.  I have tired of this dismissive approach to the issue as expressed here by Senator Rubio and some others, who derisively suggest that we cannot deport all of them.  The country that launched three men to the moon cannot deport people illegally in the country?  Preposterous!  The country that invented the Atom-Bomb cannot deport people who have come into the country illegally? Nonsense.   Nobody expects the US Government to flip a switch and instantaneously corral 11-20 million people, pushing them out of the country the next day, but if there are 11-20 million of them, it shouldn’t be too hard to find one-tenth of them.  This insulting line of dismissal is one of the reasons there is a distrust between the American people and their government on this issue, a distrust Senator Rubio laments, but herein promotes. Who has been ignoring the fact that they are here?  The American people are too well aware of the presence of millions of illegals, because while they allegedly hide in the shadows, they seem to fill our emergency rooms and our schools and our courtrooms.  Who is ignoring it?  The American people, or their government?

“For example, passing a law that only focuses on modernization and enforcement and leaves for another day the issue of those here illegally is not a good idea. Because as the enforcement measures kick in, millions of people living here illegally will be unable to work and provide for themselves and their families. The resulting humanitarian impact will then force us to scramble to address it. It is better to address it now as part of an orderly and measured process.”

Again, this expectation that we will force 11-20 million people to pack their bags in one day is preposterous.  Can we not begin with a somewhat less ambitious number and work our way up?  No, you see, the Senator is concerned first and foremost with the economic impact on the nation, and businesses that employ illegals may be hampered if they cannot continue.  Welfare workers would have less to do, and therefore justification for their jobs. Senator Rubio should not take such liberties in assuming that we are so desperately stupid and childish as to believe enforcement could come at once and immediately in complete perfection.

“The only solution I know that can work is to reform legal immigration in a way that is good for the economy, do everything we can to secure the border, and allow illegal immigrants to eventually earn permanent residency by passing background checks, paying a fine, learning English and waiting at the back of the line for at least 10 years, at the same time that border security and enforcement measures are put in place to prevent this problem from happening again.”

Again with the economy?  I have news for Senator Rubio: The economy is doing poorly already. The easiest improvement to the economy by virtue of our immigration policy is to be gained by deporting as many as we can, and preventing those here from making use of our welfare state.  That would address many issues, including our deficit and exploding national debt. The benefits to our economy and to our fiscal condition would be immediate.

“The bill I helped write is a good starting point, but it is not a take it or leave it proposition. I am open to any ideas others may have on how to do this, and I’ve been listening to the legitimate concerns people have raised with the expectation that we will be able to improve the bill as this debate continues.”

I am glad that Senator Rubio views this law as a proposal open to amendment and revision.  If he’s serious, he could scrap the 800-plus page bill and offer a simpler one, as an act of good faith on the part of the United States Government keeping its past promises to its citizens.  He can draft a resolution stating that before any easing of immigration requirements can commence, the current laws of the United States must be in full force for not less than five years, at which time the American people can re-evaluate the government’s efforts to earnestly enforce the law and secure our border.  In short, get back to us when you show you can enforce the current law, a law you claim is not even as stringent as your new proposal.  If the new law is so much tougher, it should be a simple matter indeed to merely enforce current law.

“We must do something to end today’s de facto amnesty, and conservative Republicans should lead on this issue. Because without conservatives at the table and in the fight, we are ceding this issue to President Obama and his allies in Congress. And as the last four years have proven, that is never a good idea.”

Senator Rubio should grasp that conservatives have no need or reason to come to a table to negotiate in good faith when past promises have been broken and previous laws ignored.  If the Senator is serious about his concerns regarding the prospective actions of President Obama, he should surely join in the open opposition to the President and his allies in Congress.  Perhaps rather than preach to conservatives as to how they must accept the “inevitable,” Senator Rubio could instead join with other senators in sufficient numbers to prevent its inevitability.  I recognize the fact that Senator Rubio has worked hard at pushing this legislation, but given what we’ve learned about the concrete legislative language in this bill, he should perhaps consider spending more time on the bill’s reformulation than on salesmanship.  Sufficiently addressing the former would certainly ease the chore that will be the latter.  It is on this basis that I oppose this bill, because if a serious proposal were brought forward that would address the concerns of conservatives, complying with their cherished principles without dismissively deriding them as unrealistic, conservatives might well go along.  Until then, I must respectfully disagree with the Senator’s bill. Simply put, it’s not good enough.

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Posted in Conservatism, Featured, Illegal Immigration, Immigration, Law, News, Politics | 3 Comments »

The Dishonesty of the Gang of Eight

Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013

Water Carrier?

Breitbart is carrying informative stories on the bogus “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” bill that is being pushed by the “Gang of Eight” senators.  I would urge readers to pay close attention to Breitbart.com for more news on the issue.  Byron York of the Examiner is also doing fantastic work exposing the gaping holes in this bill.  Breitbart’s William Bigelow has revealed another fatal flaw in the supposed reforms offered by the Rubio-Schumer/Gang-of-Eight bill that will leave a giant opening for the administration to do absolutely nothing in enforcing the allegedly strict measures contained in the new law.  As reported by the Byron York, via the Examiner.com, the feature of the bill described by Marco Rubio on Mark Levin’s show last week that would create a commission including the four border-state governors is nothing less than a sham.  There are no teeth to the provision, and no means by which to guarantee that provided there are recommendations by a commission of four governors, but also six bureaucrats selected by the President, any of these recommendations would see the light of day.  York explains:

“It sounded tough, intended to convince skeptical conservatives that reform would be based on stringent border security.  But as it turns out, the structure Gang sources described is simply not in the bill.”

York continues:

“In the legislation, the Commission would be formed if the Secretary of Homeland Security “certifies that the Department has not achieved effective control in all high-risk border sectors during any fiscal year beginning from the date that is five years after the enactment of this Act.” The Commission’s “primary responsibility,” according to the bill, “shall be making recommendations to the President, the Secretary, and Congress on policies to achieve and maintain the border security goal” of 100 percent surveillance and 90 percent apprehension.  The Commission will have six months to write a report “setting forth specific recommendations for policies for achieving and maintaining the border security goals [specified in the bill].”  That report shall contain, according to the bill, “recommendations for the personnel, infrastructure, technology, and other resources required to achieve and maintain [those goals].””

As if this isn’t bad enough, York then delivers what should be the final nail in the coffin of this horrible legislation:

“The bill requires that the head of the Government Accountability Office then review the report to determine whether the Commission’s recommendations are likely to work and what they will cost.  And then — the process stops.  “The Commission shall terminate 30 days after the date on which the report is submitted,” says the bill.

“There is nothing about the Commission going from “being an advisory panel to a policy-making one.”  The strict trigger that Gang sources advertised as being in the bill just isn’t there.

“As far as the “money set aside in escrow” for the Commission and its enforcement plan, the bill specifies that $2 billion “shall be made available” to the Secretary of Homeland Security “to carry out programs, projects, and activities recommended by the Commission.”  It is not clear whether there is any directive for the Secretary to actually do anything.”(emphasis added)

What this all means is that when Marco Rubio appeared on Mark Levin’s show on Wednesday of last week to explain the bill, he misled the audience and presumably the host. Levin asked tough questions despite being friendly with the Senator, but it seems that Senator Rubio “dissembled” a bit on some of the details.  The Daily Caller quotes Rubio from his appearance on Dr. Levin’s show:

“If, in five years, the plan has not reached 100 percent awareness and 90 percent apprehension, the Department of Homeland Security … will lose control of the issue and it will be turned over to the border governors to finish the job …. which is not a Washington commission, made up of congressmen or bureaucrats.  It’s largely led by the border state governors, who have a vested local interest in ensuring that that border is secure … and there’s money set aside in the bill for them to do it.” [Emphasis added]

You can listen to the audio of the segment here, from Mark Levin’s Audio Rewind:

Alternative content

Unfortunately, as the Daily Caller goes on to detail, this is a bit less than fully honest:

“True, the bill does create a $2B pot of money for the DHS to use to carry out the commission’s recommendations–but there’s nothing that compels the DHS to actually spend it on all of them, or any of them, let alone to actually achieve the “90 percent apprehension” goal.

“Nor, if the goal isn’t reached, does the bill delay the issuance of green cards to the already-legalized former illegals (as Rubio at one point seems to suggest to Levin).

“Oh, and the commission isn’t “made up of the governors” of the border states–they only control four of the 10 commission seats. The other six are “Washington” appointments (see pages 14-15)

“Aside from those things, everything Rubio said about the commission was true.”

Whether the statements of Senator Rubio were intentionally misleading, or whether he is simply being led around by the nose by staff or other senators on the plain language of the bill, what is deeply troubling is that by appearing on the Mark Levin Show, repeating falsehoods(whether or not he knew them to be falsehoods,) Senator Rubio has done much to contribute to the lack of ill will and distrust over this legislation.  Whatever other supposed virtues this legislation may have, it’s wrecked by the propaganda being spread in this instance by Senator Rubio.

As this goes on, Rubio’s own spokesman, Alex Conant, is on Twitter comparing immigrants, legal and illegal, to slaves, H/T Twitchy:

Alex Conant @AlexConant

@conncarroll We haven’t had a cohort of people living permanently in US without full rights of citizenship since slavery.

If this is the attitude of Rubio’s spokesman, one must wonder about the strategy being employed by Rubio. The claim that immigrant are akin to slaves is a ridiculous notion, and frankly, Rubio should fire Conant.  It leaves open the question as to whether Senator Rubio might endorse such notions, and while I doubt that to be the case, it won’t help the Senator’s cause. Likewise, it isn’t helpful when one sees a conservative senator going around arm-in-arm with Charles “Chuck-U” Schumer(D-NY,) one has every reason to believe that Rubio may have relied on the characterization of the bill provided by the likes of Schumer.  I wonder if Rubio isn’t being made a patsy, but then again, I’m not sure it matters because there is something disturbing about a purportedly “conservative” senator relying on the explanations of the legislation of anybody.  Why isn’t he reading the language?

Schumer has taken a slightly different approach, going on the offense and claiming that some would use the occasion of the Boston Marathon Bombing to stall or obstruct the Immigration Reform legislation.  I must say that given the disclosures about the actual provisions of the bill revealed over the last week, I sincerely hope some conservative senators will do precisely that.  It makes no sense to pretend that this ridiculous immigration bill will accomplish anything but to make our nation less secure, and the Boston bombing clearly exposes that for the average citizen. The dishonesty being employed by proponents of this legislation is very much like an Obama campaign, and that’s all the more despicable when you think that a rising star in the Republican party may have diminished himself into nothing more than a flash in the pan.  That’s a sad prospect, one that could be headed-off if these politicians would simply read the legislation they’re advocating.  Senator Rubio owes us an explanation for the incomprehensibly misleading statements made on Levin’s show, but one probably won’t be forthcoming.  Draw your own conclusions as to the reason(s).


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Posted in audio, Conservatism, Featured, Illegal Immigration, Immigration, Mark Levin, Politics | 1 Comment »

Sarah Palin at CPAC: “We’re Here to Rebuild a Country”

Saturday, March 16th, 2013

Rebuilding a Country

After a string of speakers this week who hope one day to be President of the United States, Sarah Palin spoke to a packed house as she explained her vision of the future, and also what conservatives must do to regain electoral success.  She was introduced by Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who had been the keynote speaker.  Of all the rhetoric to come out of CPAC 2013, it will be this speech that is remembered.  Governor Palin reminded conservatives that it is their principles they must abide, and not the political winds of the day, but she also cautioned conservatives to speak to a broader audience, instead of merely preaching to the choir. She also pointed out that rather than abandoning their principles, conservatives should abandon the consultancy that has led the party to so many defeats.  As has always been the case, Governor Palin energized the crowd.  At a time when conservatives are still reeling from Obama’s re-election, her speech laid out the only rational course conservatives can take in order to rebuild the country.  Here’s the video:

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Posted in Conservatism, Featured, News, Politics, Sarah Palin, video | 5 Comments »

The Conservative Savior-Trap

Monday, February 18th, 2013

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.

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Looking for Leadership in All the Wrong Places?

Monday, February 18th, 2013

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.

Note: Mr. L also had some words to say on this subject.

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Posted in Activism, Conservatism, Featured, Healthcare, Media, News, Politics | 5 Comments »

Establishment GOP Abusers and Their Willing Victims

Saturday, February 9th, 2013

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.

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Posted in Activism, audio, Conservatism, Featured, GOP Establishment, Mark Levin, Politics, Tokyo Rove | 5 Comments »

The Republican Conspiracy to Defeat Conservatives

Thursday, February 7th, 2013

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.

 

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Posted in Activism, Conservatism, Featured, GOP Establishment, News, Politics | 2 Comments »

Karl Rove Still Trying to Decide for Conservatives

Wednesday, February 6th, 2013

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:

  1. Who decides what constitutes the “most conservative?”  According to whose standard?  Karl Rove’s?
  2. Who decides who is able to win?  According to whose calculations? Karl Rove’s?
  3. What do we know about Mr. Rove’s success rate in his selections of candidates?

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.

 

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Posted in Activism, Conservatism, Featured, GOP Establishment, Mark Levin, News, Politics, Tea Party, video | Comments Closed

History Repeats as GOP Establishment Seeks Unity With Democrats…Again

Wednesday, February 6th, 2013

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.”

 

 

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The Fantastic Delusion of Fiscal Conservatism Absent Social Conservatism

Monday, February 4th, 2013

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.

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Truth in Advertising? Rove Creates “Conservative Victory Project”

Sunday, February 3rd, 2013

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.

 

 

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Poll Reveals GOP Desire to Justify Ditching “Social Issues”

Sunday, January 27th, 2013

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:

  1. Shall we abandon fiscal issues like taxes, government spending, and the debt?
  2. Shall we abandon economic issues, like unemployment, housing, and high energy prices?
  3. Shall we abandon National Security issues, like terrorism, foreign policy, and national defense?
  4. Or finally, shall we abandon Social issues, like abortion and family values?

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.

 

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NY Times Expresses “Concern” for GOP by Trashing Ted Cruz

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2013

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.

 

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Class in Session: Mark Levin Declares RINO-ism Dead

Wednesday, January 23rd, 2013

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:

Alternative content


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.

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The Rise of the Mini-Dems

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013

Miniature Look-Alike

In the ruinous ashes of Republican defeat at the hands of Barack Obama, a number of Republicans have popped-up in media to dutifully serve the narrative that the election had been the fault of conservatives.  Not only is this preposterous conclusion untrue, but also a proxy for any actual examination of why Republicans lost in 2012.  One of the favored approaches of these critics is to suggest that if conservatives wouldn’t be, well… so darned conservative, there’s some chance Republicans could have won.  One writer has even fashioned a new term to apply to staunch conservatives, but it’s not hard to notice that by the connotations of his term, he doesn’t mean to win them over.  James Arlandson, writing in the American Thinker, has coined a new term for most of you and I, and I don’t believe he intends flattery, although the combative part of me likes the label even if inaccurate.  He suggests we “might be Hyper-conservatives if…” and in the form of Jeff Foxworthy, goes on to list a number of conditions he believes characterizes the class.  Myself, I’ve devised a different label for folks like Arlandson because I believe it captures the essence and spirit of their fundamental philosophical frailties, to the extent they adhere to any ideology at all. These philosophically smallish Republicans would honestly make better “Mini-Dems.”

Arlandson’s approach to the matter is straightforward, if a bit muddled.  He alleges that there are certain aspects of some in the conservative wing of the general Republican universe that must disqualify their opinions because he believes certain positions are beyond the pale.  He lists a number of these conditions, and right off the top, he asserts a falsehood without substantiation. What makes it interesting is his use of a term to describe those who vote libertarian.  We’ve heard this term before, and it’s another I’m not afraid to wear. Arlandson says those who wish to eliminate too much government too quickly(while bothering to define neither scale) are “too severe.”  The only other person I know who in recent memory used that term to describe conservatism was Mitt Romney, describing himself, for Pete’s sake.

He then insists that we might be hyper-conservatives if we cry “third party” every time we don’t get our way.  Actually, I haven’t cried “third party” every time, but only when the party completely undercuts its purported principles for the sake of political expediency, an approach Mr. Arlandson would seem to approve.  The fact that these betrayals are happening with increasing regularity plays no role in his formulation.  His claim is that “grownup conservatives” (ostensibly such as he) “must be willing to suck it up and fight harder for the (imperfect) brand that has the best chance of winning — R.”  Let us imagine we take his advice.  The imperfect brand with the best chance of winning actually won, with the other imperfect brand following his advice.   Hint to Mr. Arlandson: That’s a “D” – Not an “R.”

He argues that we might be hyper-conservatives if… “[We] refuse to work with Dems(even after [we] lose an election.)”  Exactly what work would Mr. Arlandson suggest we take up with the Dems?  Shall we help them ban semi-automatic firearms?  Shall we work with them to more rapidly bankrupt the country(an object Republicans in DC have apparently taken up?)  Shall we stand by and watch the Democrats rape, pillage and burn, or does the mere suggestion of the truth of the situation brand me irrevocably as a “hyper-conservative?” I know one he intends, but he gets to that in a separate line-item, and so shall we.

Let’s apply his faulty strategy to any other human endeavor in which one side wins and the other sides loses.  In war, should we now work with al-Qaeda, since its apparent that despite more than a decade of conflict, our current administration seems committed to failure?  Too late, the President Arlandson suggests we’re no longer to substantially oppose has already done that.  Even in sport, is a beaten football team supposed to work with its rival?  Should a defeated boxer pummel himself in order to work with his opponent? I’m trying to understand the mentality that permits one to believe any of that is possible without simply joining the other team, but I think Mr. Arlandson is fairly-well ahead of me on that score.  This serves as the unmistakable clarion call of an approaching Mini-Dem.

He argues that if we fantasize about shredding or scrapping the school lunch program, we might be hyper-conservatives.  I suppose that cinches the matter, and I should confess, because if this is the standard, I am guilty as charged, and this issue must serve as my hyper-conservative bona fides.  I would also suggest that this is the sort of issue where the Mini-Dem is likewise exposed.  You see, I may be hyper-conservative, but I also know that the ultimate aim of any such program must be the intent to become obsolete by virtue of a growing prosperity, a quantity and quality that will remain out of our reach so long as we continue to fund dependency.  While Arlandson likes to wave Ronald Reagan around with zest, here he instead peddles “compassionate conservatism,” a theory that when turned to practice actually demonstrates neither.  As he decries those of us who would cut government programs “like drunken lumberjacks,” I’m looking around for some whiskey, and where did that blue ox run off to?  It seems Mr. Arlandson has forgotten that Reagan maxim that we should measure compassion not by how many are on government programs, but instead by how many no longer need them.

Naturally, it didn’t take long for him to get around to the discussion of immigration.  After all, it’s a good opportunity to work with Democrats who will be the primary beneficiaries of so-called “comprehensive immigration reform.”  Those who want illegals deported are apparently some sort of back-woods rednecks right out of the script of The Deliverance, at least where Arlandson is concerned.  Says he:

“Honestly, I would self-deport from your America if she were ever made in your image. The DNC is gleeful.”

Honestly, I too would be gleeful at the prospect of your self-deportation, Mr. Arlandson.  He offers us sage counsel, as if we’re too stupid to know it, or too lacking in compassion to care, chiding us:

“Immigrants, even illegal ones, are humans.  Never forget that.”

If there’s one thing a hyper-conservative hates, it’s to be the object of condescension by a Mini-Dem, and here, Mr. Arlandson goes too far.  My wife happens to be an immigrant.  I know everything I need to know about the issue, and I am well aware of the hurdles, the obstacles, and the myriad difficulties, but guess what?  None of that stopped me or my wife from observing the law. Put another way Mr. Arlandson, stuff it. How’s that for hyper-conservatism?

He apparently supports the made-up holiday Kwanzaa.  Why should I care?  In his view, admitting the entirely contrived nature of the holiday is to express some part of that quality that Colin Powell would term “a dark vein of intolerance.”  I suppose he needs to take this complaint up with Ann Coulter who famously dislikes the holiday, if she’s not too busy tying Chris Christie’s shoes. This is one more glaring reason that our country should never be entrusted to Mini-Dems, any more than it should be left to the mercy of the full-size imbeciles.  They’ll accept any absurdity in order to appease others, particularly if those others comprise a significant voting bloc that Republicans will never likely capture.

He says hyper-conservatives get side-tracked too easily by hobbyhorses. Like berating conservatives critical of Kwanzaa?  One example he offers is the desire among many conservatives and libertarians to eliminate the Federal Reserve.  He dismisses the notion with a thoughtful and retrospective view of the history and function of the Federal Reserve by simply saying:

“Ain’t gonna happen.”

That’s a nifty assertion, but let me offer a different view to Mr. Arlandson, although he may well reject it as the product of hyper-conservatism:  Nothing made by men lasts forever, so that whether it happens as a result of a seemingly inevitable monetary collapse birthed by that very institution, or instead because the United States of America ceases to exist as a political subdivision on this Earth, it most certainly will happen at some point whether you like it or not.  The question is not “if the Fed will die,” but instead “when,” and perhaps also “how.”  I love it when people like Arlandson deify themselves and make such preposterous declarations, as if they had any power whatever to make it come out the way they dictate.  It’s another tell-tale sign of a Mini-Dem. Apparently unhappy with their station in life as the weaker ideological sister to either left or right, they tend toward grand pronouncements easily debunked by adolescent logicians.    Notice, however, that Arlandson does not answer whether the Federal Reserve ought to exist, or whether it is doing more harm than good, instead merely asserting that it does exist, and on such basis must remain in perpetuity, or perhaps at least until he gets tired of it.  Naturally, he takes on those who get caught up by media questions about the age of the Earth, as though it had been a perfectly settled matter, but he is unable to acknowledge that the sun will burn out, the world will end, the United States will dissolve, and the Federal Reserve system will come to an end.  Apart from the direct intervention of God, these things will all come to pass, but while He might have some interest in the first two events, I suspect the Almighty isn’t spending much of His infinite time pondering the possibility of life on Earth without the Federal Reserve.

Arlandson goes on a bit more, about “birthers” and rape, and the age of the Earth, along with other pressing issues to conservatism, in each revealing his general competence for the description of Mini-Dem.  Like so many Mini-Dems, he wields Ronald Reagan in selective references like a sword, much like full-size Democrats do, but he is careful to remember only that much of “the Gipper” that will buttress his points, but no more.  He quite predictably flees to that age-old taunt about “hyper-conservatives” being too “simplistic.” What this really denotes, as ever, is a willingness to forgo discussions of precise right and wrong; simple truth and falsehood; moral white and black.   This is the signature cop-out of a Mini-Dem, because what they assert is that things are not so simple as to be reduced to a string of binary choices and decisions, though every computer on the planet proves otherwise.  It’s the same old dodge with the same old flavor:  Create gray areas to obscure one’s [intended]wrongdoing.

As a matter of clean-up then, I suppose it’s time to explain what I mean by “Mini-Dem,” and therefore permit you to decide for yourselves whether Mr. Arlandson fits the description:

A “Mini-Dem” is Republican who never has a single big idea.  Big ideas are too risky for Mini-Dems, because the larger (and smaller) part of what defines them as such is their abiding lack of political courage. They refuse to confront difficult challenges because it’s so much easier to surrender.  To conservatism?  No, never.  To Democrats?  Who else?  Mini-Dems would rather join with Democrats and assist their victory than bend their will to conservatism, because they possess the imbecilic need of a teenager to be accepted by the crowd, while actual conservatives realize that saying “no” is necessary job of responsible adults.  Part of the problem may owe to their conception of political courage, in Mini-Dem terms defined by criticizing conservatism to the endless glee of the left-wing media.

Theirs is the position of interminable surrender.  Who wants to go through all that fighting, and after all, “can’t we just get along?” It’s not that they never contemplate a fight, but instead that at the first imagined spilling of political blood, they go running of in search of another excuse for their cowardice. It’s always “we’ll get’em next time,” but when it’s this time, the “getting’em” is always delayed until next time. Next time never comes.  Ever.  If you want to see Mr. Arlandson’s prescribed approach in action, watch the abandonment of all reason and principle by the House Republicans over the Debt Ceiling.  Last time, they said “next time,” but when the next time came, they said again “next time, not this time.”  Do you notice the pattern?  They talk about conservatism, but when the time demands conservatism in practice, it’s always next time.  My own conclusion is that this owes to small hearts, small minds, weak constitutions, and over-indulging parents.  (All right, fine, maybe not that last, but it just felt right.)  In short, they’re almost exactly like Democrats in practice, their protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.

I think that which defines the larger part of the psyche of Mini-Dems is a preternatural fear of being disliked. It’s like the teenage emotional state of panic that occurs when they realize everybody is looking at them as though they had the world’s largest zits on the ends of their noses. It’s that kind of sheer terror that reveals the Mini-Dem, and it’s another reason why we continue to lose elections.  Their panic at the embarrassment of a naturally occurring dermal disturbance sends them screaming out of the room to the roaring laughter of their peers, not because they had pimples, but because they had freaked out over them.  It makes a more solid conservative wish to grab and shake them. “Get a grip, man: Zits happen.”

The rise of the Mini-Dem was inevitable after moderate Mitt was defeated.  The idea is to excuse Mitt’s moderate or liberal positions, as possible reasons for his loss.  The problem is that these had been most of the cause, but just as Mitt refused to fight over the Benghazi issue after Candy Crowley flat-out lied to the debate audience, this lack of combativeness typifies the Mini-Dem.  We mustn’t have a big and ugly spectacle lest some one notice those zits on our noses, don’t you know?  Therefore, what defines the breed is an near-absolute unwillingness to stand on any principle lest they be mistaken for us.  What are we?  Apparently, we’re hyper-conservatives because we don’t fear losing much of anything save for our souls. Then we’d be Mini-Dems.

 

 

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Obama Preparing for Second Term Rampage

Monday, January 21st, 2013

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?

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Escaping The Party-Trap: The Liabilities of Low Information Republicans

Sunday, January 20th, 2013

Cheering for the Team

Rush Limbaugh has popularized the discussion of “Low Information Voters” who dutifully go to the polls on election day to throw the levers as instructed by the talking heads of the Democrat party, but the truth is that we on the so-called “right” face a similar challenge with many Republicans, who hold with that party due to tradition, momentary fad, or simply because it’s what their friends are doing.  In many cases it simply comes down to their disgust with Democrats, an understandable feeling that would drive sane people to vote for virtually anybody else.  This is all a result of what I term the party-trap, and it causes people to defend and support candidates, ideas and policies with which they would never align had they been asked to choose from an infinite range of possibilities.  This is the intention of GOP party bosses and insiders, who wish to leave you with a narrowed range of choices among which their chosen candidate will be left standing as the only “obvious” or “inevitable” choice.  They don’t mind if you see their candidate as the lesser among evils, so long as you show up and vote for them.  It is in this way that the Republican Party has gone from a mildly conservative party to a reliably liberal one, not in its speeches, but in its actual legislative and executive endeavors, but it’s only possible because we have permitted too many of our own to become Low Information Republicans.

The whole notion of party identification is to associate candidates, ideas, and policies with a party, such that if the party is seen in a favorable light by a given voter, he will tend to choose that party irrespective of the concretes involved with the specific choices at hand.  In 1994, after the Republican revolution led by Newt Gingrich, there was an entire sea-change as many long-time Democrats saw the hand-writing on the wall, resigning that party to join the Republicans.  Did they change their firmly-held beliefs overnight, or did they simply change labels according to the shifting tide in favorability in party labels?  Here in Texas, I can certainly tell you that a large number of politicians who jumped from one to the other didn’t change their ideas in the least, and we witnessed newly-minted Republicans who continued to advance policies that looked precisely like those they had advanced when they were still Democrats.  It is for this reason that I think when a politicians switches party, he or she ought to immediately face the electorate to confirm their continuance in office. It’s not that I wish to punish those politicians who have a real change of heart, rare though they may be, but that I wish all the others to face up to the electorate and explain their change, and what views they’ve adapted or changed. Otherwise, it looks a good deal like being traded from the Yankees to the Dodgers, where the only determinate factor in loyalty is the matter of who is paying the wage.

Too often, our own ostensible support is hooked into those party labels without regard to what they mean or represent. In too many instances, this is because the labels have come to mean precisely nothing.  This is how we arrive at the bizarre spectacle of Jon Huntsman Jr. seeking the nomination for President as a Republican.  Huntsman’s disagreements with the Republican Party platform are so thorough and so deep that I cannot imagine how he sees himself as even remotely eligible, but the same can be said for other liberal Republicans like Chris Christie, or Colin Powell or Jeb Bush.  These are not Republicans insofar as the party’s platform would describe one, never mind conservatives, yet these are the sorts of people who seem to crop up as our national choices, and with increasing regularity and unfailing precision, we seem always to land on the most leftward candidate that conservatives can somehow contort their intellects to support.

From there, it’s a piece of cake.  The Low Information Republicans, easily pushed by media and political strategists, go into full-throated support mode, and then there is no stopping it.  At that point, there’s such gravity in favor of the candidate that nothing short of a colossal and all-consuming scandal can stop them.  In 2012, I watched people I had regarded as conservatives based on their prior positions go into defensive mode on behalf of Romney-care.  Ladies and gentlemen, there is nothing about Obama-care’s pilot program in Massachusetts to defend, particularly if you’re even vaguely conservative.  I listened to self-described “conservative Republicans” explain to the electorate with unabashed loyalty to the party, but not their purported principles that Mitt Romney’s more liberal decisions taken as governor owed only to the liberal environment in which he was operating, as though this would be some sort of assurance that once he landed in that statist Mecca that is Washington DC, he would somehow there find reformation to something approximating conservatism.  It was gob-smacking.  Worse, all through the country among Low Information Republicans, I watched as people desperate to unseat Barack Obama abandoned all reason and actually concocted some formula by which to call Romney a conservative!

Those of us who had thought Romney the worst possible choice (excepting only Huntsman) dutifully went to the polls with the singular motive to oust Barack Obama, but we were not fooled about who Mitt Romney was, and we certainly had no intention of carrying water for him.  In point of fact, many of us were on the fence as to whether we would vote for him at all.  I don’t believe there was more than one chance in one-thousand that Romney could defeat Obama, and I said so all through the long primary season during which he was consistently portrayed as the “inevitable nominee.”  The problem is that for Low Information Republicans, this “air of inevitability” became a sort of self-fulfilled prophecy to which at some point, most Republicans inevitably surrendered.  This is why we mustn’t adhere to the notion that to get somebody out of office is our most pressing objective.  If we had succeeded in pushing Obama out and getting Romney in, what would we have gained?  A slightly less-virulent big government?  Electoral success cannot commence with the self-deceptive idea that a candidate can win by default.

Ladies and gentlemen, if party labels are to have any meaning, the candidates, ideas, and policies of that party must be firmly rooted in some sort of ideological bedrock from which we will not retreat.  The dangerous phenomenon of Low Information Republicans must be demolished, not by name-calling or brow-beating, but by a real and thorough effort to educate our target audience.  So many who vote Republican cannot tell you why they do except in terms of their opposition to Democrats, and when left in the position of defending one of the liberal or so-called “moderate” Republicans, they engage with the same fervor as their Democrat counterparts who defend Obama, and from the exact same ideological vacuum.  Ideology is a dirty word to many, but ideology is merely an expression of the fundamental principles underlying one’s proposals.  If one cannot describe his or her ideology, they’re offering a blank slate onto which anything conceivable may be drawn, and it is by this method that the Republican Party has moved unmistakably leftward.

It’s our job to explain the ideology we conceive as being “conservative,” because left to others, the entire question will be abandoned, dismissed, and evaded in order to continue the process by which voters are subsumed into the party without any identifiable, rational cause.  This party-trap is fueled by people who have no actual interests in policy discussions, but are instead motivated by such faulty drivers as “popularity” or “prestige.”  They speak in riddle-like terminology about “compromise,” “moderation” and “flexibility” without explaining what these will mean in concrete policy implementation.  The more troubling part is that too many ostensibly on our side will accept it.   These are the same Republicans who cannot really explain why they dislike Sarah Palin, except in terms of leftist attacks in the popular media culture. They’re like the cheerleader section of the Republican Party.  They don’t know why they’re cheering, except that “their team” is involved so that whatever that team does, it must be good, right?  I think this business begins in High School, where no person would consider publicly supporting a rival team, or even contemplating the nearly unlimited alternatives.  One team.  One. That’s all they’ll permit themselves to see. It will be up to us to show them something different.

I realize that many of our Low Information Republicans are simply people who are too busy in their lives to take on much more, trying to keep businesses afloat, keeping the family farm alive, or merely concentrating on local politics where statism is likewise on the march, but the truth is that much of it is intellectual laziness predicated on the false hope that somewhere, somehow, some one else is fighting on their behalf.  You might be astonished at how many Low Information Republicans actually exist, and how dependent the GOP is upon their votes, but as you may have guessed, not nearly all of the people consumed with the idiocy in our popular culture are liberal, leftwing Democrat Low Information Voters, although admittedly, that number is embarrassingly high.  What I hope is that we who study the issues, make the arguments, and engage in the political discourse are willing to make our case, not merely to one another, and not only to our friends, but particularly to these Low Information Republicans because if we are to avert the rise of faulty candidates, we’ll need greater numbers of those who by sheer ideological immunization against them are no longer persuaded by superficial cheer-leading.

The elections season of 2014, and just beyond it, the next presidential cycle in 2016 are racing toward us, though with Obama in the driver’s seat, it seems torturous and slow. It’s time now to give some thought to where we have been racing, and and whether the lame horse that is the GOP can be rehabilitated, or instead should be put out to political pasture.  We won’t be able to accomplish either if we’re outnumbered by Low Information Republicans, but as we stumble around in search of a viable course of action, we’re in danger of being led into another losing effort, and it will be made with the voting support of those least aware of our current predicament. If we’re not careful, they will overwhelm us by the sheer force of their numbers. How many conservatives spent some of the last primary season scratching their heads over the absurd pronouncement of fellow Republicans?  If we’re to avert that sort of catastrophe, we must begin now, advancing our position by making our arguments and refusing to defend bad decisions and policies of the past on the basis of supporting the team.  One unmistakable message of the primary season of 2012 is that we ought not spend so much time worrying about Democrats’ legion of Low Information Voters.  We have enough of our own to keep us busy for a long, long time.

 

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Colin Powell’s Feckless Attacks on Conservatism

Sunday, January 13th, 2013

Voice of Reason?

The only thing worse than a has-been is one who won’t acknowledge that status and simply fade away. Former Secretary of State and general Republican malcontent Colin Powell has for two presidential election seasons endorsed Barack Obama over moderate Republicans who ought to have been to his liking. Since Powell desires nothing more than to avoid the charge of hypocrisy because he rose to prominence due in part to misguided policies of affirmative action, and since he is obsessed with maintaining his allegedly “moderate” position, I think it’s time for him to leave the Republican Party.  It’s not that I care about the Republican party so much that I desperately wish for him to leave it, as it is the fact that this ideological garbage-receptacle is hauled out by the media as some kind of authority on Republicans and conservatism, as though despite his last two endorsements, he could possibly preserve any credibility with those who fit these approximate descriptions.  Colin Powell is a fraud, but the media gives him airtime precisely because it’s his goal to damage conservatism in exchange for positive press.  In the venue that is the study of political philosophy, Colin Powell is a circus madhouse of self-contradictory posturing who provides a good deal of haughty noise but evinces no substance.

Consider this video as the latest exhibit in evidence of my thesis:

Seldom will you see aggregated in such a fashion the grotesque spectacle of a mind at war with itself.  Contrary to what some might assert, this does not make the former Secretary of State “thoughtful,” but merely muddled and confused like a football player who’s taken one-too-many shots to the head.  There is no virtue in his convoluted positions, to the degree they are discernible among the loosely connected philosophical wreckage, but let us imagine that we were to seriously consider the things this man has said, and so examine them in light of the facts.

Let us examine his claim that “there is a dark vein of intolerance in some parts of the party.”  The first “evidence” he goes out of his way to offer as evidence is a statement by Sarah Palin about President Obama’s “shucking and jiving” over Benghazi, suggesting that this was a racially-tinged statement.   Apart from the fact that Governor Palin has never exhibited the first inclination to racism, apparently, Colin Powell believes that phrase has been used exclusively to describe the behavioral pattern of blacks held in bondage during slavery, and through the pre-civil rights era.  That’s an utter falsehood, but leave it to Powell to be so racially tuned as to mind-meld with the crowd which professes these myths to our youngsters on college campuses around the country.  A “moderate Republican” such as he takes the opportunity to attack Sarah Palin for alleged racism in the party?  I think it is only through the lens of focused, narrow-minded racism that one could begin to assert such an underlying motive on her behalf due solely to the choice of that phrase. In truth, the term “shuck and jive,” despite its ancient origins, is exactly as racist in contemporary terms as the pronouncement of our President’s middle name, and for precisely the same dishonest reasons.

Three times during the course of this interview, Powell couldn’t wait to push the immigration mantra of the GOP establishment, and it boggles the mind that any person, least of all Colin Powell, doesn’t understand the grave national security risks in the continuance of our current open-borders policy.  Here is a man urging Republicans to bend to the pragmatism of changing demographics while he continues to push for acceleration in that change.  Does he seriously expect to win an argument with right-thinking people who note wryly that far more people are murdered each year by illegal immigrants than by so-called “assault weapons” since that term of weapons classification became law in 1994? [1]

The problem is that Powell isn’t satisfied with a conservative party, or one even vaguely trending in that direction.  If you listen carefully to his litany of top policy priorities, it sounds like the platform of the Democrat National Convention, circa 1992.  Health-care, global warming, immigration, education, and the whole sorry statist menu is also his agenda.  Back in the mid-nineties, I called Rush Limbaugh’s show one day to offer my opinion, since there was much talk about Colin Powell as a potential GOP candidate in the upcoming 1996 election cycle, and I asked quite bluntly: “What’s the difference between this guy and Bill Clinton?”  Rush argued that he didn’t think we could say with certainty, but if that’s so, what must we now conclude?  Apart from the fact that it has been clear for most of the last two decades that Colin Powell is a Republican in precisely the same fashion that Ted Kennedy had been a Catholic,  sharing precisely the same devotion to bedrock principles, the simple truth is that he loathes the so-called “right-wing,” which is to say: Average, everyday Americans who make the country work.

Another key to Powell’s confused philosophy is his claim that we must “help those less fortunate than us.”  Who is the “us” he describes?  I think it’s clear that he’s referencing people he perceives as well-off, so that what you have here is another appeal for higher taxes on the so-called “rich.”  What Colin Powell obviously doesn’t understand is that many people who fit that description on paper are entrepreneurs who do not have vast wealth.  Being that Powell has seldom held a non-political job since at least the 1980s, it’s easy to see how a man captive to the DC cocktail party circuit could conclude that a certain gross income equates to a significant wealth, but I know individual filers with seven-digit gross incomes that wind up living on well under six figures in order to keep the business going, since the vast majority of that revenue is plowed into paying for employees, supply vendors, and capital investments in plant and equipment.  In other words, this is much less money than a General or a Secretary of State receives, even retired.

Colin Powell speaks of a disconnect between the Republican Party and its people, and if there was one idea he conveyed with which I can whole-heartedly agree, this would be this notion of a party disconnected from its base, except that his concept of this disconnect is exactly backwards.  As expressed through his critique of so-called “birthers,” one is left with the sense that the General is accustomed to top-down organizations dictating the course and the direction without input from the poor saps below.  On the matter of the so-called “birthers,” he asked:

“Why do senior Republican leaders tolerate this kind of discussion within the party?”

General/Secretary Powell, has it occurred to you that the senior Republican leaders tried very hard to dismiss and discount the entire “birther movement?” Let us be honest shall we?

The left also calls those concerned with the eligibility of Barack Obama to the presidency “birthers,” but there is nothing inherently wrong, evil, misguided, or otherwise faulty about demanding that our politicians demonstrate their legal eligibility to office.  Why is it that Powell thinks this is somehow evidence of the great problems in the GOP?  What he ought to consider is that rather than being dismissive of the issue from the top down, had the party actually addressed the issue with diligence from the top, it would have been dispensed with in one way or another several years ago.  Instead, by acting to suppress the discussion as he insists they should (albeit apparently with insufficient vigor to suit Powell,) what happened instead was to keep the issue boiling without final resolution.

Powell is the sort of elitist who thinks that a political party is or ought to be like a military chain-of-command, but this neglects the distinctly populist view that has been the tradition of American politics since at least our founding.  The parties are conduits for the ideas and the will of their members, or at least that’s what they ought to be, and it’s the job of top party leaders to guide rank-and-file without trying to drive them like a herd, and to accept their input on the direction of the party, understanding that without them, there could be no party.  Part of what leads Powell to his mistaken conceptions of party structure is undoubtedly his military service, where one does as one is commanded, or else…  I think the bigger measure of his problem may be that he’s lived an insular existence within the Beltway of DC for thirty years, and he has come to believe that what he sees of the party in DC is representative of the party at large.  It isn’t, and it hasn’t been, despite the view one might develop on the cocktail party circuit.

Powell is a product of his political upbringing, and the pinnacle of his career’s successes came under two Presidents named Bush, but neither of them had been conservative, despite their strong inclinations to national security.  Both were Republicans of the mold to which Powell is inclined, which is to say that they remained in perpetual struggle with much of the base of their party over fiscal and social policies, because the Bush family is not comprised of conservatives with moderate leanings, but instead moderates with a bare few conservative notions.  If Powell is right about anything, it is that sense he expresses that he doesn’t belong in the Republican party, not because it has moved rightward as he asserts, but precisely because it hasn’t.  It’s because he and his ilk have moved instinctively leftward, away from the mainstream of those who consider themselves to be Republicans, never mind conservative.  Powell’s conceptualization of Romney’s 47% remarks may have been the giveaway, because Powell and his moderate friends are intent upon increasing that number given their continuing commitment to growing the welfare state.  If Republicans had a party leadership worth a tinker’s dam, they would call Powell aside and tell him to pack his bags, and move with deliberate energy to the other side of the aisle.  If this is an example of our alleged “friends” in the DC Republican elite,  truly, who needs enemies?

The one thing Powell’s interview makes plain is that he’s out of touch, and mortally so, with those who comprise the vast bulk of Republican voters, whatever their party identification.  It’s absurd to believe as Powell does that the whole of the party should rush to seek his favor.  Why should they?  What would such a surrender to his leanings gain for them?  An endorsement of Joe Biden in 2016?  Thank you, no.  I’d just as soon General/Secretary Powell depart the Republican party, or anything else even vaguely related to the concept of conservatism.  He’s not our friend, and offering him authority to speak for the Republican party merely provides him a platform from which to aggrandize himself, but nothing more.  I think we who are conservatives, and have been the lifeblood of the Republican party have had quite enough of this sort of paternalistic counseling.  Leave already, General Powell!  The elephant in this room is wearing a general’s stars, but it might do the retired Secretary of State well to understand that if the Republican party is broken, it is because he and his moderate friends have been running it for a generation or more.  Add to this his malignant misunderstanding of conservatism, and it’s well past time Powell is discharged.

 

1.]According to FBI statistics, in 2010, there were 348 murders with all rifles, which includes so-called “Assault Weapons” but also includes ordinary hunting rifles.  At that rate, it would take a decade to equal the number of murders by illegal immigrants in a single year.(click to return)

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Another Bite at the Apple: The Desperate Need for Welfare Reform

Sunday, December 2nd, 2012

Insensitive?

In the immediate aftermath of the election, I suggested to readers that the key driver in Barack Obama’s re-election was one particular sub-group of the electorate in which Romney got creamed.  I pointed to single mothers as the key group that killed any chance of a Romney victory, and the reason I suggested was simple enough to understand: “Free stuff.”  In short, this particular segment of the populace views big government as a “sugar daddy,” and by extension, it’s chief advocate, Barack Obama was the chief beneficiary of this view.  I had known that the number of programs and benefits available to women who fit that description was quite amazing, but I had no idea the extent to which this is true. The simple truth of the matter is that unless and until conservatives devise a method by which to change this formula, they are going to lose national elections.  The problem they will face in so doing is the screed of the left about a “war on women,” but apart from weak-kneed leadership, afraid of such attacks, if something doesn’t change, the country is already lost.

The following image is a chart put together by James Pethokoukis at the American Enterprise Institute, and it demonstrates how a single mother is subsidized by the state, or how Eve, once tempted from her pedestal, became a ward of the state:

The first thing that should strike you is that a single mother of two earning only $29K is subsidized to the extent that she has the same effective lifestyle as a similar woman, unsubsidized, earning $69K, because net, the two have around $57K in income and benefits.  Effectively doubling her meager gross by virtue of the welfare state’s programs, the woman earning $29K is in pretty good shape.  People have lamented to me over the years about people who use foodstamps, but who also load their groceries into awfully nice cars, and the question had been: How can this be? Here’s part of the answer, inasmuch as relieved of the costs of food, medical care, and a tax burden, among other welfare-state benefits, what income is present is freed-up for the purchase of that nicer car.  It’s no wonder she has an iPhone 5, because under this construct, she can afford it, since taxpayers are subsidizing to some degree virtually everything else.

Leftists and those of the moderate middle wonder why we conservatives claim that such programs are a disincentive to work, but the facts make it clear.  What is the point in bettering oneself if it actually can be a detriment to income, as the chart above makes perfectly clear.  At certain thresholds, by earning the next marginal amount, benefits available drop off to the extent that it’s punitive to earn more.  This explains well why in certain lines of work, we have the phenomenon of women roughly matching the description, who quit or get themselves fired once they’ve been there a certain period of time, and it’s because they need to keep earning, but they also need to prevent themselves from crossing these thresholds, or “welfare cliffs.”

The challenge to conservatives is to reverse this without being accused of waging a “war on women.”  The first thing we need to admit is that such a situation is a travesty, both to the women trapped by this process, and to those who are working outside the blanket of this lavish welfare state.  It should never be the case that our people are faced with the choice of placing reason in adversity to morality.  Let me try to explain it this way: If you’re that woman earning $29K, you’d be nuts to earn enough money to push you over the cliff.  It would diminish and damage your lifestyle, and the lives of your children.  At the same time, you would [hopefully] know that to continue to languish on these programs is wrong, but when you look around, you notice everybody around you is doing it, so how wrong can it really be?

This dichotomy is the difficulty we face.  We have provided this system, and it is entirely socialistic.  Viewed from a big-picture perspective, it’s constructed precisely to create a very socialistic outcome: The net wages and benefits are flat from wage or salary levels of $29K to nearly $70K. The woman who earns $29K is the economic equal of the woman who grosses $40K more.  This is an astonishing revelation to many people, who had no idea how thoroughly perverse with socialism this system had really become.  Is there any wonder that welfare-to-work initiatives have failed in recent years, to the largest extent?  Is there any wonder that job training programs seem to have been largely fruitless?

It’s easy enough to identify the problem once you have the facts before you, but then the question becomes: Whatever shall we do about it?  If Congress simply slashes these benefits, they fear they won’t be re-elected, but if they don’t do something soon, they won’t be re-elected anyway because this will have become the daily reality for far too many people to ever reverse it.  The problem is that if we don’t reverse it, it’s going to bankrupt us, and that day is coming all too soon. All of this subsidization is being accomplished with borrowed money, and it simply is not sustainable.  It’s always difficult to convince people that their best long-run interests are better served by giving up a little in the shorter run, and the evidence is quite obvious when one examines how few people ever put money away for retirement or savings in any form. Part of the reason they’re unable is because the money they’re earning today is being taxed to subsidize others, so that the total effect of this problem is much worse and much more widespread than the superficial conclusions one might draw.

We need a real, thorough examination of our welfare state, but under the current administration, we’ll be lucky if we can merely restrict its growth.  This administration knows where its bread is buttered, and it’s not going to yield any ground on this without a brutal fight.  The truth may be that this has already doomed us to a financial and monetary collapse of epic proportions.   When that happens, it won’t matter any longer because this will come to a screeching halt, and both the single mothers in this scenario will pay a terrible price along with every other American.  The left has worked very hard to dissociate any stigma previously attached to such subsidies, so we’re going to need to make more than a financial argument, because this is a problem in largest measure of desperate moral concern.  We need adults in the room, but right now, Congress is acting as the elves in Obama’s portrayal of Santa Claus, and the states have become the sleigh, Rudolph, and his eight four-legged friends. It must stop, but in truth, one way or the other, it will stop.  The question is whether it stops in a sudden crash, or instead because we decide wisely to apply the brakes. The choice is still yours.

For now.

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Message to Congressional Republicans

Tuesday, November 27th, 2012

Beohner Re-Elected Speaker

I’ve listened to this mewling bunch of whiners tell us they’re “one-half of one-third” until I can stand it no longer.  It’s true that Obama was re-elected, and it’s true that Harry Reid still runs the Senate, but it’s also true that Republicans still control the House, and it’s about damned time they begin to behave like it.  All, I repeat ALL, spending and taxing measures must originate in the House.   This is no time for tears, and no situation for surrender.  If we are to hold off these statist loons, we must begin now, and we must begin here, at the cliff’s edge. These slack-jawed losers-in-waiting had better understand reality, if they can see it through all of those tears:  You were sent to Congress to STOP OBAMA, and I’m sick and tired of Republicans who have all the spine of overcooked spaghetti, and who will not live up to THEIR mandate.  I’m not one to cast unnecessary or pointless profanity into the public sphere, but you squishy whiners in the House had better get your acts together.  I have one message for House Republicans: SACK UP or GET OUT!

If you’re not willing to do the work you were elected to do, I expect you to tender your resignations now.  Conservatives no longer wish to listen to the excuses.  If you surrender on taxes to make a deal with Herr Obama, you will be blamed when the economy goes into recession.  If you refuse, and he plunges us over this so-called “fiscal cliff,” you’ll be blamed.  So be it.  You’re going to be blamed either way, so you might just as well summon the testicular fortitude to do what is right and stand on a principle.  My apologies to the ladies in the House Republican Caucus, but I think some of you are more capable of leading, and you’ll need to do so, because you’re surrounded by Republican eunuchs.  They haven’t the equipment or the gumption to do what is needed, but a few among your number have.

You people have let this thug-in-chief control the narrative for far too long.  While he and his henchmen have castigated Republicans for the alleged “war on women,” he’s been conducting a real war on America.  It’s time you say so.  While you permit him to get away with alleging that all of your opposition owes only to his race, you’ve let his party machine toss out one of your number who happened to be an African-American, and it’s not coincidental that none of you seem all too unhappy about it, because he dared to oppose some of your deal-making.

Back in 2011, as your so-called “speaker” was making deals with Harry and Barry behind closed doors, selling-out both principle and country, you sat on your hands and made no fuss as this entire debacle was shoved down your throats.  You took it.  You let it happen.  You went along with it.  Now, some sixteen months later, you’re surprised to find Obama still controlling the situation?  If you rest on your laurels, as you did throughout the campaign season of 2012, what did you think would be the likely result?  Your short-sighted deal-making of July 2011 has set this stage, and you’re to be held responsible for it.

Now the president intends to run the table on you, and your answer is “Let’s make a deal?”  DEAL???  Let me tell you the real deal, and let’s make it clear: Do you remember in 2006, when you lost the House?  2014 is right around the corner, and if you don’t find your stones for this fight, you might just as well go home.  In fact, why wait?  If you’re unwilling to make a stand now, why don’t you simply surrender altogether?  Why don’t you quit your nifty offices, with all your staff and goodies, and make a run for the border…of your home state?

This is not good enough.  It’s not nearly good enough.  The “fiscal cliff” is a joke.  The monetary cliff is real, and the money-printing must stop, but the only way to do that is for you to put the brakes on it.  ALL spending and taxing measures must originate in the House.  Simply don’t originate any.  Why aren’t you out in front of the White House making a spectacle?  Why aren’t you down there marching and yelling?  When will you learn that if you don’t have the ball anyway, you might just as well keep it in his court and let him field it?  I’ll tell you why: You people have grown too comfortable, and besides, he’ll let your pet earmarks through so long as he can get his agenda into law.  It’s time to set all this aside now.  Where are your tears for the US Constitution, the destruction of which you are enabling?

Dare this president to spend one nickel without your authorization.  Dare him to spend one cent beyond the debt ceiling.  Dare him.  Where is your courage?  Will you stand for nothing?  Will you fall for anything?  When will you realize that this clown can only make traction when you let him?  He is impotent if you take the purse away.  Impotent.  If he tries, impeach him for high crimes and misdemeanors.  There’s simply no other purpose for which you exist in your offices.  If you fold, there will be no coming back, and there’s no time to argue about it.  If you won’t do what is necessary to preserve this union, then we must replace you.  You have compromised your last if you expect to return to office in January 2015.

It’s time for Congressional Republicans to act as though they’re in charge of the House, and if they won’t stand, we must send them home.  What is the point in fighting to have a majority that once installed will not fight for the principles on which it was elected to lead?  Even now, Obama is trying to incite public support for his legislative tax-and-print agenda, but what is John Boehner doing?

This madness needs to end, but it won’t end until the adults in the room learn to say “no” and stick to it. Who will be the adults?  It will need to be we conservatives.  We conservatives need to think of this entire situation as an emergency, and as a war, but rather than become despaired at the current situation, we need to think in terms of warfare.  That’s how the enemy thinks, and until we realize that it is only the outcry of we conservatives who can make these cowardly Republicans in Congress fetch some resolve, we’re going to be in for a tough time.  The country is not nearly so overwhelmed as these election results might indicate if viewed only through the lenses of whining losers.  We need to buck-up first, and then we need to hold Congressional Republicans’ feet to the fire, and we need to let them hear us.  If we don’t do it, who will?  If now is not the time to stand, when shall we?

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Posted in Activism, Barack Obama, Congress, Conservatism, Featured, News, Politics, Tea Party | 8 Comments »

The One Failed War Leftists Won’t Quit

Friday, November 16th, 2012

War Without End

I was born in the 1960s, just as Congress and Lyndon Johnson launched a new war.  The war raged on, and the amount of money spent was unprecedented. Never before had so much money been thrown at a war, but the enemy refused to relent.  Money bled out of our treasury, and the futures of so many young Americans were wrecked.  The cost to the nation was measured in its tragic affects on our culture, as well as our financial standing, and since that war commenced, America has never been the same.  In most cases, the left can’t wait to shut down a failed war once it’s taken up by Republican Presidents, but this war was different.  This was a war they would continue to wage, despite all of the evidence that they were making no ground against an intransigent and intractable enemy. Failure didn’t matter.  Nothing mattered.  Infiltrations?  No matter.  Destroyed morale?  Just another burden to be borne by the American people.  Ladies and gentlemen, no war in history has cost so much or produced so little as the war commenced in earnest by President Johnson, and yet no war in American history has seen such a commitment of resources.  Naturally, I speak not of Vietnam that ended in the 1975, but instead of the counterproductive “war on poverty” that continues to this day, with no hint of success in sight.

In the five decades of the declared “War on Poverty,” there hasn’t been a President who hasn’t spurred it along, and there hasn’t been a Congress that did not act to expand it.  We have spent money in the range of some $15-20 Trillion on the various means-tested entitlement and welfare programs over that period.  It’s fair to say the number is at least on par with our current national debt, and yet for all the screaming by Democrats over the cost of the war in Iraq, and the war in Afghanistan, neither approach the colossal sum poured into the welfare systems and programs of this nation.  In fact, you can combine the total of defense and war spending over that same period and not arrive at an equal sum.  My question for Democrats, as well as for “compassionate conservatives” is simply this:  When do you admit that this war had been a complete and utter failure, more fruitless than any you’ve enlisted our country to fight?

At this late date, we have more people in poverty, and enrolled in these poverty programs than ever before.  If the purpose of these programs had been to give people a “hand up,” how long ago should we have expected them to take it?  One in six Americans is receiving food-stamps.  One in six!  One in seven is enrolled in Medicaid.  More than half the nation’s children receive free or reduced-price lunches and breakfasts at school, all funded by federal dollars.  The number of people living in government-furnished or government-financed housing is outrageous.  If the United States had been involved in a war stretching across the span of a half-century, yielding no improvement in the state of our security, the leftists in this nation would be terminally apoplectic.  We can’t so much as deploy troops to battle terrorists without the left losing its collective hive-mind.

If one were to view warfare as an investment in the future of a county, one could justify the first Gulf War on the basis that it at least restored the free flow of oil at market prices that permitted the nation to enjoy most of a decade of relative prosperity.  If you evaluate the so-called “War on Poverty” by the same criteria, a serious economist would note that it had only made the nation poorer.  In real terms, we have more people in poverty, and a system that is designed to increase the number who will languish in that state.  In truth, most of the people receiving the bounty of the welfare state are living as well as people who earn 150% of the poverty level, and we now provide hand-outs of every description to so many people that they have begun to outnumber producers.

If it is the standard policy of Democrats and their cohort leftist groups to abandon a failed war, why are they not protesting on the streets?  Why are they not screaming and chanting and having die-ins on the streets, not wearing the garb of massacred civilians, as is their usual ploy, but instead wearing the clothing of all those who work for a living?  That’s who they’re killing.  The people being rewarded by this system are not the people who’ve earned it.  Instead, the people who earned the bounty that is being redistributed are being victimized by the Democrats, but also by their friends who are the self-described “compassionate conservatives” in the Republican Party.  Is their compassion with the money of others so thoroughly blinding that they are now unable to see what it is they have wrought?  Rather than elevate people from poverty, giving them the needed “hand up,” what they have accomplished is to create a permanent underclass that largely only fits that definition to the extent of their earnings, but no longer by their standard of living.

The wretched tragedy of this failed War on Poverty might be forgiven if one were to believe it had been the accidental consequence of good intentions, but it is not.  No rational person can evaluate the failed results that have characterized our national effort to reduce poverty, ten years in, twenty years in, or thirty years in, somebody ought to have recognized that this is not working.  It can’t work, in fact, but if you support programs of this sort after you’ve watched their perennial failures for the span of a half-century, one can scarcely conclude that the advocates of such a system had been motivated by benevolence.  While the “War on Poverty” has been a thorough failure, their other war has been a rousing success:  The entirety of this system is part of the extended political warfare against the American people.  The idea is to break us, and it’s working, so that at long last, they have succeeded in making us vulnerable to every conceivable threat.  If the real goal isn’t to cure poverty, but instead to impoverish the American people both in material and liberty, the war of the statists against America has been a rousing success.  We believed they were fighting a war on poverty, but the lengthening line of economic corpses tells another story. There will be no flag-dropped coffins in this war, and no one will salutes its victims, eventually to be measured in the tens or hundreds of millions in shattered dreams and wasted lives.   Too generous and trusting to perceive the objective of their attackers, most Americans didn’t understand that all along, it had been a war for poverty.

Theirs.

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Posted in Anti-Capitalists, Civil Unrest, Conservatism, Featured, News, Politics, War, Welfare State | 4 Comments »

Putting Humpty-Dumpty Together Again

Monday, November 12th, 2012

Too Fractured?

The Republican establishment has done all it could to fragment and divide the Republican Party.  Divide and conquer is part of their strategy. In each election, they are willing to let Republicans lose who do not fit the mold of their moderate visions.  Conservatives are told to go along, and to shut up besides.  Worst of all, different factions within conservatism are beginning to follow the cues of the GOP establishment.  Conservatives of various descriptions should understand that we mustn’t permit the establishment to blame conservatism, whether they point their finger at economic conservatives,  Tea Party constitutionalists, social conservatives, evangelicals, or any other element within the broader description of conservatism.  This is part of their strategy to divide us.  Please don’t fall for it.  Instead, I’d like you to look at the GOP establishment, where the blame really rests, and consider what it has meant to all of conservatism to be led by a pack of moderates who behave as a fifth column for the left.  We may never put Humpty-Dumpty together again, but I ‘m not certain we should try.  Instead, I want all of the subsets of the greater universe that is conservatism to examine how the Republican establishment has betrayed all of us, and we can’t win with their divisive approach.

Let’s examine this thesis a little more closely.  I’d like to see if I can demonstrate my point to the broader audience that is conservatism.  Let’s identify some sub-groups, and how their most important issues are being thrown overboard by the GOP establishment:

  • Fiscal conservatives are being told that “we can raise taxes a little on the upper brackets.”
  • Conservatives in general are being told that “we must be open to comprehensive immigration reform.”
  • Social conservatives are  being told that “we must be more open to the gay rights agenda.”
  • Evangelicals are being told that “abortion, contraception, and related life issues are killing us.”
  • Liberty-minded conservatives are being told that “we may have to make some compromises on gun control.”
  • All conservatives are now being told that “Obama-care is the law of the land [and we're going along.]“
  • All conservatives are being told that “we need to become more inclusive”[while they ditch and fail to support Love and West.]

Which division or subset of the conservative base of the party has not been betrayed by the GOP establishment?

During the primary season, we were told that Mitt Romney was inclusive, Mitt Romney could appeal to independents, he would do well among Hispanics and the LGBT community, and that incredibly, he would do well among minorities in general.  We were assured repeatedly that this sort of moderate candidate could reach all of these independents, but the results of the election tell a completely different story.  We did not make even a slight dent in the so-called “gender gap,” the minority gap, the gay rights gap, or any other discernible subset of so-called “moderates” or “independents.”  Why did that fail?  Why was Romney’s alleged draw insufficient?  The answer is rather simple, and I’ve said it before, but it’s worth repeating: You cannot win by trying to out-liberal the liberals.  They will beat you because this is their game, and they are professionals at winning it, but more importantly, they will rush to point out how you’re effectively endorsing their positions anyway.  Biden did this during the debate with Ryan, and sadly, Ryan had no effective answer.

What you might conclude from this is that the Republican party is hopelessly lost, and I would agree inasmuch as under the current direction and “leadership” offered by the establishment, there is no way to repair the fault-lines splitting the party apart.  Let’s be honest about it:  Conservative positions on a per-issue basis are winners across a broad spectrum of the electorate.  I think we need to engage the various subsets of conservatism and ask the simple question: What one issue is the absolute deal-breaker for you?  Are there more than one?  I suspect there may be, but let’s be honest with ourselves and one another about what that list of issues looks like.

I don’t like the fact that evangelicals have decided (broadly)to take a powder.  I don’t like the fact that social conservatives are splintering away.  I detest the fact that the Tea Party wing of conservatism has felt rejected and put-upon.  In fact, as I go through the list, the thing all of the subsets of conservatism have in common is this: The GOP establishment is out to mute them.  Some may put a priority on one issue over another, but in a broad and general sense, most of these subgroups within conservatism agree.  The problem may be that we’ve been too willing to cast a subgroup of which we are not constituents overboard.  “Throw the evangelicals overboard.”  “Ditch the Tea Party.”  “Get rid of the social conservatives.”  No, if we fall for this ploy, we’re trapped like suckers in a game we cannot win.

In order to obtain electoral victory, we will need to define ourselves rather than letting the media or the establishment define us.  We’re going to need to find away to create a working coalition that is large enough to capture the White House. We will either do this or die as an electoral force.  We can’t deny that the one thing the Democrats and their cohort groups never do is permit themselves to be split.  The GOP establishment’s tendency to compartmentalize conservatism so as to better control us means we’re going to need to defeat and discharge them from leadership, or abandon the Republican Party altogether. We have four years to have our act together, but truly a good deal less, and it’s time to acknowledge that the leadership of the Republican party on the national level is ineffective, disingenuous, and in all too many instances, the largest part of the problem.  The work begins now.  Let’s get going!

 

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Posted in Conservatism, Featured, GOP Establishment, News, Politics | 4 Comments »

The GOP Has Figured Out the Problem: You

Monday, November 12th, 2012

Can it recover?

It shouldn’t be possible that we have people who invested in the neighborhood of one billion dollars for a return on their investment that amounts to exactly nothing.  These were the so-called “wizards of smart,” who knew how to guide Mitt Romney and the slate of down-ballot candidates to victory.  They’re the number-crunchers, the poll-takers, the marketeers and strategists who represent the consultancy who ran the electoral efforts of the GOP and associated groups.  All of it was allegedly aimed at getting Mitt Romney into the White House, and spend like mad though they did, the failures were massive by any measure.  What makes the whole thing more preposterous still is that five days after the electoral failure they helped to build, they’ve all figured out what the problem is, and they’re unanimous: It wasn’t them, their strategies, their marketing, or their polling models, but instead a single problem that none of them anticipated:  You.

It was the fault of the Tea Party, says Rove.  It was the fault of social conservatives says Erickson.  It was the fault of conservatives’ insistence on closing the border down and dealing with the illegal immigration problem before we commence any sort of immigration reform.  It was the fault of xenophobic conservatives who just don’t want to reach out to Hispanics, they said.  It couldn’t have been their messages, their advertising, their notions of the electorate, or even their candidates.  It was you.  Now that we’ve moved from a President who has spent four years blaming George Bush for his own failures, we will now spend the next two years at least with the Republican establishment’s intelligentsia telling us how the problem had been we conservatives, of varying descriptions. It’s worse than preposterous.  It’s maniacal.

We now know we have at least one Republican Congresswomen addressing the Spanish-speaking press, telling them that the problem with the Republican Party had been the Tea Party and Rush Limbaugh.  Jeb Bush, says she, is a conservative.  If Jeb Bush is a conservative, I’m Adam Smith. Actually, I’m a good deal closer to Adam Smith.  The point is that the party is trying to repackage what it means to be a conservative, and along the way, there are several issues they’d like to dump:

  • Traditional marriage
  • Pro-Life Stance on Abortion
  • Illegal Immigration
  • Obama-care

Since they’ve yielded over the years on nearly everything else, what this suggests is that they wish to dump all associations with conservatism.  Sure, they’re still in favor of free markets and property rights in principle, but they can be flexible on those too. American sovereignty isn’t an issue for them either, since they don’t think it ought to exist.  States’ rights and the 10th Amendment are fine insofar as it goes, and with this crowd, you can bet it won’t be far.  No, there isn’t a principle in existence they won’t spit on or tweak if they believe they can somehow capture the middle but still scare you into showing up.  The problem, their wizards of smart assure them is that they’re not liberal enough.

Most conservatives I know are livid over this election, in part because of what it will mean for the country, but also in part because so many of them warned against nominating a moderate Republican of the establishment wing.  To know that Karl Rove’s view is essentially “you win some, you lose some – oh well, we’ll get ‘em next time,” is enough to make most conservatives begin to experience dry heaves.

Like so many of you, I had wondered what could possibly account for this crushing defeat, but while we tend to focus on the Obama vs. Romney campaign, I think we ought to spend some time looking at what happened in the down-ballot races. The more I look, the more I become convinced that this election presented an opportunity for a purge of conservatives, and the GOP establishment capitalized on that opportunity.  I wonder how many members of the Tea Party Caucus in the House of Representatives never saw it coming.  Remember, the roots of the Tea Party go back to 2006, when there was widespread dissatisfaction with Congressional support of Bush policies and spending priorities, and the sense of general uncertainty about the growth of the deficit.

The one discernible constant has been that conservatives are to blame.  Idiots on the left blame conservatism for moderates’ bad policies, policies on which they would double or triple-down. Consider the whole sorry spectacle of Obama campaigning on the “unpatriotic” nature of the Bush deficits.  He’s quadrupled them.  Bush was widely criticized by conservatives for the prescription drug plan for Medicare, but he was widely criticized on the left also.  The difference is that those on the left would have spent more, much more, and all to purchase votes.  We conservatives get the blame for everything the moderates in the GOP establishment enact, but we generally oppose these things also.

In one sense, we deserve some of the blame since we helped elect these guys often knowing they were mush. The problem is that as the GOP establishment views it, this is a good opportunity to rid themselves of conservatives.  They will use this opportunity to push conservatives to join them, and in desperation, some will.  I think conservatives should think carefully about the notion of blaming one another.  Evangelicals are not the problem.  Tea Party and constitutional conservatives are not the problem.  Social conservatives are not the problem.  The problem is the GOP establishment, and it always has been. It’s when we let them set the agenda and the direction that Republicans lose or having won, blow the opportunity. If we’re ever going to save the country, I don’t think we have any choice but to walk away from the GOP. The Republican establishment will always displace blame and it will always land on us by association.  It’s time for conservatives to get out of the box.

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Posted in Conservatism, Featured, GOP Establishment, Media, News, Politics | 19 Comments »

Courageous Grass-Roots Conservative Rebukes Florida Congresswoman

Sunday, November 11th, 2012

The Courage to Stand Alone

It takes guts to take on the establishment, and in this case, I happen to know the gentlelady from Facebook, and I also know she is a true patriot and she’s interested in real reform of the GOP.  She posts on Youtube as “IzzyLovesFox1.” Being a Spanish-speaker, and a resident of Florida, she caught Florida Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen making remarks in Spanish that non-Spanish speakers wouldn’t have caught, and she was both shocked and disappointed by the rhetoric of the Congresswoman.  It takes courage to put your face out there and to take on the GOP establishment, and I think this soft-spoken lady with a big heart for America ought to be commended.  The remarks of Lehtinen, as revealed by the Youtube video, were despicable. It’s precisely the sort of divisive rhetoric we get from Democrats in Congress, and it ought to be unacceptable to patriots of every race, color and creed.  I want to thank “Izzy” for bringing this to us.  She’s a great patriot!

It’s worse than obnoxious that Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is carrying water for the GOP establishment, talking trash about the Tea Party, and Rush Limbaugh, but frankly anybody openly standing for the establishment while speaking to media in Spanish.  Thank you Izzy. We non-Spanish speakers might never have known.

View the video here:

 

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