Posts Tagged ‘GOP Establishment’

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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 »

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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Posted in Activism, Conservatism, Featured, GOP Establishment, News, Politics, Statism | 3 Comments »

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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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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A Party of Sell-outs Symbolized by Their Leader Must Be Replaced

Thursday, January 3rd, 2013

It’s his party…

Watching the vote for Speaker of the House on C-SPAN, it became apparent that the suck-up weasels in the GOP simply do not have the stomach for the fight.  Boehner was re-elected with Ms. “Titanium Spine” herself, Michele Bachmann(R-MN) arriving at the last moment to vote for John Boehner.  This is the sort of thing we must have expected, since these are the same people who have sold us down the river to the statists.  One might wonder why, but the answer is simple: They’re statists too.  It’s really no more complicated than that.  These people aren’t interested in restraining the growth of government, or abiding by the constitution.  This is a parade of useless feeders, gobbling up your resources while pretending to represent you.  I don’t want to hear, ever again, how this one or that one is courageous.  Certainly, there are a few.  At least two votes were cast for Allen West.  A handful abstained or voted for some others, including Eric Cantor.  This crowd of losers picked the best possible representative of their useless class.  This is the crybaby Congress, and they have an apt leader, but cowardice will not save the country.

This is why the GOP must die.  This is why we must build a new party.  It’s time to reconsider all of this. It’s time to realize that we can restore our nation only by leaving the Republican Party to wither on the vine, building a new party, and stepping up to be citizens in full, without reference to this dead polity that wants only to grow the government and serve the purposes of global statism arrayed against us.  The time fore weaseling-out is over.  This vote for speaker was emblematic of a dead party, and a dead polity.  We can no longer afford for the Republican party to dominate the opposition to the statists, since they are now clear allied with the statists.  It’s not too late for a New Year’s resolution, and the first thing you can resolve is to be independent Americans who will work to build a country that actually functions as designed.  The Republican Party functions without reference to your will, your contributions, and your efforts on its behalf.

It’s time to wash it all away.  It’s time to stop pretending that these people will protect us from Obama.  They won’t.  Many of them are openly on his side, and more work toward the same ends in private.  It’s not going to suffice for patriots to wait for somebody else to do their fighting.  It’s going to take you.  If you’re not resolved to save the country, and the constitution that had provided its foundation in liberty, just wave your white flags, submit to Obama and Boehner and Reid, but stop wasting the time of patriots who will.  This isn’t going to be easy, and it’s not going to be nice, so that if you’re obsessed with good manners to the extent that you won’t call a liar a “liar,” or a tyrant a “tyrant,” you might just as well go lie down and wait to be consumed by the legion of looters.

Ladies and gentlemen, I am going to fight for my country and my constitution, and I will do it with or without help, and I will stop only when they drag my carcass through the streets, but I will no longer rely in any measure on the Republican party.  It’s dead.  Don’t wait for it to save you.  It’s helping to sink you, and if you wait for it to come to your rescue, you’re already dead.  This Republican Party isn’t the party of Lincoln, or Reagan, but the party of Nixon and Hoover.  It’s the party of perennial losers committed on principle to selling us out.  I am taking the pledge:  No more Republicans.  It’s a party of, by and for simpering cowards.

Do as you will, but I will have none of it.

 

 

 

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Boehner Leads the GOP to Electoral Suicide

Wednesday, January 2nd, 2013

Will He Stay?

Speaker John Boehner marched his members to the cliff, and while their bungee cords permitted them to avert one disaster, they managed to magnify others.  As I predicted here four weeks ago, Boehner wound up passing the “fiscal cliff” bill with mostly Democrat votes.  We’ve seen this before, as this was merely the first sequel in a three or four-volume tale of woe.  As Boehner’s competence and commitment are being questioned all over the nation, Eric Cantor is posturing to perhaps unseat Boehner, but given his track record, I wouldn’t trust him any more than the man he would replace.  There’s a dire edge to all of this, and it comes in the form of the upcoming debates over the debt ceiling, but also the more immediately threatening posturing about gun control. Suicide had been the order of the day, and in the main, Boehner achieved it.  We cannot permit him to take our whole country over a much more gravely threatening “cliff.”

The Republicans in the House have completely wrecked their negotiating credibility, and I cannot for one moment see how true disasters will be averted if they cannot stomach even this small fight.  Meanwhile, Allen West has been unseated, so that only a few conservatives remain in the House, and as some Republicans who are moving toward independence look on in stunned disbelief at the wreckage, they’ve begun to notice that the voices of false unity and party loyalty are precisely the same shady characters who have led them into this dark abyss.  If the Republican Party is to have any hope of coming back, and if indeed there remains anything in it worth preserving, it will only be with the leadership of outsiders.

As this Greek tragedy plays to a conclusion, it is important to take stock of all that the party machine has wrought.  Now inoperable, it is finally possible to begin to assess all that it had rejected on the way to the ash-heap of history over which it now teeters. The party is not in its current state from a lack of “progressivism,” or from a dearth of “moderation,” but from an excess of both combined with a goodly portion of corruption mixed in for good measure.  The machine did all it was able to put up a Presidential candidate that would represent its values, but not ours.

It placed in nomination a man who while being a businessman from mostly private sector experience had nevertheless spent most of the last two decades seeking public office or otherwise operating in the public sphere, and it placed as his Vice Presidential running mate a man who has in his professional career known only Washington DC.  It was not a surprise to see that Congressman Paul Ryan voted for the fiscal cliff bill, since as he admitted, he liked what was in it.  Think of that the next time you rationalize your support of him on the basis that he had been a “good conservative.”  No, this is precisely indicative of the reasons he and Governor Romney lost.

If the wizards of the Republican Party had any brains, guts, or integrity, they would now voluntarily step aside.  They would leave in shame, abandoning it to be rescued while it can by better characters.  Those like Sarah Palin and Allen West among others could theoretically rescue the party, but one wonders if they should, encumbered as they would be by the legions of foul characters who would rush to hitch their wagons to the new team(s.) Everybody seems to have bought the line that such people make good trench fighters, but that they’re not leadership material for some reason, undoubtedly because such wizards can’t imagine getting out of the way.

The truth is that this may be the moment for such people of good character and principles to stand up and make themselves known.  As any conservative will witness, it’s not as though we have a surplus of good leadership, and besides: People wise enough to know that sometimes the victory lies in the trenches are precisely the best leaders any cause might ever find.  Still, while I doubt either of these would be the sort to hold a grudge of the sort to which I’d be prone, one wonders if they could be blamed for washing their hands of this fiasco altogether.

The other problem is that the sorry lot who runs the Republican Party in Washington DC these days is precisely the sort who never know when their day has come and gone.  These are the political vermin who cling to power, with their own versions of “Baghdad Bob” telling the press(and themselves) that they’re still large and in charge.  The bunker mentality with which they’re often finally beset only follows on the heals of a rousing defeat, such as the one suffered on New Year’s Day.

Naturally, the underlings immediately begin plotting to undo their leaders, gambling that in a moment of political weakness, they might exploit their positions to maximum advantage.  Watch Eric Cantor over the next few days.  Boehner is nervous, and so is Cantor, because if Cantor misses his moment, he will be finished, and if Boehner stumbles, Cantor will unseat him.  It’s the same old dance, among the same sorry sort of characters who always vie for power when a vacuum appears, however briefly.  You can bet that no matter how it turns out, they will remain fast friends.

The problem the GOP faces is larger than normal, inasmuch as they have a newly re-elected President who is seeking(and thus far succeeding) in running the table on them.  Even if Obama does not win another thing for two years, he knows that his chances of taking back the House in 2014 have just improved markedly.  If he’s smart, he will play carefully and rather than push an agenda that will whip the opposition into some form of unity born of frenzied resistance, he’ll leave Boehner(or Cantor) hanging way out on the limb alone for two years, get the House back, and then do all he wants and more.

If this weren’t all such a fascinating game for DC Republicans, and if they really believed they had anything personally at stake, they’d realize this and get out of the way to let others lead, but power-hungry megalomaniacs seldom do, and what we must remember is that for them, this is all about them.  For Boehner, he gave no consideration to the damage this fiscal cliff bill would do to the nation, but instead only worried how it would look if it didn’t pass.  Cantor and others will undoubtedly see this as an opportunity, one they will pursue if Boehner looks weakened in the light of Thursday morning. That’s the ugly underbelly of Washington DC, and indeed every seat of government, because true public servants are rare creatures of inestimable worth.  The wretched fools now dominating party politics are contrarily all but worthless.

I’ve said as much in my first post of the year: This is a year for choosing, and we must choose between cowardice and courage.  We cannot prevail with the former, only the latter offering any chance at a start toward national restoration.  No politician is perfect, as no human is infallible, but in the evaluation of their worthiness for the job, the single most important issue remains one of character.  You see, we can all make errors in judgment, and we can all make faulty decisions based on incomplete or incorrect information.  It is only in character that you discern those who will work to be morally infallible, because one’s moral bearing is a choice.  Therein lies the deep secret to rescuing the GOP, or even the country, if either remains possible, because it is only with people who strive to make the right choice each time they face one that there is any hope.

Boehner’s current weakness leaves open a chance to bring in the sort of outsider who stands at least a chance of cleaning things up.  Many people have suggested Sarah Palin for the Speaker’s job, but while she spent much of her time as Governor of Alaska battling the corrupt insiders in her own party, she did so with the authority and support of the people accorded to a chief executive.  While she undoubtedly possesses the skills, she would be wasted on the speakership when there are higher offices for which she is better prepared.  Still, if there is a complete outsider who could pull it off, it would be one of her temperament and diligence.  Others have suggested bringing Newt Gingrich out of mothballs to take on this task, and I know those making the suggestion intend a compliment in so saying, but I think the former Speaker is fine with the notion of leaving it that way.  More frequently, I hear(and have once made) the suggestion of Allen West.  West would likely bring the sort of no-nonsense leadership that the herd of Republican cats would need to accomplish anything useful at all.  His military experience would probably assist him well, as I suspect any outsider taking this on would need most of all a firm boot, and the willingness to extend it both firmly and frequently.

Others continue to suggest Cantor, who I wouldn’t trust with the proverbial potato-gun, and a few more have suggested Ryan given his experience as Budget Committee Chairman, although given yesterday’s vote, I still believe he hasn’t the strength of principles to whip this crowd into shape.  This Republican majority is adrift on an unprincipled sea, and it will take somebody of firm commitment to gather this flock.  I haven’t the sense that Cantor is capable of any of it, and I don’t believe Paul Ryan will fair any better.

At this hour, there are rumors that Boehner will quit as early as tonight, but I’ll believe that when I see it.  For all we know, he’s just trying to draw out his adversaries into the open.  At the moment, there will be any number quietly plotting against him, and they’d be easier to overcome if he knows their identities, so I wouldn’t be surprised to find the source of the rumors had been him.  Naturally, it could also be a sort of trial balloon put up by any member, or even staffer, trying to see if there is the sufficient sentiment to provide an opportunity for promotion after all.

Others in Washington are hedging their bets, or mending their fences.  Consider that Grover Norquist is now engaged in rationalizing a victory from this shocking defeat, and others in the DC establishment are trying to cast this as a less thorough defeat.  Listen to them if it suits you, but remember that this same crowd assured us that George HW Bush wouldn’t pay a price for his “Read my lips” pledge, despite the fact that in 1992, he most assuredly did.  This is what happens when a party or a leader forgets the principles that placed them in power.  In one last-minute appeal to the “knuckle-draggers,” it was leaked that Boehner had told Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to “Go f… yourself.”  Twice! As if this would be some sort of consolation, we are supposed to lap that up as evidence that he was battling for us.

If you’re reading these musings, wondering what might really be going on inside this den of thieves, join the club.  Here is what I know with certainty:  I have contacted my member and urged him to push Boehner out, and to find somebody other than Cantor to replace him.  I will be heard, whether it will have any effect, and you should be heard as well.  Just because the GOP committed electoral suicide yesterday does not mean conservatives ought to ride with them to the silted bottom.  There is an opportunity in this for us as well, and it’s high time we make the most of it.  If politics – like nature – truly abhors a vacuum, let us fill it with conservatism for a change.

Come Thursday, Boehner must go if we can manage it.

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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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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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Shell-shocked: Allen West’s Seat Stolen

Sunday, November 11th, 2012

Can we afford to lose him?

I can’t even begin to characterize how thoroughly disgusting this fiasco has been.  Retired Lieutenant Colonel Allen West lost his bid for re-election after what can only be termed an incompetent and dishonest count by officials of St. Lucie County.  They did not recount everything, but only three days of early voting.  Military ballots were never counted.  I want to say this one more time. According to sources on the ground, all of the military ballots languished in a warehouse, uncounted, and they never will be counted.  This is a shocking development, and West’s legal team is pressing their case, but at this point, he’s been screwed.  There were problems with bad memory in at least one voting machine, and any number of other clear irregularities.  The GOP establishment got their wish and rid themselves of Allen West.  To be honest, while I had been hopeful, I have been expecting this sort of result.  West tangled with the machine, and they redistricted his butt to the curb in answer.  The most dynamic, forthright, and clear-minded speaker for conservatism in the House of Representatives was sent home, not only to punish him, but I believe to dispirit and punish us.

Some will choose to focus on the irregularities, the vote fraud, and all of the things that have occurred in that district, and we should certainly fight against those transgressions, but ladies and gentlemen, that ought not to have been Allen West’s district at all.  The Florida legislature, particularly those in tight with the GOP establishment, redrew West’s district knowing he would face these issues with corrupt St. Lucie County.  They knew it.  That’s why they made this area part of his district.  It was sabotage, and after all we have been through together here on this blog, if you don’t recognize it, you’re wearing blinders.  In January, I brought readers this story.

Just minutes ago, directly from Facebook, in the Allen West Republic group, Gary Galiano, boots on the ground, had this to say:

“It’s all in the attorneys hands now I feel they have so much evidence to fight this it’s not even funny. It’s a sad day when you have to count on a memory card from Office Depot to determine the final results of an election.”

And then:

“I’m signing off now going home. Sorry I couldn’t give you all better news. Take care.”

And from Tanya Grimsley:

“UPDATE from Florida. This will effect all of you soon. The SOE, Supervisor of Elections, in Saint Lucie County just kicked out all onlookers and was escorted away by the St Lucie Sheriff’s deputies (not in handcuffs). The public by the Florida State Constitution has the right to be present at any voting recount. You will think I am crazy, until you open your eyes, this is the start of the Dictatorship will will live under. The “Republic” has fallen.”

Indeed. This entire process is despicable.  While the attorneys will continue to fight as they should, you and I must carry this fight in another direction.  You see, this ought never to have happened.  The GOP establishment wanted this outcome, and it was the result they wanted when they created this new district and told West he could run here, after breaking up his district. On this Veterans’ Day, when we ought to be honoring men like Allen West, and when we ought to be remembering all of those who gave the “last full measure of devotion,” we must instead mourn a defeat that ought never to have happened.  Instead, we must contemplate the meaning of losing a district in which the military ballots were never counted.  We must think about the fact that this is the system for which veterans have fought and died.  Did the honored dead and wounded fight to preserve this?  Is this what my own service had been aimed at defending?

I want to say this to my readers one more time:  There may have been rampant vote fraud that ensured this result, but the real theft of this election occurred during the redistricting.  Yes, you should be angry with the lying, cheating, thieving, and fraudulent Democrat machine, but you should be even more enraged with the same old GOP establishment that afforded the ‘rats this chance.  Allen West is now without a seat…just like the establishment wanted.

Now the question remains: What shall conservatives do about it?  The reason we admire Colonel West is that he has been willing to say the truth on issues that were of critical importance to this nation.  Will we speak the truth on his behalf?  I floated an idea on Saturday, and I’m still rolling it over in my head.  I’m not sure how to get it done.  I only know that the Speaker of the House of representatives is a role that does not require elected membership in the House.  A person is chosen for that job by the whole House.  Somebody must invariably place the names in nomination, and then they vote.  If the House of Representatives is truly the “Peoples’ House,” it seems to me it ought to be possible. I would love to see him taking the gavel from Boehner.  It would finally give John something worth crying about.

If that doesn’t work, I have a secondary solution.  I would be happy to have Colonel West move back to Texas, and contest the seat in my district, where John Carter is now the Representative.  Carter is getting on in years, and he follows along with the Boehner boys nearly every time.  I wouldn’t mind seeing him replaced.  He helped sell us down the river on the Debt Ceiling Debacle.  A good deal of what comes next will naturally be determined by Colonel West.  Most of all, we conservatives must continue to support him in his endeavors because he really does constitute a glimpse at the kind of leaders we will need if we are ever going to save or rebuild this republic.  I want to thank all of those who carried on this fight. It’s terrible to go into battle with one’s hands tied, knowing the deck is stacked against you.  On this Veterans’ Day, let us remember those who gave everything and recommit ourselves to retaking this country in their names.

 

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The Role of the GOP Establishment in the 2012 Disaster

Saturday, November 10th, 2012

Can it be revived?

My readers deserve the courtesy of bluntness, since it’s preferable to get the unpleasantness out of the way early.  I’ve always been a “save the good news for last” kind of fellow, and if you’ll bear with me, I’ll get to that eventually.  If you’re a loyal and strident fan of John Boehner, Mitt Romney or anybody named Bush, you may wish to exit this blog for the duration.  Let me first say that if I had to point to a date on which Mitt Romney’s loss was cemented, it would have to be after the ides of July, 2011.  At the time, we were headed for a shutdown of the federal government over the debt ceiling.  Congress must authorize the amount of money the federal government can borrow, and at the time, what was particularly disconcerting to conservatives had been how willing John Boehner seemed to be to pull the rug from beneath the feet of conservative House members.  He went through the dog-and-pony show of letting the House pass “Cut, Cap & Balance,” but only because he knew it would die in the Senate, since he already had a tentative deal worked out with Reid and Obama.

I knew this would doom Republicans in 2012, so I urged members to stand fast, and I was particularly harsh when they didn’t, perhaps undeservedly so with respect to one particular freshman representative from Florida.  Like a number of others, he was told to walk the plank and vote for the “deal” and after some fussing, he folded, and the bill was passed.  That would come back to haunt us in the election of 2012.  Giving Obama a pile of money to spend through the election would give him unlimited resources for spending on the “power of the incumbency” as the vote drew near.  That’s precisely what happened.  The Strategic Petroleum Reserve was cracked open to drive down the price of gas at the pumps. Giveaway programs including everything from foodstamps to Obama-phones accelerated to new heights.  All of this free stuff was purchased with your money, but the irony is that it is money you and your children have yet to earn.  Thank John Boehner and those operating his strings for the colossal debt incurred to keep Obama in office. The Debt Ceiling Deal of 2011 basically guaranteed it would be difficult to beat Obama, if not impossible, and at the time, there were reports that Romney had urged the deal.

You see, Mitt Romney was never supposed to win.  That may be why the Bush clan endorsed him.  They needed a fall-guy.  They needed somebody who would believe he could win, be controlled if he somehow did, but most importantly, prevent any real conservative from making it into the Oval office.  They surrounded him with their own campaign stooges, many part of the permanent political consultancy class in DC, and many of whom undoubtedly gave him counterproductive advice, and gave him false assurances about his situation in the polls. Romney believed that come election day, he would have the full support of the team, and they were going to bring new technology to the voting process, using a mobile app on smartphones among their volunteers to track and report and to try to get people to the polls.  For some odd reason, the technology failed.  That’s right, the technology failed all day long, and the passwords volunteers were supposed to use to access it didn’t work, but the good news was there was a password reset tool, and the worse news is that it didn’t work either.  Poor hapless volunteers stood around with no back-up plan, and some went home early in disgust.  As I said, whether Romney knew it or not, he wasn’t supposed to win.

Whether Mitt Romney was so inept on his own, or was instead the unwitting victim of really bad, sabotage-laden advice, we may never know, but what is clear to me now is this:  As soon as Romney conceded the race, almost before the smoke cleared, there were those in media who had prepared remarks about how this was the result of demographic changes to the country, and that the Republican Party ought to get behind “Comprehensive Immigration Reform.”  Yes, you see, the argument was that the Hispanic vote went with Obama in search of an amnesty of some sort, in the form of the “Dream Act,” or similar. I was not shocked therefore when I heard an account of John Boehner telling Dianne Sawyer in an interview on Thursday that his legislative priority would not be jobs, the fiscal cliff, Benghazi-gate, or anything of the sort, but instead: Comprehensive Immigration Reform.  You might wonder where this would originate, since it’s almost incomprehensible that Boehner came up with this on his own, and you’d be right.  Jeb Bush, the former Governor of Florida, and brother of George W. Bush, is about to publish a book on the issue.  It’s part of Jeb’s agenda: Comprehensive Immigration Reform.

Plausible Deniability

One might ask how all of this ties together, and I will admit that my evidence is thin, except for the events we’ve all witnessed in puzzled disbelief.  I believe that JEB Bush will run for President in 2016, and since the Bush clan has been hot and heavy for comprehensive immigration reform for decades, but doesn’t want the political pain involved in shoving CIR down the throats of conservatives, they’ll have Obama, Boehner and Reid get it out of the way.  In fact, the Bush clan has had a hand in subverting US sovereignty via what is known as the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America, whereby the notion of a EU-like North American Union was conceived(and you’ll doubtless notice how well the EU has come out for member nations.)  A necessary part of that union will  be open borders, and this is why the Bush presidencies never resulted in any tangible results in getting control of our borders.  The problem for the advocates of SPPNA is that to get it through, and to realize it fully, they will need a good deal more votes in the Senate.  I would ask you to view the results of Tuesday’s election in light of the SPPNA, and ask yourself if it was a positive or detrimental outcome for the SPPNA adherents.

Boehner is one of the people bringing this to us, and he wanted to eliminate through this election any members he thought might be trouble.  He succeeded in large measure, and he almost rid himself of Michele Bachmann, who received no help from the party, as she’s been a squeaky wheel.  At the same time, the establishment had to sabotage Richard Mourdock, because he wasn’t one of theirs.  Lugar had been a supporter of the SPPNA and he’s a big fan of comprehensive immigration reform. When conservatives in Indiana dumped Lugar, Mourdock couldn’t be allowed to win.  The GOP establishment and a bunch of disgruntled Lugar supporters(I call them Lugies) showed up to sabotage Mourdock in every way they could.  In fact, as I look at the candidates closely, what I notice is that those new faces who made it into the Senate tend to be people who are amenable to the SPPNA and Comprehensive Immigration Reform.

If we had 41 Senators who were staunchly opposed to CIR or SPPNA, those things would never gain ground.  It was therefore imperative that any candidates who made it into the Senate be CIR and SPPNA advocates.  Go look at the results.  I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions, but if Jeb Bush is about to publish a book on the issue of immigration, and if he intends to run for President in 2016, one of the things you ought to consider about him is this whole business of CIR and SPPNA.  You ought to consider likewise the impact Jeb and the family Bush had on this election.  Was Mitt Romney an unwitting placeholder?  After all, the name “Bush” is still toxic even among conservatives, and that family wouldn’t want to risk that an actual conservative might get into the White House, so they could have supported Romney knowing he would lose, but knowing that with their help, he would be strong enough to freeze out the others. I’d like you to consider the whole of the 2011-2012 primary season in this light.  For those who still believe this election failure had been about “outreach to Hispanics,” I urge you to read this piece by Heather MacDonald.

For those of you who wonder at my dislike for the Bush policy agenda, let me put it in these terms: “Compassionate Conservatism” is merely Establishment Code for “We’ve got free stuff too!” If we can’t make the Bush family irrelevant in the GOP, then we’ll need to abandon the party.  They still control many levers of the party machinery, including in Texas and Florida, but also other states.  We must rid ourselves of these people.  They’ve never managed to do anything but sink us in the long run, and they have advanced the statist ball down the field more reliably than most Democrats. On Friday, it was reported that Jeb’s son George P. Bush intends to seek office.  The times article quoted a State representative in Texas:

“George P. was recently our guest down here in the Valley, where we held an event for him,” said a state representative, Aaron Pena, a Republican who represents part of Hidalgo County in the Rio Grande Valley. “The level of excitement was through the roof. Here you have arguably the most famous family in American political history, embodied in a person who is much like ourselves. After the trouncing that Republicans received in losing the Hispanic vote in the recent presidential election, George P.’s candidacy is the sort of remedy that we’re looking for.”(emphasis added)

Apart from the subtle racism  implicit in Mr Pena’s remarks, I find it troubling that yet another Bush intends to run in order to advance the family agenda.  It’s for this reason that I submit that we won’t repair the Republican Party until we finally accept the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s advice, but only this one time, and only with respect to the family Bush:

Alternative content

(click “play” for Jackson’s advice)

Really people, “stay out da Bushes.”  I don’t think we’ll ever have another conservative President until we excise the Bush influence from our body politic.  America is not a land of royalty, and no single family should wield so much power over so long a span.  There is nothing peculiar to the Bush family that makes them more suited to leadership.  Nothing.  The problem is, they want the power and prestige because they have goals that supersede your interests or mine, in their view.  The SPPNA is just one of them.  They don’t mind being out of power for eight years if that’s what it takes to rehab their family name.

When you take all of this in, it stings a little, but it also begins to make sense.  I don’t believe Mitt Romney was supposed to win, and I think that the Bush family intends to restore their family name, a name that took a beating as a result of many of their policies while in power, not only from rigid leftists, but also among conservatives who have rightly noted that the Bush family seems to have extensive sympathies with statists, and with globalists who are more interested in big ideas about global governance than with American sovereignty.  The Bush family seems to wish to drag us unwillingly into their global vision, and I’m not going without a fight. Neither should you.  We conservatives simply must stop walking into these minefields.

After all, who will be their next moderate patsy, and will we go along with that one too?  If their family name is still too toxic in 2016, expect them to put up another stand-in.  I think the next one will be a big fan of donuts.  He’s shown himself willing to help, but he may now be damaged goods himself.  Time will tell.

Solution to two problems?

Insofar as Boehner, he is a cog in this machine.  The good news is that we can rid ourselves of this particular tool, and I even have an idea as to how we might do that. I realize this may be slim consolation, but we need a win. We need to start somewhere, and I think this is as good a place as any.  As you know, there is no requirement that the Speaker of the House be a voting member of the House of Representatives.  If they wanted to, they could elect Rush Limbaugh…or me. (Though if nominated, I would not run, and if elected, I would not serve…)  It just so happens that we have a plausible candidate for the position, since he’s recently been left jobless after being set up for defeat through redistricting in Florida.  He’s still contesting the results, but win or lose, Allen West would make a great Speaker of the House, and there’s no reason we shouldn’t call our respective representatives to insist on it. I’m not trying to start a movement, but I think we must finally rid ourselves of Boehner, and the best way to do that is to replace him with somebody we want.  While it’s not likely, it is possible, so that when they vote for the Speaker for the next term, we can make a difference.

For readers who want more background on the immigration argument, Heather Mac Donald also wrote this piece some time ago.

 

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The Farce of “Somehow”

Monday, September 10th, 2012

I’ve had a few comments from sincere people who have argued in response to my last post that we must focus on defeating Barack Obama until after the election.  I still wanted to know how we were to hold Romney’s feet to the fire.  It’s a simple question: “How?”  A number of my longtime readers responded to some of the Facebook comments by repeating my simple query.  Naturally, there’s no answer, or if the proponents of this theory know one, they’re not offering it.  Time after time, I’ve been berated by ostensibly conservative people who tell me that I must “focus on Obama,” as if by looking at that awful picture, it will relieve me of the awful truth about Mitt Romney.  Again and again, I ask them to explain how Romney will be bent to a more conservative direction, and time and again, I am told to focus on Obama.  This sort of redirection hints at the desperation so many feel about this election, but it also demonstrates a willingness to dissemble and it’s surprising to see it coming from conservatives.  At the end of it all, if you can corner them into an answer, it amounts to an undefined, unexplained “somehow.”

“Somehow” is the retort of leftists when you tell them that the budget cannot be sustained as it has been, and that by simple mathematics, it’s not possible to continue.  You might ask them how they’ll pay for it all, and when they’ve exhausted all of the ludicrous ideas about taxing the rich, their last resort is almost invariably the same: “Somehow!”  Somehow?  My paycheck doesn’t come to me “somehow.”  My taxes don’t pay themselves “somehow.”  Food doesn’t leap onto my table “somehow,” but when you ask them for the concrete steps that must be undertaken to pay for all the spending they propose, it always comes down to “somehow,” which in the short run means “some one,” but in the long run means they haven’t a clue, and worse, don’t care enough about it to bother with the details.

When you ask a liberal about their latest environmental scheme, their energy-limiting, anti-industrial, pathologically anti-human schemes, they are no less evasive.  First, they hurl insults. Next, they tell you how important it is for future generations(a.k.a. “the children”) to save our planet by the measures they propose, but when you show them the math, and the undeniable truth of the insufficiency of wind, solar, and hydro-electric or geothermal resources, and you want to know from them how you’re to maintain anything like your current standard of living under their scheme, they might utter something about “shared sacrifices” but if you’re insistent, they will retreat to “somehow.”  In this context, the “somehow” they’re imagining is one they’d prefer not to name, since it comprises entirely of reducing the human population of the Earth, and the standard of living among those who remain(except them, naturally,) but since they’ve been less than successful at convincing the Third World of this goal, they’ve switched their focus and will begin with you.  That’s the essence of the “somehow” they dare not name, and it consists of reducing you to the state of a hut-dwelling refugee in some barren wasteland.

All of this is to be expected from liberals or leftists, since it signifies the dishonesty and delusion enabling their philosophy, but what has happened that heretofore conservative Americans resort to similar language?  I have seldom heard such an amazing collection of otherwise conservative Americans adopt the language and argumentation of the left.  Apart from the intellectual laziness implied, there’s something horrifying about the proposition that good and serious Americans would offer us “somehow” in answer to anything.  I hope it is a temporary affliction, but alas, I don’t see it as such.  I don’t know how one can go from “somehow” back to concrete answers at the drop of a hat.  It usually ends badly, in more rationalizations.

I asked how it could happen that Mitt Romney’s feet could be “held to the fire,” and the first thing I was offered was that I am guilty of a treason against the country.  After that, I was told I need to focus on Obama, but when I would not relent, and instead focused on the answer to my question, what I was given, if anything, is “somehow.”  How will we maintain our principles while supporting a man who doesn’t share them?  “Somehow.”  How will we protect our values if the nominee we’re supposed to support thinks they’re fungible?  “Somehow.”  How will we get Mitt Romney to make conservative appointments to the bench if John Boehner has already engineered it right out of Congressional oversight?  “Somehow.”  How will we get Mr. Romney to do anything at all, such as the complete repeal of Obamacare, if he’s already abandoned that position and now speaks of his fondness for some portions of it?  “Somehow.”  How will Paul Ryan’s position as Vice President have any bearing upon the kind of legislation Mitt will sign into law?  “Somehow.” How will we exert pressure on him by running a challenge to him in the 2016 primaries, since the RNC has essentially amended the rules to make that almost impossible?  “Somehow.”

No, the truth of the matter is that the only way we have available to exercise any control over Mitt Romney is now, here, at this time, before he’s elected, and the fact of the matter is that if he is, he will not cater to our wishes.  He can only be controlled if we exercise that control this moment.  Since we have no control, many of us having departed the party proper in disgust, there is only one method of control we can exercise.  Only one.  Exercising it may lead to Mitt Romney’s defeat.  Exercising it could, in a backward sense, contribute to Barack Obama’s re-election.  Why is that the fault of people who rightly ask these simple questions about Romney?  Why is that the fault of people who simply want to know how it is that Mitt Romney is to be controlled by those who are being asked to entrust him with the presidency?  Maybe I’m stubborn, or maybe I’m out to make a point to all of these who have in desperation leaped onto the Romney bandwagon:  You can’t trust him, and even if you elect him to oust Barack Obama, there will be no end to this fight. Or, will there be?

When they get around to “somehow,” what I suspect is that either they haven’t the foggiest idea and haven’t considered it, or they do not care to throttle Mr. Romney’s liberal tendencies.  Either way, it’s unacceptable to me. 

 

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Holding Mitt’s Feet to the Fire

Monday, September 10th, 2012

Time for a Shake-Up

I’ve been told repeatedly that we must elect Mitt Romney, come what may, because the country won’t survive Obama for another four years. Whether this assertion is true, those who hold this point of view invariably follow up with a claim that I now find utterly laughable.  I am told: “Besides, if Romney wins, we’ll be able to hold his feet to the fire, and get him to do our bidding…”  I wonder if the people who express this view realize how thoroughly nonsensical that position really is.  There is only one way to hold a President’s feet to the fire, and it is by being able to exert electoral control, but as of the Rules Committee report of Tuesday at the RNC, that option is now all but effectively gone.  I would like those who claim that we conservatives will be able to exert some influence over a President Romney to explain to me with precision how that is to be accomplished, apart from vague platitudes:  How can we expect to “hold his feet to the fire?” By what mechanism?

First of all, what fire?  Romney hasn’t pledged much except to repeal and replace Obama-care.  Replace?  Yes, “replace.”  For those of you who practice self-deception, you might not have heard him say that, but now I ask you:  “Replace with what, precisely?”  Here we are delivered more vague platitudes about market-based solutions, but not once does Romney offer what those solutions will be.  More platitudes.  More vague generalities.  It’s a load of hogwash. Welcome to Romney-care 2.0. Welcome to Romney 3.0.

Let us assume, however, that there is some magical laundry list of things Mitt Romney had promised with some specificity.  Even if he has, could some brave soul please explain to me the method by which he is to be made to perform as promised?  What will you do if he refuses?  Will you “primary” him in 2016?  Fat chance.  The power grab begun in the RNC’s rules committee consisted of making that nearly impossible.  What will you do?  Deny him campaign funds?  The advent of SuperPACs has made this an irrelevant point.  Karl Rove will merely scare up a few hundred million dollars and spend it on his behalf.  Why should he care?  Now, if Karl Rove were to get mad at him, that would be a different thing.  What are the chances that he won’t do the bidding of his masters?

Right.  Now you’re catching on.

Once you understand that there is no method by which you will be able to even lean on Mitt Romney, except in the court of public opinion, you must also realize that this notion of “holding his feet to the fire” is as vaporous as spilled acetone.  There is nothing you can do to affect Mitt Romney if he is elected.  Nothing.  The influence any party and its voters exerts over a President is already slim once they obtain that high office, but in the case of Romney, given the rigging carried out on at the Republican Convention, but frankly throughout this primary season, there is virtually nothing short of an actual coup d’etats that would pry him from his positions, whatever they may be.

Amnesty?  Abortion?  Romney-care?  What are you going to do about it once you elect him, having effectively given him the power to re-write the rules of the convention at will?  You’re going to whimper and cry, and you will be stuck with eight years of his liberal tendencies, and as almost half the span of yet another generation will have elapsed believing that this had been  conservatism, your country will be lost. Even now, Governor Romney is out on the campaign trail explaining that he will not repeal all of Obama-care, but will instead opt to keep some of it.  This is what we are told is conservative?  This man, it is said, can be held to perform the promises he’s made?  It hasn’t been two weeks since the convention, and he’s already ditching promises.

One can’t help but observe that the GOP establishment is bound and determined to give us candidates who are not conservative, but who will claim the label long enough to win in primaries before becoming full-bore mush.  For a man who had described himself as “severely conservative,” whatever that means, the rush to retreat from his promise to repeal all of Obama-care is breath-taking.  For those of us who hadn’t believed him, the only thing breath-taking about it has been the predictability of the matter, and the gullibility of all those who have assured us it wouldn’t go that way.  Put another way, the Mittster has shaken up the Etch-a-Sketch, and he’s drawing a new picture.  Post-convention Mitt will now advocate a modified Obama-care rather than a full repeal.

Will anybody who claims to be a conservative please explain to me in unvarnished terms how it is that we will “hold his feet to the fire” on this issue?  This is the enduring problem with Mitt Romney, and it puts the lie to the claim by some who argue that despite his clear attachment to liberal positions on a variety of issues, we conservatives will somehow be able to exert some sort of governing force over him.  It simply isn’t so, and the delusions attached to such claims are astonishing only in the implicit motives of the claimants.  Why pretend?  Why not simply deal with the truth?  If conservatives expect anything but Obama Lite from a Romney administration, they’ve been led astray.  It’s time we begin to contend with the reality at hand:  The GOP establishment moderates who are running the party have led it to ruin, and it’s going to be up to we conservatives to rescue the country, not only from the rabid left, but also from their collaborators in the Republican party’s liberal wing.

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Turn Out The Lights: The Grand Old Party Is Over

Tuesday, August 28th, 2012

That’s it. You can shut down the convention right now. It’s over. Romney’s camp just shut down all dissent, and they rigged it that way.  Twitter is awash in angry tweets from people who know this was a sham.  John Boehner actually wielded the gavel without a hint of a tear as he said “the ayes have it.” They didn’t have it, and I think it was pretty clear that even if they did, this was a set-up. I have news for the GOP establishment. I am voting in November. I will vote for all the down-ballot candidates who are worthy of my support. I am not going to vote for Mitt Romney.  Don’t look at the page as though you’ve read the words of a man pledging treason. It was not I who rigged the primaries.  It was not I who rigged the convention. It was not I who rigged the rules committee. All of those things are actual treasons against the conservatives in the America, and all of those things were carried out by Mitt Romney and his legion.  I am a small matter to it, but I will have my say.  If the Republican party wishes to commit suicide by Romney, they may do so, but they will do so without my help in the matter.  John Boehner may have enjoyed his moment in despotic pleasure, and Reince Priebus may have been doing his masters’ bidding, but Mitt Romney had it within his power to put a stop to all of this, but when tested by circumstance, Mitt Romney’s fatal character flaws prevailed.

The Republican Party is dead.  It’s time we get on with this convention and consider it a funeral.  You’re witnessing a party that will now fall, and I’m going to help it on its way.  Some of you diehard Republicans who read this blog may wish to find other haunts.  It’s not going to be pretty. When I saw John Sununu begin to surface with regularity on Fox News over the last few weeks, I suspected the fix was in.  His conduct of the RNC Rules Committee on Tuesday demonstrates that fact.

I am a person who refuses to separate his convictions from his actions and choices. Mitt Romney could have done many things to gain my support, and the support of many others, but rather than do so, he seized control.  He used all his pals and buddies to take over and make the voices of grass-roots Republicans and Tea Party conservatives silent.  Some will urge that we remain focused on November, and I agree, but my focus is irrevocably changed. I am out to defeat the GOP establishment in any and every form that may take.

Note to conservatives: I will understand if you swallow your pride and your principles and vote for Mitt Romney, but do not come to this site to chastise me or others who refuse to join you.  Your argument had consisted of convincing us that the Romnoids wouldn’t behave this way, and at precisely that moment when they needed to prove it, they behaved precisely as we dissenters knew that they would. Save it.

Romney had his chance.  Today, he blew it.

 

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The Power Grab Isn’t Over

Tuesday, August 28th, 2012

If you’re not aware of Morton Blackwell’s letter to RNC delegates, I suggest strongly that you read it here.  As the controversy continues, there was on Monday night a so-called “compromise” floated that would strike Rule 15, the objectionable rule that would permit the party to dominate the State parties, but hidden behind all of this was the unchanged rule 12, that would permit the Party to change the rules at will.  In other words, they were willing to pull back the most obviously objectionable rule now, but maintain the rule that is a complete abomination in the long run.  This sort of trick is precisely the kind of thing we have come to expect from Democrats, and from the Obama administration.  As usual, Michelle Malkin is doing great work on keeping us updated on the state of all of this, but I must tell you that your input is required.  Read Mr. Blackwell’s letter.  Act accordingly. (RAISE HELL!)

If the GOP establishment has its way, our voices will be muffled and silenced.

Governor Palin has weighed-in too:

“We have to remember that this election is not just about replacing the party in power. It’s about who and what we replace it with. Grassroots conservatives know this. Without the energy and wisdom of the grassroots, the GOP would not have had the historic 2010 electoral victories. That’s why the controversial rule change being debated at the RNC convention right now is so very disappointing. It’s a direct attack on grassroots activists by the GOP establishment, and it must be rejected. Please follow the link to Michelle Malkin’s article about this.”

As I reported, the Republican establishment seems to be obsessed with dominating the grass roots, and this calls into question the future of the Republican Party. Rule 12 is Mitt Romney’s insurance policy against a primary challenge in 2016 if he moves too far to the left.  What leverage will the grass roots have if he were to appoint another Harriet Miers or to go along with some sort of modified Obama-care?  None.  It’s also the Bush Clan’s insurance policy if Romney fails in 2012.  Any way you look at this, it’s all about controlling the party from the smoke-filled rooms of political consultancy in Washington DC, leaving you in the dark as they feed you manure.  The GOP establishment prefers mushrooms.  It’s our job to force them into the light.

Update(8/28/2012 6:45am): Apparently, not satisfied with having tried to rig this, the establishment tried another dirty trick.  They sent details of the alleged compromise over rule 15/16 to the Hearst papers (via the Houston Chronicle,) but omitted the discussion of rule 12.  This was done to trick people into believing that the controversy was over, but it isn’t over. As long as rule 12 remains, the truth is that they will retain the ability to change the rules at any time.

Update(8/28/2012 7:15am):The truly unseemly part of this is the Chronicle’s attempt to refer to only “the Texas delegation” and “the Ron Paul delegates.”  There is much more involved in this than a few wild-eyed Ron Paul supporters. Washington (state) is supporting the minority report opposed to rule 12 also, and the possibility of an all-out floor fight continues. This is simply astonishing. They are hoping by associating this solely with Ron Paul supporters, you’ll shrug it off and walk away.  The fact is that rule 12 is a problem whomever you support, now or in the future, in 2016, and in perpetuity.

 

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As Though The Appointments Sell-Out Hadn’t Been Bad Enough… Another Budget Surrender

Wednesday, August 1st, 2012

Too Afraid to Fight

Early Wednesday, I brought you the story that had erupted in Washington over Republican capitulation on Presidential appointments on Tuesday evening. While Ted Cruz was winning the Republican run-off for Senate in Texas, the House Republican leadership was busy selling us out, but it didn’t end with the matter of Presidential appointments. They also came to an agreement on another temporary spending extension that will carry the budget problems until after the elections by virtue of yet another continuing resolution, as the Heritage Foundation reports.  Let’s get real: If we can’t win by standing for the constitution, let’s just quit, surrender the country, and simply lie down and die.  This is another example of the preternatural fear exhibited by Republican Congressional leadership over the prospects of a government shutdown.  I don’t understand why, because this nation has survived many shutdowns, including at least three major ones during Reagan’s administration, and at least one during Clinton’s. Of course, it is the shutdown of 1995 that leadership fears, because in that instance, Bob Dole over in the Senate undercut Gingrich because Dole was seeking the Presidency in 1996.  Now, the leadership is selling-out for Mitt Romney’s sake, but if this continues, we will have a repeat of the 2006 disaster.

Somebody should tell Speaker Boehner and Leader McConnell that they don’t answer to Mitt Romney, but more, Mitt Romney should make a case on behalf of budgetary discipline, but just like last summer, Romney didn’t say a word about the deal-making over the Debt Ceiling until it was finished, only then remarking on it. This is precisely the sort of spineless approach I have feared from Mitt Romney, and from any Congress that would work with him.  If this is what it will be like in a Romney administration, I’m not interested.  More, we shouldn’t get our hopes up too high since it’s now apparent that Boehner and the boys in the House simply don’t have the stomach for a battle.  As usual, the GOP establishment is in collusion with liberals to screw the rest of us for the sake of politics.

Here’s the list of problems Heritage offered with this latest continuing resolution(CR):

  • It stifles the economy by adding to the uncertainty among investors and employers, making them reluctant to pursue growth-producing, job-creating activities.
  • It erodes public confidence. Congress’s repeated failure with such routine matters as annual spending bills breeds cynicism about how lawmakers are handling more than $3.5 trillion of the economy’s resources each year.
  • It weakens Congress’s ability to budget at all. Each repetition makes fiscal mismanagement the norm. Past vices become present-day habits, and the chance of Congress restoring stable budgeting practices grows more remote. Without them, Congress will be unable to address the huge entitlement spending challenges that are growing larger and more imminent.
  • It risks an economic breakdown sooner than expected. Former Senator Judd Gregg (R–NH) has warned that “once reality sets in that there is going to be no improvement in leadership, whether on the fiscal cliff or on long-term deficits and debt, people and markets will react. They will not wait until January. Historically, September has been a good time for such a reaction.”

More than any of this, however, I believe it simply “kicks the can down the road” again, in search of a more favorable time to address the impending catastrophe.  By “more favorable,” they mean a time when there is no impending election, but I have news for these establishment weasels:  There’s always an election pending, and this is precisely why we never actually address these issues.  Kicking the can down the road is much less painful to politicians, but it does precisely nothing to repair our nation, and it helps to promote an eventual collapse of our system.

Congressional Republicans ought to wake the Hell up.  Mitt Romney’s campaign didn’t appoint them to office.  We elected them.  They’re in office to represent our interests, but not Mitt Romney’s electoral aspirations. This is not a winning strategy, but merely a plan for perpetual retreat. We can’t afford this sort of leadership any longer, and if this is what Romney offers, we’re better off without him too.

 

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Shooting-Off Again: Dick Cheney Leads the Attack… on Sarah Palin

Sunday, July 29th, 2012

Still Mad, Dick?

Bless his heart, but Dick Cheney really stepped in it this time.  I want to know why the former Vice President is attacking Sarah Palin. We were all sickened when leftists publicly wished he would die, or be denied the heart transplant that has extended his life, but apparently, Vice President Cheney has no heart left for common-sense conservatives, or for the lady who bore the brunt of the left’s most vicious attacks in 2008, since he now adds to them.  Having been the frequent target of the left’s senseless harangues, one would expect that Cheney would know better, but it’s apparent that a decade in Congress, four years as Secretary of Defense, and eight years as the Vice President haven’t made him any smarter.  If I were a leftist comic, I would take the opportunity to remind readers that Cheney has a history of shooting at the wrong target.  Asked by Jonathan Karl of ABC News what advice he would offer about the process of selecting a VP candidate, given 2008 as an example, he said this:

“The test to get on that small list has to be, ‘Is this person capable of being president of the United States?’”

True enough, but then he said:

“I like Governor Palin. I’ve met her. I know her. She – attractive candidate. But based on her background, she’d only been governor for, what, two years. I don’t think she passed that test…of being ready to take over. And I think that was a mistake.”

As is the current fashion in the media, ABC used the occasion of Mitt Romney’s impending VP pick to launch an attack on the former Governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, and predictably, this representative of the Bush administration and of the GOP establishment crowd wouldn’t miss an opportunity to get his digs in.  Mark Levin was so annoyed by it that he posted to Facebook on the subject, and he’s right to be upset with the former Vice President.  After all, what is served by attacking Sarah Palin?  What’s in it for Cheney?  I believe Cheney’s criticism of Sarah Palin reveals something ugly about the Republican establishment, but also their basic view of the Presidency. In their view, the Presidency and Vice Presidency should never be held by “amateurs,” a.k.a., “non-insiders.”

When Cheney said he thinks Sarah Palin hadn’t “passed that test…of being ready to take over,” what he’s stating bluntly is that she was not qualified to be President.  There are likely millions who would disagree vociferously with that assessment, and Cheney’s criticism is one we ought to examine because he had held that office, but we should not fail to turn the question on him:  Was Dick Cheney qualified to hold that office?  Some would argue that from the moment he first exhibited substantial health difficulties, Cheney should have stepped down as Vice President, permitting President George W Bush to replace him.  After all, if something terrible or unfortunate had happened to the President, the health of the Vice President, then unceremoniously elevated to the Presidency,  would have been of immediate concern for the country.

Americans expect is their leaders will do the most responsible thing in pressing situations, but Dick Cheney failed that test.  Whatever the objections of President Bush may have been at the time, Cheney should have stepped down, for the sake of the country, if for no other reason.  He didn’t.  He could have done the responsible thing, and nobody in the country would have blamed him had he stepped aside due to ill health, and a frightening heart condition that could have claimed him at any time.  He’d have enjoyed the sympathies of millions who would have respected him for doing the responsible thing, and yet he failed that test.

While Dick Cheney gives interviews to ABC News, Sarah Palin has been out on the campaign trail doing the hard work of getting out the vote for common-sense, constitutional, conservative candidates.  Dick Cheney is giving interviews to mainstream media outlets to attack Sarah Palin.  To me, one of the most important qualifications for either the job of President or Vice President is to exhibit leadership.  What is Dick Cheney leading?  An assault on Sarah Palin?  What is Sarah Palin leading, and what has she recently led?  In 2010, she helped to lead the battle to retake the House of Representatives, and in 2012, she is helping to lead the charge to retake the Senate.  Meanwhile, Dick Cheney gives interviews offering advice to Mitt Romney on his forthcoming VP pick.  While the country is burning down around us, this is the battle in which GOP insiders like Cheney wish to engage? Nobody stops to turn the question around and ask Cheney about his qualifications, which are assumed to have been sufficient:

Cheney states: “She’d only been governor for, what, two years.”

Question: How many years was Cheney governor of a state?  Answer: None.

Cheney headed the Department of Defense under George H.W. Bush, but that’s a largely bureaucratic position more than one of leadership.  Leon Panetta is the current Secretary of Defense.  Is Panetta qualified for the presidency?  Cheney was a legislator, first and foremost, and an insider who elevated himself within the House of Representatives.  Is this the qualification for President?  Cheney was never an inspirational figure.  Did this qualify him for that office?  After all, it was Cheney who had helped to select Vice Presidential candidates before, including in 1976, and again in 2000, when he headed the search committee, but himself got the nod from George W. Bush.  It was also Cheney who was campaign manager for the Ford Campaign in 1976, and he served as Ford’s chief of staff.  I don’t know how any of that qualified him to be Vice President, or President, but if Sarah Palin ever decides she wants some advice on how to be a DC insider or political hanger-on, she should immediately contact Dick Cheney, as in this at least, one might conclude that he had been eminently qualified.

It’s not my intention here to drag Dick Cheney’s name through the mud, but I must repeat Mark Levin’s question: “Why does Dick Cheney feel the need to attack Sarah Palin?”  Cheney is an insider.  Way back in 1976, it was Cheney at the GOP convention who helped to make sure that Gerald Ford was the Republican nominee, but not Ronald Reagan.  The GOP establishment is rightly sensing a bit of a revolt forming in the rank-and-file, as many conservatives are not altogether thrilled with the presumptive Republican party nominee.  He knows there is a move afoot to ditch Mitt Romney at the convention, and he sees Sarah Palin as one of the threats to the Romney ascendancy because the grass roots of the party loves her. Whatever happens in this election cycle, it is the aim of the establishment to be sure that none but another member of the extended Bush clan rise to the nomination in 2016.  Hammering away at Sarah Palin now, in 2012, helps to solidify the notion that Governor Palin is a political has-been, and one who was never qualified for the office in the first place.

That’s garbage, but in the perceptions-driven game of politics, it contributes another few slashes in the death of one-thousand cuts.  The GOP establishment doesn’t want a Palin candidacy, now or any time in the future, and it perturbs them greatly as the collective hive-mind of the anointed class that at present, the most effective spokesperson for rank-and-file Republicans is a woman they would rather have us all forget.  Sarah Palin brought big oil to heel as Governor of her state, forcing them to live up to contracts with the state of Alaska on which they had been dallying interminably.  She exposed and throttled crooks in both parties, including the state’s own GOP establishment.  None of that sits well with the Washington crowd of which Cheney is an undeniable part.

Whatever Governor Palin’s electoral potential in the future, I find it simply astonishing that a man who had virtually nothing to recommend him as a potential President of the United States other than his appointed proximity to that office now offers Mitt Romney counsel on who to pick as his VP, and in so doing, sets out to demolish the party’s last nominee for that post.  It’s a despicable bit of politicking on Cheney’s part, and it is in such instances as this one that cause many in the grass-roots to wonder about the motives of the establishment.  It is Cheney, as part of Washington DC’s permanent political class that symbolizes the problem.  From his first day working inside the Beltway as an intern for Congressman William Steiger in 1969 until present, Cheney has been hooked into DC politics. Forty years of his influence in Washington is more than enough.  Until we begin to discard these insiders, we will never get very far in restoring our republic.

His opinion on Governor Palin was offered up as another propaganda victory to the left, as it was the sort of answer Jonathan Karl had been seeking.   An old Washington insider like Cheney couldn’t possibly have fallen into a trap of that sort, so this was said with the full intention of malice, and the manner in which it was said makes it clear there is plenty of that left in Dick Cheney’s heart.

(I suppose this evinces also the fact that one can change one’s heart but still not alter one’s mind, however small the latter chore might have been.)

 

 

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Harboring the Enemy

Saturday, July 7th, 2012

Is the GOP Bearing Us Gifts?

My friend Carl likens the GOP establishment’s strategy to the idiotic way in which the US lost in Vietnam.  Too often, the Republican Party creates a safe haven for the left by placing off-limits to attack such programs as education in which they hold complete sway.  More than this, the party adopts rules of engagement that hamper the effort, for instance when John McCain refused to use Obama’s middle name, or when Romney used every Alinskyite tactic to secure the nomination, but will not use them in the general election campaign.  I’m prepared to take it one step more:  When we elect establishment candidates, we provide the left with a safe haven in government, as most of them are permitted to remain in place.  Permitting establishment Republicans to call themselves “conservative” without challenge, we encourage the denigration of actual conservatism.  Mitt Romney isn’t conservative.  He’s a “moderate Republican,” which is to say he is a liberal.  If he takes the White House in November, it will remain staffed by people who are statists.  There will be no change in philosophy, but merely a slow-down in the rate of its pursuit. We shouldn’t expect to restore our constitutional republic by harboring the enemy.

Mitt Romney says he’s been “severely conservative.”  I don’t know how one who knows the first thing about conservatism could begin to make such a claim.  If anything, his history as Governor of Massachusetts tells us something quite different.  Romney-care is an abomination to any free people, and the mere fact that he helped enact such a program as law puts the lie to his claim of conservative credentials, much less a “severe” one.  No, he enacted regulations that pushed the entire farcical global-warmist agenda, and he helped to create and fund programs such as “Welfare Wheels” that are all in keeping with a big-government statist.  The most telling part of his claim is the use of the word “severe” as his adjective of choice.  It is only the most liberal Republicans who attach the impression of severity to conservatism.  For mainstream conservatives, we believe we do not need to say we are “compassionate” because compassion is implicit in our policy ideas.  To the degree we are “severe,” it is in the realm of truth-telling and logical analysis.  To apply the modifier “severely” to conservative is to admit that he doesn’t know what conservatism is all about.  It confesses a philosophical distance from conservatism that cannot be bridged by our desire to win in November.

There are those who would take issue with my description of Republican establishment types as “enemies,” but this is at long last  why some might refer to me as a “severe conservative.”  I’m not willing to gloss over the reality, either for the sake of an election, or for the sake of some false sense of party unity, much less to condescend to other conservatives who will have known better all along.  The simple truth is that establishment Republicans repeatedly damage conservatism in two fundamental ways, and I won’t apologize for pointing them out:

  • They actively seek to undermine conservatives, conservative ideas and principles, and frequently side with the radical, statist left.
  • They frequently attempt to disguise themselves as conservatives, such that when their own versions of statist programs go awry, the wider universe of conservatism in general takes the blame, despite the fact that conservatism had exactly nothing to do with the failures.

I’m going to prove the first method by the use of a single name:  John Roberts.   John Roberts undoubtedly sees Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas as  examples of  “severe conservatives.”  His own abandonment of constitutional principles and precedents marks him as precisely the sort of enemy we face in the GOP establishment.  Following along behind him is a cadre of Republican(but not conservative) excuse-makers who will try to convince you he had ruled correctly, somehow.  What John Roberts did by his ruling marks him as an enemy of free men everywhere, and I frankly don’t give a damn what some spouting geyser of human incompetence says to the contrary.

They often disguise themselves as “conservatives,” and you can often see this when they begin to attach all sorts of modifiers to the label “conservatism.”  They will tell you they are at least “moderately conservative,” or practitioners of “compassionate conservatism.”  What these really mean is: “Weak-kneed, non-conservative conservatism.”  In practice, what these translate into are simply more statist programs, regulations, and market-manipulations.  What the programs born of these will reveal is a contempt for principled conservatism.

Some will immediately throw in my face that my own favored candidate, whose candidacy didn’t materialize in 2012, likes to talk about “common-sense, constitutional, conservative ideas.”  Permit me to explain why I see this as significantly different.  When Governor Palin uses that particular phraseology, I believe she is describing the nature of the ideas. I also think she’s describing the nature of conservatism accurately.  Conservatism is rooted in a respect for common sense, or if you will, simple logic.  Conservatism is rooted in a reverence for the constitution as written by our founders, but not necessarily as reinterpreted by subsequent lawmakers or judges.  Based on such evidence as her career in politics makes plain, I don’t believe that Governor Palin is trying to re-define what conservatism is, but instead, simply explaining it those who haven’t understood it, or have been misled about it by some of the alleged practitioners(who weren’t.)

Enemy identification is a difficult task at times, and it’s made all the more difficult by enemies who try to position themselves as allies.  The GOP establishment doesn’t love any liberty so well that they’re willing to stand on its behalf if they perceive a popular movement of any dimension against it.  The truth may be worse, because just as many of my readers have perceived over time, there are instances in which it has been perfectly clear that establishment Republicans are part of the left.  Consider the issue of immigration, or the implementation of new entitlement programs, or their willingness to go along in many cases with further restrictions on firearm ownership.  See how they pander to the environmental movement, another front for radical leftists.  It is becoming apparent that in all meaningful ways, they are absolutely committed to undermining our republic, just like the leftists. The only significant difference I can see is that most of them will claim a committed faith, whereas the leftists distance themselves from faith in most instances.

There are those for whom such an apparent difference is enough to make a distinction, but as I have observed, I cannot know what a man truly believes simply because he declares it.  What I can know is what a politician has done, and what it says about the views held by virtue of their practice.  If this is the measure, and I firmly assert that there must be no other, I do not know why I would view the establishment of the Republican Party as anything other than an enemy, every bit as committed and intractable as the rabid left to the dissolution of the American republic as we have known it.  In the final analysis, this is why I am walking away briskly from the Republicans.   I am still “severely conservative.” I haven’t changed my views, but one: I no longer believe that the GOP can serve as a vehicle for the restoration of the republic.  I will no longer be tempted for short-run political advantage to adopt the old notion that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”  I will simply hereafter acknowledge that I may have more enemies, and that the only real battle between them is akin to the struggle between rival gangs.  They might fight with one another, but in practice, they’re all the same, and either will happily pillage, plunder and poach my life when the opportunity arises.

Rather than we conservatives looking for ways to join the Republican Party, I think it’s time for conservatives to move on, and let Republicans try to join with us.  I’m not willing to let the latest Republican Trojan horse through the gates of our city, bearing statists.  Be not deceived, conservatives.

 

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Posted in Featured, GOP Establishment, Leftist Cabal, Mitt Romney, News, Politics | 10 Comments »

Some Republicans Secretly Gleeful Over SCOTUS Decision

Saturday, June 30th, 2012

Benedict Roberts

There, I’ve said it, though I will be damned for it.  The problem we have had in the Republican party comes to surface at times like this, and I’m not going to participate in the reckless concealment.  There are those of political motives, who care not for the disaster that is the Supreme Court decision upholding the Affordable Care Act(a.k.a “Obama-care”) because it serves their political ends. Within some circles of the elite Republican establishment – that thing George Will assures us does not exist while telling us this ruling is really a ‘victory’ – there are those who are absolutely giddy with anticipation in the wake of this ruling, though they must presently conceal it.  It comes down to two things: Some of them are purely fifth-column statists, who actually want this law, and others are motivated solely by the opportunity they see in the political sphere.  After all, what better way to unite wayward Republicans and conservatives then to hit them with a true disaster?  If you’re a Republican party hack driven by purely political considerations and motives, this ruling is a gift from on high that will help drive the vote.

Sure, it does horrendous damage to the body of case-law.  Yes, it does gut the constitutional limits on Congressional power.  Absolutely, it permits Congress to tax in any way it likes so long as some moron in a black robe can dismiss its unconstitutional aspects as irrelevant or insignificant.  True, it really has no manner of a silver lining if you’re an actual conservative, but so what?  At least it will help Mitt Romney get elected by driving the herd!  It will permit the Republican establishment to foist their own version of it upon us, tinkered-with and massaged as it will be, but still the heart of the bill will remain intact, and the Beltway crowd can be ecstatic that they will have finally killed the meaning of the constitution, the rule of law, and the entire notion of American self-reliance and self-determination.  Nevertheless, it also offers the chance to the GOP establishment to round up the herd, and get them all running in the same direction.  That it had been an establishment Republican who sabotaged this ruling should be the dead giveaway.

I would ask my conservative brethren to consider the evidence.  Even a flimsy, often obtuse Anthony Kennedy ruled our way, so absurd is this law.  A man who is able to imagine that Arizona has not the authority to protect its own citizens from foreign invaders, as in Arizona v. United States was not able to imagine the Affordable Care Act as constitutionally permissible.  Think of that!  This law is so preposterous, and the arguments of the administration so bizarre and absurd that Anthony Kennedy could not sustain them, but John Roberts, Bush appointee, did.  Do we think John Roberts is truly the idiot that his ruling implies?  Do we believe John Roberts is so intellectually vacuous that he could not see the absurdity of his ruling?  If we believe this, why are we not demanding Boehner and the beltway boys impeach this man as an incompetent?  Why? I’ll tell you why: Because Boehner and his toadies would never do it anyway.

We are being herded.  We are being driven.  We are being run through the political squeeze-chutes of the GOP establishment.  These people are worse than our open enemy, the leftists.  They are using subterfuge and stealth to reorganize our society into their global vision of statism, a nanny-state version in which you have little freedom to choose, and even less money or property with which to exercise that choice.  We are descending into a death of one-thousand cuts, and we have Republican party bosses who are gleeful that we are angry, because they intend to use that as the fuel to recapture power, not for conservatism or freedom, but for the aggrandizement of their own statist vision, complete with open borders and vast social programs to which we are all enslaved, but as a bonus, with our votes, too!

How else does one explain the servile pronouncements by some conservative commentators that the ACA ruling had been a victory?  How else does one discount the accurate assessments of stalwarts like Mark Levin, who sees this monstrosity clearly?  How in the name of most unholy Hell does one derive the notion that this is anything but a national tragedy?  In some respects,  I place this ruling above Pearl Harbor Day.  In terms of the long-term damage it will do to America, I place it above 9/11.  I place it as the greatest attack on the United States and her people since before its current constitution had been adopted.  It will certainly lead to the death of more Americans.  It was certainly a plot hatched against us.  The delivery of the fatal blow was no less a shock.   I must go all the way back to General Benedict Arnold to find an apt analog for the sort of sabotage this infamy represents, and all brought to you by a bi-partisan Washington DC establishment that seeks to rule over you.

Remember, when some conservatives reflexively screamed at the notion of the appointment of Harriet Miers, many felt relief when George Bush put up John Roberts, who was seen as more reliably conservative and eminently more qualified, as was my pet goat.  That was the sham in all of this.  Roberts is no conservative, and his ruling in this case makes that plain, lest there be any confusion.  Harriet Miers was a throw-away nomination, and Roberts was the goal all along.  This is how politics is done.  I was astonished at the speed at which the reaction to the Miers controversy was brought to a head, and more astonished still at how quickly they dropped the ostensibly reliable Roberts on us.  Do you remember who screamed first and loudest at the Miers nomination?  I do. Odd how that critic is now a rabid Romney-bot these days, isn’t it? I hate conspiracy theories, but I always thought it odd how that whole situation turned out, with Rehnquist retiring just in time to re-nominate Roberts for the Chief Justice position.

Ladies and gentlemen, the truth is that the GOP establishment exists to keep us in check, to keep us to a dull roar as the statists reorganize our nation into their vision of global, social, welfare-statism.  The GOP establishment advances the ball(never spiking it, of course,) and we permit them to manage us like puppets.  If you accept their talking points these last three days, you’re playing directly into their hands, and you had better believe that they see this as a victory, because for their agenda, it is.  They will be immune to Obama-care.  They won’t worry about death panels.  They won’t worry about government-enforced rationing.  They won’t be waiting in the endless lines.  They won’t have any need to concern themselves with the entirety of the system they’re building, because they are above it, after all.

The same people who tried at every turn(and often succeeded) to blunt the conservative Reagan revolution are once again making political hay over this decision, as they now know you have no alternative.  They engineered it that way.  Feel free to believe what you want, of course, but for me, the matter is clear.  I have seen suppositions that somehow, Obama bullied Roberts into this decision, but I find that unlikely.  Roberts was placed in this position to uphold Obama-care.  There are those who will become apoplectic at the mere suggestion, but for me, the matter is now painfully obvious: If we do anything short of replacing the Republican Party, this nation will be damned.  I’ll not be kept in line any longer.  The Republican Party must rip this law out from the roots, or we must make a new party.

Some are still convinced that there exists a win in all of this.  They offer as evidence that we are still free, this moment, and that this affords to us a chance, somehow.  This is akin to saying that as the last breath escapes your lips, the hooligans choking the last of your life from you, there is still some chance.  Technically? Sure.  Practically? No.  Violence is being done to us, and the best we get from most Republicans indicate that many of them don’t mind, in fact, although there are a few notable exceptions.  On the 11th of July, we will have a pointless exercise of repeal in the House of Representatives, a tale told and believed only by idiots, that for all its sound and fury, will signify nothing.  The GOP establishment loves a charade, and too many of us likewise adore one.

 

 

 

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Posted in Activism, Featured, GOP Establishment, Healthcare, Mark Levin, Media, News, Obamacare, Politics, Supreme Court | 4 Comments »

…and Another Thing…

Sunday, May 20th, 2012

Who Me?

While I’m busy declaring war on the GOP establishment, I ought to make mention of another thing that burns me up.  Some of you will have noticed throughout the primary campaign season that certain GOP candidates seemed unwilling to go after Mitt Romney on a number of issues, and always seemed to defer to him in various ways.  It’s true.  Some of them seemed more interested in blowing him kisses than in defeating him, and to be blunt, some of you along with me thought at times that they may have been conspiring with Mitt right along.  If to withhold one’s criticisms of one’s opponents is to evince some sort of collusion, I must now ask you what it must be if Mitt Romney does it with respect to Barack Obama.   This business of Mitt Romney repudiating the examination of Barack Obama’s relationship with Reverend Jeremiah Wright and other leftist radicals is disgusting.

Mark Levin commented on this subject last week, and he properly flogged Romney.  RightScoop provides the audio.

Levin is spot-on here.  Romney used every conceivable advertising gimmick and revisionist historical fraud to attack Newt Gingrich, and he and his surrogates left no stone un-turned in seeking to hammer the former House Speaker, but when it comes to Barack Obama, some things are simply off limits.   Ladies and gentlemen, I must ask you with a sense of grim foreboding:  If you believe that Ron Paul held fire on Mitt Romney in exchange for something, why do you suppose Mitt Romney is insisting on holding fire against Barack Obama?  Answer it.  If you believe there is a quid pro quo in the first instance, please tell me what you believe about the second instance?  Don’t tell me that Romney is “unwilling to go to the gutter,” or some such nonsense.  He was more than willing when his opponent was Newt Gingrich.  He was more than willing when any of the would-be non-Romneys rose, even momentarily.  Sure, he used surrogates, but what is this business about leaving the Rev. Wright issue alone?

Does he believe it will buy Obama’s silence on Romney’s religion?  It won’t, and the evidence is that it hasn’t.  Knowing this, why would Romney seek to repudiate all of those who raise the issue of Rev. Wright?   When it was about obtaining the nomination, Romney was a “no-holds-barred” and “hey, that’s politics” sort of guy, but now that it’s Barack Obama, whose defeat is the object of this entire campaign, he’s pulling his punches?

Don’t tell me that the GOP establishment wishes to defeat Barack Obama.  Don’t tell me they don’t constitute a “fifth column.”  Don’t pretend to me that Mitt Romney is anything but another statist placeholder who will lead us into defeat.  I have taken all I am inclined to take when it comes to the Republican establishment.  It’s not that they don’t know how to win, but that they don’t want us to win.  Holding back on Barack Obama’s associations with radicals isn’t a strategy to “keep clear of the gutter,” as some would suppose, but a strategy to let Barack Obama go un-vetted for a second consecutive election cycle, and the only reason somebody, anybody, could possibly want that is…

What?

You see, there are those who have already begun to argue that Romney, if he loses, will do so because of a lack of support.  The idea is to shift blame to conservatives, Tea Party folk, or anybody else who will not step up and vocally support or at least vote for Romney.  I reject that thesis as a scandalous lie.  Don’t tell me Romney wants to win but doesn’t want to talk about Reverend Jeremiah Wright, or Bill Ayers, or the whole rogues’ gallery of philosophical villainy that accompanies Barack Obama.  Then, after rejecting these obvious problems with Barack Obama, I’m to blame if Mitt Romney loses?

No way.

If Mitt Romney loses, it will be because he failed.  He failed to be a conservative.  He failed to insist on talking about Barack Obama’s radical associations.  He failed to rally the base of the Republican party.  He failed to motivate conservatives.  He failed. If you want to blame me for a Romney loss, have at it, but I won’t accept blame.  Here we have a candidate who saw no problem in hammering his Republican opponents in dishonest ways, but who now shrinks from talking about the truth of Barack Obama, and some wish to blame me?

If you will not call a monster by name in public, why would you be surprised if others will not view him in that light?  After all, we elect Presidents because we expect them to tell us the truth even when it’s unpleasant.  If we know the truth about Obama, but Romney won’t say it, what could be the justification?  At what point does somebody step up and ask Romney:  “Why won’t you talk about Obama’s radical associations?”  Why, after saying he cannot tell the superPACs that support him what to do, when it came to Newt Gingrich, is he now going out of his way to dissociate himself from any discussion of Obama on this subject by those superPACs?  What he’s done is to “call off the dogs” on this, something he refused to do when it came to Gingrich just a few months ago, laughing it off as the nature of politics.

I am beginning to think Mitt Romney will have a good deal for which to answer if/when he loses in November, because if he refuses to talk about Obama’s past, he’s helping Obama to win.  Every conservative in the country must know this, lest a parade of the “political analysts” tell us it’s our fault.

Again.

 

 

 

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Posted in Barack Obama, Election 2012, GOP Establishment, Mitt Romney, News, Politics | 40 Comments »

Our Crisis

Saturday, May 19th, 2012

Thomas Paine

I was interested to read a piece and listen to the commentary by “Mr. L” posted on his Mr. L’s Tavern blog about why he won’t be out beating the drum for Mitt Romney this Fall, and I find that I simply cannot disagree.   His reasoning is sound, and in many ways, he repeats the complaints I’ve lodged, as well as those leveled by other staunch conservatives who realize Mitt Romney simply isn’t a conservative, by any measure, or in any significant way.  To be blunt about it, Mitt Romney is a liberal Republican, and while he may well be the party’s nominee, he’s not my candidate, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to hold my nose and vote for him.  I’m not alone, apparently, but there exists a growing number of people in the Republican party who are so desperate to be rid of Barack Obama that they will accept almost anyone.  I don’t like counterfeit conservatives, and in fact, it’s fair to say that in many respects, I dislike them even more than Obama, and it’s because they do more to undermine our nation than Obama ever will.  How many times have we been undermined by Republicans who rush to surrender to the statists?

In war, the only thing worse than the enemy is a saboteur or spy or collaborator, who pretends to be one of your own, while working to undermine you.  This is the reason that in war, we traditionally deal severely with traitors and such, because in fact, they are worse than the enemy because you’ve relied upon them to be on your side.  I have come to view the entirety of the Republican establishment in that light, and there’s really no getting around the fact that in many ways, they serve as a fifth column for the statist phalanx.  They pat us on the head like children, with all their solemn assurances that they understand the conservative point of view when they want and need our votes, but when it comes time to implement policy, the pat on the head is replaced by a swat on the behind as we’re sent to a perpetual time-out in the corner of the classroom.  After decades of this, we should begin to bring our own dunce caps.  We’ve been snookered again, but not by Barack Obama.  Despite the great Presidency of Ronald Reagan, the GOP establishment has never accepted our ideology, while they have accepted our votes and financial support.

We should expect Obama to lie, and to advance the cause of statism at every turn.  He’s a statist, and we’d be shocked if he did anything else, and for that reason, we have risen to oppose him.  The problem remains that we are still losing, but the reason we’re losing is not because Barack Obama is such a masterful politician.  He’s simply not that good.  Instead, we are losing because we accept leaders who dither and negotiate and squander every tactical advantage in pursuit of a strategy that doesn’t include any concept of victory you or I might accept.  Instead, the GOP establishment leads us from retreat to surrender, on one battlefield after the next, and the truth is that until we supplant them entirely, and until we push them out of the party, or abandon it to them, going off to form our own, we will never find victory, as it is ever delayed, forestalled, or abandoned as an idealistic goal never to be achieved.  Their approach rests on the basis of the “pragmatic” calculation that politics is all about the “art of compromise,” in establishment terms, but translated into language you and I understand: “Complete and unconditional surrender…over the long run.”  The Republican establishment offers that the statists are like The Borg of Star Trek infamy, and that we “will be assimilated.”

Mitt Romney is part of the greater parcel that ails the Republican party.  He’s exactly that which most conservatives can at best hold their noses to support, but at worst can merely look at with disdain, or even contempt.  As a matter of factual consideration, the truth is that Romney’s operatives were already undermining the McCain-Palin ticket during the 2008 election cycle in October, before the defeat, and they were already establishing the narrative that it was Sarah Palin’s fault.  Mr. L picked up on this fact, and I’ve discussed it here before, but I raise this only because Mr. L, while delivering the bill of particulars against Mitt Romney, mentions that the Romney bunch had been attacking Palin as early as Novemeber 5th of 2008, but I beg to differ only inasmuch as we now know they were attacking her a good deal earlier, in October.  It’s a minor point, but it’s not insignificant, as many of you voted for John McCain solely because he picked Sarah Palin to join him on the ticket, and in the context of a political “war,” it’s important to know who was working on behalf of Benedict Romney in shoving Palin under the bus, and when.  They didn’t wait for the defeat, but proactively began to establish a narrative aimed at undermining Palin for the future, and of course undercutting McCain-Palin in that cycle.

Bearing in mind that many of you were holding your noses to vote for McCain at all, motivated in large measure by the prospect of the able young Governor of Alaska as his running mate, it’s important for you to recognize who it is that you’re now being asked to support.  I say “asked,” but the truth is more like “cajoled” and “prodded” and “urged,” and in a few cases, “bullied.”  I won’t be bullied, so those vocal Romney-oids can cease with the e-mails.  I’m much too busy to read much e-mail these days, but what I do read won’t be the various iterations of “support Romney if you’re a real patriot.”  Excuse me?  The next time I see somebody named Romney walking a mile in the combat boots I once wore, talk to me about patriotism.  Otherwise, they can shove off.  While some of these were still in diapers, or standing on a stool to be breastfed in the absence of a Time magazine photographer, I was following orders all over the globe at the behest of a real Commander-in-Chief, so lay off the ridiculous appeals to a misplaced sense of patriotism.  It won’t work on me, so forget it.

You see, this is my basic dilemma, and it’s no different from what many of you now share:  Romney may well be all there is in 2012, but can we survive four more years of Obama?  I’ve decided that for me, the answer doesn’t matter any longer, even though I think the answer is “yes.”  Yes we can.  Yes we will.  What I’ve decided we cannot survive is another four years of an “opposition party” that doesn’t oppose diddly.  That’s right, I said it.  I have come to view the GOP establishment as the political enemy I must defeat.  I can’t defeat the statists by siding with their gentler , plodding version.  The constitutional republic will not be restored by going somewhat more slowly into that good night.  I recognize that many view Romney as a stalling tactic of sorts, and as a way to buy a little time to shore up Congress, take back the Senate, and so on.  I say to you that if you shore it up with Boehner, Cantor, and their ilk, while capturing the Senate only to place it in the hands of Mitch McConnell, there’s no point, and you’re not even delaying the inevitable.

I may find in short order that I am writing to read my own typos, and little else, but that’s okay by me. From obscurity only to return to obscurity is fine where I’m concerned.  I realize some conservatives have such an over-riding fear of Obama that they would vote for anybody at all who would oppose him, but I must tell you that I am not that desperate.  I am not afraid of the big bad wolf, huff and puff though he may.  My emotional, political and philosophical house is made of brick, and besides, I’ll always resist the further encroachment of government.  Over this last month and one-half as I have dealt with issues of a personal, professional, and agricultural nature, what I began to recognize is that Ayn Rand was correct: The only way to resolve such a problem is to withdraw your material support.  I think most of you already do that, each in your own way.  After all, how many of you have contributed to the GOP lately? You might selectively contribute to candidates or causes, but the party?  No. You’re not foolish, and you don’t wish to oil a machine that continues in many instances to work against you.

My question must then change:  If I do not wish to give my material support to the Republican Party, should I give the most precious thing I have to give — my vote — to the service of a party that has worked non-stop for three-and-one-half years to shove Mitt Romney down my throat?  A vote is a valuable thing, and I view it a bit like one’s virginity.  You shouldn’t yield it frivolously, because once you’ve done so, there’s no getting it back.  The glorious thing about a vote is that you have a new one to give in each election, although it can never fully repair any damage you may have done with its predecessors.  I want politicians to understand that my vote isn’t automatic because one has an “R” appended to his or her name, and that I expect performance.  The same is true of parties, and causes, and virtually anything in politics or the free market.  I don’t yet know how I will vote, but I am inclined to withhold it from either major candidate at this time.

There will be the inevitable cursing and gnashing of teeth aimed at me, along with the many others who may decide to stand in opposition to the GOP establishment.  I welcome it as I do the aches and pains of age that now greet me each morning , confirming  by unpleasant means the good news that I remain among the living.  In the same way, I expect that I will find that there exists some number of conservatives who will dislike my stance…immensely, but I will take their vocal displeasure as evidence that they understand the implications of my stand.  If the people who would tend to vote Republican in lieu of a conservative candidate wish to win the White House, they’re going to find their path difficult.  Like Mr. L, I will not “rah-rah” for a liberal Republican.  I will not trade my virtue for momentary satisfaction that will leave me feeling empty in the searing light of the morning after.

I recognize there will be those of you who disagree with my position on this, but that’s a deeply personal choice we must make, one and all.  I’m not so afraid of Barack Obama.  I’m not frightened of all of the things we believe he might well bring about, because I now view most of them as inevitable, and I know that Mitt Romney will neither stop them, nor even be inclined to do so if he could.  I also know that in another generation, we won’t have so many people willing to resist as we do now.  This is and has been the intention of the statists right along, as they have propagandized our children for five decades.  I have long agreed with the words of Thomas Paine, for so long as I’ve known them, and now that the time is drawing nigh, I will not wilt from them, or pretend they hadn’t been uttered, or written:

“If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace. ” -Thomas Paine

Is this not the sentiment of all conservatives?  I think it so.   Will a battle with the GOP establishment be messy?  Undoubtedly.  Will conducting it whilst the raging statism of Obama continues apace make it all the more desperate a battle?  Surely.  Will I yield for the sake of a false unity that abides no satisfaction of my complaints?  No.  These times truly are what Paine reported as he wrote of The Crisis:

“THESE are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated. Britain, with an army to enforce her tyranny, has declared that she has a right (not only to TAX) but “to BIND us in ALL CASES WHATSOEVER” and if being bound in that manner, is not slavery, then is there not such a thing as slavery upon earth. Even the expression is impious; for so unlimited a power can belong only to God.”

If this is not the character of our resistance to tyranny, I must ask “Why bother?”  Do I trade my vote to forestall it only?  For what will I next trade it?  A month’s delay? A week?  Another miserable breath?  If I must ask myself about the character that has been my life, I cannot for so paltry a sum diminish it.  Life may abound in compromises, but even so, knowing what constitutes compromise from that which embodies surrender is a critical distinction I cannot ignore.  I will not be bound to Mitt Romney, and I will not admit that Barack Obama controls my fate.

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Posted in Conservatism, Election 2012, Featured, GOP Establishment, Media, Mitt Romney, News, Politics | 48 Comments »

Scapegoating Conservatism: Post-Defeat Planners Redux

Saturday, May 5th, 2012

Conservatives?

One of the things I’ve already noticed is the start of the excuse-making on the part of the Republican establishment.  They shoved Mitt Romney down our throats, but some of us have vomited him out of our mouths because we simply cannot tame the bile-raising nausea we feel in the pits of our stomachs.  The immediate response of the GOP establishment has been to manufacture a narrative that will effectively blame conservatives if Romney loses.  They won’t blame his lack of conservatism.  They won’t blame his duplicity or his negative primary campaign.  They won’t blame their own complicity in setting us up with a candidate we don’t want, but what they will do is blame we conservatives, and it’s starting already.

I don’t play that game.  If they wanted to win this election, they could have supported a conservative candidate for a change, but they are very much a take-it-or-leave-it crowd.  You see, if they don’t get their way, they take their ball and their donations and go home, all while they insist we conservatives are to blame if we respond similarly, leading to the defeat of their chosen candidate.  The problem the establishment faces is that conservatives still remember Ronald Reagan, and they know too well that genuine conservatism wins.  They can continue to scapegoat conservatism, but we shouldn’t accept their excuses any longer, and we shouldn’t fall into the trap that this year’s crop of post-defeat planners are already laying.

If I owned a hot-dog stand and after years of selling barely palatable wieners,  I go to something even worse, my customers will likely find them disgusting, causing them to flee.  Do I blame them for their lack of “loyalty?”  I might even cry “but you’ll starve without my hot-dogs,” but will they?  I might appeal to their sense of loyalty as customers of long-standing, but if they don’t like my product because it’s terrible, who is to blame?  Them?  Or me?   In making the loyalty argument, I must purposely evade a concept my customers would be right to throw in my face:  If I were loyal to them, I wouldn’t try to feed them bad product, and rather than worsening it, would concentrate on improving it.

They may even appeal to my patriotism: “How can you let Obama win?”   As with the loyalty argument, I again turn it around:  How can they offer us a candidate who they know many of us will not be able to support, if they care about the country?  In a free market, such intransigence would soon lead me to go out of business, and the fact of the matter is that the same is true of the GOP establishment.  Of course, they’ve tried to rig the market in their favor, but it’s really not possible in the longer run.  They use their influence, given them by means of our votes, to solidify their hold on the “market” of political ideas, and it is our willingness to do so that enables them to continue.

The good news is that we can still make gains from this election cycle.  We can still elect conservatives to all of the down-ballot seats, and as is now plain from polling data in Indiana, where Richard Mourdock is now leading Dick Lugar despite a multi-million dollar campaign against him, it’s evident that we conservatives can still turn the tables on the establishment.  In Texas, we’re having a bit more of an uphill battle as the establishment guy, Lt. Governor David Dewhurst continues to run slightly ahead of Ted Cruz and a whole slate of lesser-known candidates, but with less than a month to go, it’s still close enough that it’s anybody’s race and we may well wind up with a run-off, in which case Cruz looks stronger.

The basic point is that irrespective of the Presidential race, we can still have a significant impact in 2012.  If we can sweep away some of the liberal Republicans in the Senate, and replace a number of the Democrats who are up this year with conservatives, we can stymie President Obama and aggressively pursue him should he continue to use illegitimate executive powers to run an end-around on Congress even if Romney loses.  If Romney wins, it will leave us with some means by which to exert control over him.

Of course, the establishment won’t go quietly.  They will continue their game, and part of their play is to make you feel as though you must support their guy.   Once you realize this, it’s easier to understand how it is that they can sell you a lower quality hot-dog, and you will be forced to swallow it, disgruntled though you may be.  In the end, they know that while they are not really the sole source, or the sole choice, they are the sole choice you can bring yourselves to make.  It’s true in both parties, but what this really means is that in most respects, our country is ruled by a political oligopoly that wishes to leave you with no other alternative.  They can afford to wait you out in most cases, because even if you sit out an election or two in protest, you’ll eventually be ripened by some issue to come back to them for harvest.  This is why they’re willing to lose elections in order to punish you.  After all, it won’t hurt them much, but let’s examine who loses what, and under which circumstances the losses really occur.

If Mitt Romney loses in November, does the GOP establishment lose?  I contend to you that they not only win, but they have set up the manner by which they will win big in 2016.  By then, assuming the country endures(and I believe it will,) they will have managed to create some substantial sense of Obama-fatigue.  Its early manifestations are already showing up in the polls, but you see, for the elites of the GOP establishment, none of it will make any difference to their immediate health, safety, or prospects for continuing profits.  In short, they won’t be hurt because their money insulates them.  Your farms may go down, your businesses may crash, your jobs may disappear, or you may find yourselves in other calamities, but none of that will bother them.  In fact, it will tend to make you more compliant with their desires and demands in the future.  If you’re starving, you’ll take my low-quality hot-dog any way I wish to serve it.

It’s for this reason that they don’t mind losing an election or two(or ten.)  If it serves their long-run interests, it may even be preferable to victory.  It also gives the Republican establishment an opportunity to defame conservatives[again.]  This makes it easier for them to win in the future, because if they can succeed in painting conservatives as heartless, inflexible ideologues who would rather lose than compromise, it makes it all the easier to sell the American people a “compassionate conservative,” who does not actually exhibit the first substantially conservative trait once examined closely.   It’s for this reason that I believe the Republican establishment will be happy to see Mitt Romney lose, because in 2016, you’ll be only too thrilled if they offer you Jeb Bush.  At that point, you’ll vote for the most liberal Republican they throw at you if only you can get rid of the Democrats.

Viewed in this manner, the GOP establishment knows it has conservatives over a barrel, and that’s what they’ve been working to do throughout this election cycle, and in perpetuity.  I realize that the choices they offer us are abysmal, because that’s the nature of their game.  Where I will not budge is on this notion that conservatives will have been at fault if they do not support Mitt Romney in November.  Viewed as any other business competing for customers or clients, the Republican Party has a responsibility to put forth an acceptable candidate.  Failing that, it is they who are to blame, and it is they who are culpable in any defeat suffered.

Of course, that assumes they want to win(in 2012,) but given Mitt Romney’s record as Governor of Massachusetts, I’m not convinced that’s the case.  They have intentionally put forward a man who is a veritable “poison pill” for many conservatives, and I don’t believe it’s accidental, or somehow the result of political happenstance.   Besides, from the GOP establishment point of view, this allows them to kill off a whole flock with a single stone.  Conservatives and Tea Partiers will take the blame, and they’ll be able to sell us on almost anybody in 2016 when they’ll have an easier time winning the Oval Office because it will soon be vacated anyway.  That’s Win, Win, and WIN from their point of view.

Conservatives and Tea Party types should be prepared for the moment when the blame game begins in earnest.  They’ve already begun to push this narrative, and that’s to be expected, but should Romney lose(and many are fairly certain he will,) you can bet that the morning of November 7th, the questions will commence on FoxNews and other establishment outlets:  “What’s wrong with conservatives?  Why are they so hard to please?  What will we do about the Tea Party?”  Bank on it. Even now, the recriminations are beginning, softly, gently now, but they will build to a crescendo by November the 7th.  I actually had a telephone call from one conservative campaign fund call and urge me to contribute on the basis that Mitt Romney probably cannot win, so we need to shore up the Congressional side, and yet there are those conservatives who say I am a gloomy guy?

On the other hand, if Romney manages to win, this will be an even bigger victory for the GOP establishment:  They will have been able to put up a liberal Republican, and out of sheer desperation, have conservatives support him.  Game over! At that point, conservatives will have no means by which to restrain a Romney administration, because they will have been a paper tiger.  This is the dilemma we conservatives face, which is why I still hold out hope, slim though it may be, for a brokered convention.  There’s a reason Romney is having a closed-door meeting with Santorum, and you’d better believe it’s about trying to get more support.   I don’t think conservatives can afford for either Obama or Romney to win, whether out of desperation to rid ourselves of Obama, or in order to avoid the inevitable scapegoating.  In particular now, it seems the GOP establishment is going after Palin supporters.  Ah well, yes, most of us are accustomed to that, as the same crowd tried to make a scapegoat of Sarah Palin in 2008.

The simple fact remains:  I can’t see how Mitt Romney’s supporters or the GOP establishment will be able to carry off such scapegoating with any credibility.  After all, how unpalatable must a candidate be to lose to an incumbent who has unemployment at around 8%, has record deficits, has added trillions of dollars to the national debt, has overseen the devaluing of the dollar, starved us of fuel and energy resources, hobbled our military, aided our enemies, abandoned our allies, and generally made a wreck of things?

Just how bad must a Republican be to lose in that kind of environment?  How thoroughly must he have been disliked, not only in the general electorate, but in his own party in order to lose despite such conditions?  How thoroughly has his campaign offended some sizable number of conservatives?  Should he expect such voters to shut up and eat the week-old hot-dog he’s selling? Are you ready to paste your palate with that stale, low-grade bun that’s been in the steamer rack four times this week?  The GOP knows what it’s doing.  You still believe, innocently, that they want to win, but it’s becoming increasingly apparent to me that they do not, and I’m not willing to let them off the hook by playing the role of scapegoat, and I won’t eat sorry hot-dogs for a notion of loyalty that is clearly unidirectional.

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Posted in Activism, Conservatism, Election 2012, Featured, GOP Establishment, Mitt Romney, News, Politics, Tea Party | 27 Comments »

If You Can’t Beat ‘em, Join ‘em?

Thursday, May 3rd, 2012

Conservatism Rides On Roof...

Signaling what may be the beginning of a new round of endorsements of Mitt Romney, Michele Bachmann(R-MN,) endorsed Romney on Thursday, but one wonders how she squares this endorsement with her position prior to exiting the race that Romney “cannot beat Obama.”  This may be the beginning of the big push to get everybody to rally around Romney, with Newt Gingrich having suspended his campaign officially this past Wednesday, and it may leave some number of conservatives in the lurch, including me, because I’m really not interested in endorsing Governor Romney.  On the basis of the adage “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” I find I’m in the position that I have no choice.  I’m not the sort to tell people how to vote, as I would rather make my arguments and leave people to decide on their own, so I’m rarely inclined to “endorse” anybody.  Naturally, as you might expect, any sort of “endorsement” I might offer will be fully justified in the context of my arguments, unconventional though it may be.  In order to explain myself, I need to catalog my reasoning:

Mitt Romney is a spineless wonder when it comes to confronting not only the left, but also the media.  He stays away from interviews he thinks might go poorly for him, considering the particular outlet, and this makes him positively disgusting in my view.  I have no problem with a candidate avoiding a liberal outlet on which it is believed a fair shake will not be offered, but to avoid interviews on conservative shows is another matter.  In virtually every issue over which there exists controversy, Willard remains aloof until the dust settles, never staking out a firm position until the outcome is already settled.  Remember the Debt Ceiling debate?  He had nothing of merit to say until it was over.  Remember the issue of Eric Holder and “Operation Fast and Furious?”  While others called for Holder to step down, and still others called upon President Obama to fire the Attorney General, Mitt remained quiet about it until the evidence was completely damning, and Holder had been criticized broadly.  That’s Mitt Romney’s leadership style, and if you’re going to replace Obama, you might just as well get somebody who joins President Obama in “leading from behind.”

Mitt is the father of Romneycare, and Romneycare begot Obamacare.  If you’re a fan of socialized medicine, this is your guy!  If you like health insurance mandates, and if you really love the notion of death panels, you have found the guy who brought this system to America.  He won’t repeal Obamacare, although he may tinker with it a bit, and if you’re into big government programs, the Republicans couldn’t have picked a better nominee.  Mitt Romney is the son of a liberal Republican archetype, so none of this is really a surprise.

Mitt Romney is a loser.  That’s what Republicans do when they nominate liberals only barely disguised as conservatives, and if you liked the Bob Dole campaign of 1996, you will absolutely love Mitt Romney’s.  He’s been endorsed by a whole slate of Bush-clan members, minus the most recent President Bush, and he’s the establishment’s chosen son.  If you liked the communitarian policy preferences of George W. Bush, or for that matter, his father, you’re going to love Mitt Romney.  If you want somebody who will carry on the Bush dynasty, throwing occasional bones to conservatives while holding court with a bunch of liberals, there has been no finer example of the type seeking the GOP nomination in 2012.

Mitt Romney is not a conservative, despite the pretense, and while the media will do its best to portray him as such in order to attack conservatives, the simple truth is that he’s more inclined to be one of theirs than one of ours.  He will be hammered by the press as a member of the elite, and a rich Wall Street guy, who is out of touch with mainstream America, working-class America, and so on.  He fits the template of the candidate against whom Barack Obama most wishes to run.  He relies upon his own version of Alinskyite tactics, since his father George Romney thought Alinsky was a peach.  We don’t need to worry about Mitt Romney dredging up Saul Alinsky in this campaign, and raise any issues that might be uncomfortable for Obama.  Isn’t that swell?

Of course, if you like failed campaign tactics, consider what Mitt Romney has employed throughout the primaries.  He and his supporting cast of super-PACs have absolutely demolished every opponent, by running dishonest attack ads to a degree I believe is unprecedented in Republican primary campaigns.  He has managed to demoralize conservatives to a degree that some will simply never vote for him, and that means he’s placed his own election chances in serious jeopardy.  His strategy rested upon ad buys that outspent his opponents by as much as twenty to one.  Of course, nobody in the media is asking how this strategy will translate to a general election campaign, when he will not have such an advantage over Barack Obama, and besides, he won’t want to offend any moderates or liberals.  Offending conservatives is fine where Mitt is concerned, but one simply mustn’t offend the left.

Considering all these reasons, I therefore believe it is nigh on inevitable that Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee and candidate for President, and he will almost certainly, inevitably lose the contest to Barack Obama, barring some completely unknown factor.  Of all the Republicans the party could have chosen to best and most thoroughly lose the coming presidential election, I believe Willard “Mitt” Romney is absolutely the most thoroughly qualified.  It’s clear that the party establishment intends to lose this election, so that they can put up another insider, perhaps another Bush, and Mitt Romney makes the perfect place-holder.  He’s safe.  He stands little or no chance of victory, and that will clear the path for Barack Obama’s second term, and an incumbent-free oval office in 2016.

Since it’s fairly clear to me that the GOP establishment wants to lose this election, as is clear by its “inevitable” nominee who at last seems to fill that role, I believe I will support the Republican party in its goals.  They didn’t want conservative support, and they tried to close off conservative participation, and I am in the mood to grant them their wish.  Many conservatives aren’t excited about a Romney candidacy, because they know even if he were to win, they will spend the entirety of a Romney administration not battling liberals, but instead in a constant battle to prevent Romney from going along with the left.   Even if Mitt Romney manages to beat Barack Obama by some cosmic comedy of errors on the part of the Obama team, he will have done so without my help.  It is with this in mind that I do hereby heartily “endorse” Mitt Romney as the next liberal Republican presidential loser in a long string of them.   Those who have more recently joined the Romney camp may find my “endorsement” somewhat lackluster, but after all, as a conservative, I believe in accepting responsibility and doing things right, so if we’re going to lose, we might just as well lose big.  It’s the least I can do.

Conservatives may eventually hop aboard the Romney bus, but if and when we do, we will be riding on the roof, and we know it.

 

Note to Readers: My apologies for the lack of posts lately. Between the recent death of my father-in-law, the Spring work on the farm, and a difficult and lengthy project at work that is consuming between twelve and fifteen hours daily, seven days per week, I’ve been unable to post so much as normal.  I expect that by the end of May, the bulk of the farm-related efforts will be complete for the season, and by mid-June, the project at work should be complete.   There will undoubtedly be occasions upon which I am able to post more in that period, but it obviously hasn’t been this week.

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Posted in Featured, GOP Candidates, GOP Establishment, Mitt Romney, News, Politics | 37 Comments »

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