Is she trying to secure a job in a presumptive Romney White House? I’m not certain, but after watching her performance on Tuesday night on Hannity’s show on Fox News, I can tell you that she ought to just break out with a big Romney 2012 button. Perino actually referred to Romney as a conservative, but the truth is Mitt Romney is roughly as conservative as Barack Obama, at least if we ignore what he’s now saying long enough to examine his record. Romney’s problem is that he sounds vaguely conservative, but his record and his own personal conduct reveal is a “conservative” in exactly the same sense Mayor Bloomberg of New York is a “conservative,” which is to say: Not at all. When Dana Perino calls somebody “conservative,” it’s approximately as though she’s saying the person in question is somewhat to the right of Karl Marx. I don’t trust the RINOs any longer, and neither should you.
Recently, Romney has been talking tough on illegal immigration. He’s argued in favor of a tough set of standards and procedures for employers to verify the eligibility of workers to hold down a job in the US. As recently as last Monday, he appeared in a Town Hall meeting and said this:
“So I say if you want to stop the flow of illegals, you need a fence and you have to turn off the magnets,” Romney concluded. “So what I would do is, number one, have a system that makes it easy for an employer to know who is legal and not. And number two, crack down on employers that hire people illegally.”
Isn’t that wonderful? Isn’t that special? Ms. Perino would undoubtedly hold this forth as a sign of Romney’s alleged “conservatism.” Unfortunately for both she and the Mittster, some folk have slightly longer memories. At least twice in the last five years, Romney has used a landscaping company that has employed illegals in cutting his lawn. In neither case did he do anything about it until informed by journalists. This makes it difficult to take Romney seriously as a “conservative.” Some will seek to excuse this, but let’s be honest about it: If he can’t keep illegals off his lawn, what chance do the rest of you stand?
Of course, as you may have seen if you surf past Mark Levin’s website, this isn’t the only problem with Romney’s alleged “conservative credentials.” As the Boston Herald reported, Romney instituted a program of free wheels for welfare recipients, whereby the State of Massachusetts defrayed the cost of insurance in combination with donated cars that constituted an outrage locally.
Meanwhile, Chris Christie was out telling the world how the Occupy Wall Street protesters are a lot like the Tea Party. I’m sure Ms. Perino would insist Christie is a “conservative” too. I am sick of these Bush operatives telling us that some RINO or other is a “conservative.” They spent three decades trying to tell us that George HW Bush and his son George W Bush are conservatives. It simply doesn’t sell any longer. All of these people have tried to co-opt the Reagan legacy, and none of them substantially agree with what Ronald Reagan believed, and absolutely all of them are big advocates of some sort of amnesty for illegal immigration, stealth or otherwise.
If you’re a Tea Party patriot or a conservative, you are probably angered by all of these phonies in media telling us who is or isn’t a conservative. This has been the problem with the Republican party since at least 1988, and prior to 1981. In fact, one could say this was one of the great obstructions Reagan faced while he was President. I have no use for the Republican establishment, and Dana Perino is one of the worst shills for the establishment GOP Bush cronies in media. I’m tempted to shout from the mountain tops in a hat-tip to the Reverend Jesse Jackson, circa 2000, who warned his fellow Democrats in what may have been the one and only time anybody should have listened to Jesse:
Jesse Jackson:
I suspect that your observations regarding what you called "the problem with the Republican party" had a role to play in Sarah's decision. In the 2008 campaign, as shared in her book Going Rogue, she saw it for all its ugliness up close and personal, including having members of McCain's staff personally attack her while he sat by with his thumb up his you-know-what! This is exactly what she was going to have to be dealing with in a national presidential campaign and these traitors were supposedly on her side! Given her youth, I believe that part of her decision was to step back and develop a strategy to take the Republican Party back from the Permanent Political Class from the ground up by working for Constitutional Conservatives at the governor and congressional levels. Given her track record in 2010, it looks to be a winner.
I've long discounted Dana's acuity. Suppose if you were in the last term of the GWB White House, even RINOs look conservative.
Bigger story is Sarah Palin promoting Gingrich, yuck!
Mark, I suggest you start using BGR rather than RINO. A BGR — a Big Government Republican — is defined by Jeffrey Lord in a very recent American Spectator essay entitled "Clark Clifford Republicans." And, as Henry Higgins said about Eliza Doolittle, "By George, I think she's got it!" so to has Lord nailed it with respect to Beltway Republicans. BTW, Sarah makes a cameo appearance as a violent opponent of BGRs. The problem is the BGRs make far too much money working to negotiate their (very high paying) clients through the D.C. bureaucracy. The problem is that any effort to reduce the size of government — a vital necessity, IMHO — is a threat to their rice bowl. And, as much as they might philosophically like to reduce the size of government, they have kids in college at more than $60K per year apiece, so…
Yes, I agree that a better name is needed.
Might as well reelect OBUMMA over Romney. They both think the same. Agenda 21. It's time or past time to clean house!! Get rid of Karl Rove and the rest of them. It has been very plain from the onset that Romney was who (they) wanted to run. Then get us out of the UN. I kind of like the term (BGR) over RINO. Look more to the tea party and the everyday working man. fred johnson
Suggesting that Romney is pro-Agenda 21 is more than disingenuous and wrong it is also irresponsible. When does it honestly become a legal liability for someone, anyone to blatantly defame people (Romney too) w/out the benefit of having to qualify their remarks.
This is the height of the problem – people (inlcuding you Mark) feel the latitude to say whatever you want and if you make it public one has to conclude that it is for the benefit of persuading others to your point. But to do so w/out feeling a sense of responsibility to qualify what you say is part and parcel to the irresponsibility that plagues our society and the dissemination of factual information.
Keith, I don't know whether Romney is pro-Agenda 21, but his previous stances on environmental issues suggest that he's of a mind to be in agreement with it. I doubt whether Romney ever came out and said "I am for Agenda 21". Things like that don't get that form of support from politicians.
Mark, not surprised you picked up on Dana Perino's Romney pom-pom rustling on Hannity. I did, too. Immediately.
And not surprised by Perino's true colors, just very, very amused by her blatant, empty, paint-by-numbers advocacy. I don't think I'd ever seen her that unfettered about her moderate mush values. I believe Varney was discussing Cain's 9-9-9 plan and how the others didn't have one. She piped up instantly, imploringly reminding viewers: "Romney has a plan!"
She was openly biased for Romney and spent her entire airtime nudging what was supposed to be objective analysis into a Romney pitch.
It really hit home for me: George W. Bush is a good man and I thank him for his post-9/11 diligence. But neither he nor his administration (Perino included) were ever one of us. Just wish I'd fully grasped that long ago.
Before you blanketly label me also..
Just for the record I would love a Sarah Palin Presidency as well.
"If you're a Tea Party patriot or a conservative, you are probably angered by all of these phonies in media telling us who is or isn't a conservative. "
I come from an old-school conservative family and have always considered myself a constitutional conservative. Being a bit of an outsider here on Mark's site (I support Ron Paul) I have to say that, yes, it does anger me sometimes to see the media spouting nonsensical garbage in the name of conservatism.
If only the Republican Party could agree on getting back to it's traditional conservative values (which is what wins elections) we wouldn't be faced (as we are now) with the ridiculous task of considering anyone other than a conservative candidate for our party.
The inevitable is coming. It's like a snowball rushing down the slope, picking up speed and it can't be stopped. The crash is going to hurt EVERYONE. It is then that the people will have to choose. Mark, most of your readers already have, but the snowball is not going to wait for people to wake up. So, the RINOs are finished, for all intent and purposes. They will feel the pain as much or more than most. The Marxist structure is just about set, depending on how these protests are handled over the next 9 months, for the government to step in and take us back 400 years. All the way back to
Jamestown. We need another option. Whatever Rino is in office in 13', will be worthless. I predict that it will be brutal. We have to have everyone ready. They don't know that they will be ready, but we keep getting the message out, it will hit them right in the face when the time is right.