Duncan Hunter on GOP & Tea Party Politics, Rick Perry and Ilegal Aliens

AJM: Not bad, it looks like we actually have about a 68 degree temperature today, with no rain.

DH: Well, I’m going up right now with a friend of mine, trying to find a place for getting a fishing license. We’re driving up the road and can’t find anything. What are you doing?

AJM: I was up north at an industrial site today, checking out some electrical equipment. Just got back in the office, and itching to get your 2 cents on the issues of the day.

DH: Well I haven’t had…OK. Go right ahead. First tell me the news and then I’ll comment on it. (laughs)

AJM: That’s how it usually works. You’re too busy fishing and campaigning and being a grandpa to spend time reading all the newspapers. (laughs)

AJM: First thing I’d like to mention is that up in Idaho, some MORON from the Tea Party Express group, one of the leaders of the Tea Party Express – which I had been quite admiring of all this time – came out and endorsed Walt Minnick up in Idaho. And I just about fell of the floor when I read that…

AJM: Not sure if there is a real leader, but some guy who claims to be an organizer said ‘we have to have some democrats so we’re going to pick out Minnick’, who by democratic standards isn’t awful. So they decided to pick him and I’m thinking this has GOT to go to Vaughn Ward, we need that seat!

DH: Yeah, I agree with you totally. My point is I don’t think the Tea Party has an elected leader do they

DH: Obviously, things like this were bound to start. The dems and Minnick are spending extra hours trying to figure out how to keep Minnick in that seat as the tide turns. So the obvious way to do that is to get the Tea Partiers, to try to split some tea partiers off.

What we ought to do, the Republican Party ought to do a thing, an ad, that shows all of the votes that Walt Minnick made when he voted to make Nancy Pelosi Speaker of the House. He cast the die for an extreme liberal agenda.

The other thing I think we don’t notify the American people enough about is the fact that these democrats in conservative clothing who cast symbolic votes after their party allows them to leave the herd because there are enough votes – the bill is going to pass anyway – the one important vote that they are not given any discretion on is the vote for the Chairmen of the House committees. So Walt Minnick voted for people like John Conyers as chairman of Judiciary.

DH: Yeah, so he not only voted for Nancy Pelosi and cast his die for an extreme socialist agenda in Congress, but he also voted for these chairmen who are going to carry out the Obama-Pelosi philosophy. And the Republicans ought to be taking him to task for that.

AJM: I think that Mr. Ward would be well advised to do it himself, but he’s got to win that primary first. I think he’s got a great shot at that.

AJM: Now I’m going to switch from Idaho to Arizona. This is fresh news, to keep you up to date. The newest Rasmussen Poll came out for the Senate race there. And your old buddy JD is only five points down now, which is about a 15 point improvement where he was a couple of months ago.

DH: And my reaction to that is that they are both friends, they both campaigned for me in San Diego. No one can tell JD he doesn’t have the right to run, but I’m going to concentrate my efforts on the campaigns against the democrats.

AJM: Yeah, yeah, I know, though I’m quite sure it won’t break your heart when JD manages to pull that out of the fire.

There was some other news from Arizona too. The State assembly passed the toughest immigration bill of any state just this past week. Where they are going to basically codify what Sheriff Arpaio’s being doing down there, and that is if you pull some one over for a minor traffic or other violation, you check them for citizenship, and arrest them if they aren’t. What do you think about that?

DH: I think it’s a result of the frustration of the state and local governments with the federal government’ refusal to finish the Border Fence and to provide a real strengthening of the borders, which is desperately needed! So the state and local reaction is that they are going to have to start taking measures themselves to ensure that….to essentially extinguish the magnet which has been created to bring people across the border illegally. And the Obama administration is busy strategizing, trying to figure out the best way to avoid having to arrest and deport these folks, while giving the appearance that they are accomplishing something.

AJM: Yeah, and I believe that Phoenix is the kidnap capital of large cities in the United States now because of all the illegal drug traffickers.

AJM: I don’t remember the number, but I remember reading it twice now that it was number one for large cities in kidnappings. And almost all of them have to do with the southern border drug trade.

DH: I think that Arizona could take a lesson from San Diego County. In that after I built the border fence between Mexico and San Diego County or the City of San Diego, the crime rate dropped, by FBI statistics, by 54%. There is a large population of criminals who move back and forth across the border in areas where they are not impeded by a real fence.

AJM: Yeah, and old Slick Perry, who more than just about anybody else was ridiculing your fence, is now begging the feds, and is thinking of sending troops down there because the border is so grossly out of control. His statements on the border fence were the most ridiculous I’ve seen next to Janet Napolitano’s.

DH: Yeah. Yeah, Rick Perry is the guy who claimed he wanted to have a “friendly” border. Now he’s got one.

DH: The problem is that it is friendly to felons, drug traffickers, and literally thousands of people who are coming across the border illegally and….

AJM: You were just finishing up on Texas and 1000s of illegals trampling over Perry’s backside.

DH: I was saying that Perry and the Texas Senators did not want the border fence. So they killed the border fence, on the basis that they wanted to have a friendly border. They got a friendly border, but the problem is it’s friendly to drug dealers, rapists, and felons who are coming across in increasing numbers to commit crimes against Americans and move large amounts of cocaine and other narcotics.

AJM: Yeah, absolutely. We were discussing a few minutes ago Arizona, and I mentioned the new law and you said local politicians were taking matters into their own hands. They tried to take matters into their own hands in 2008 when they picked you as their #1 favorite Presidential candidate out there in Phoenix!

AJM: They are, they are. You smoked McCain and all the RINOs. Anyway, maybe they can get another chance with that scenario?

AJM: I wanted to mention also, the NY Times and CBS did their joint poll yesterday, or over the last few days and released the results just now. 52% of Americans believe that Obama is moving the country to socialism. Only 52 percent?! (Laughs)

AJM: I think it is finally starting to sink in. His own approval numbers are showing it. I think the message needs to be hammered home.

DH: Yeah. That is the reason that candidate Obama never wanted to define what ‘change’ meant.

AJM: Yeah, that was his campaign strategy, and unfortunately, McCain and Palin did not force him to. I thought they ran a very timid campaign in terms of Obama’s known radicalism. Rush Limbaugh and people like me were screaming it from the top of our lungs that this clown is bad news, and they treated him with kid gloves.

DH: Well, we got what we got, unfortunately, so we now have to concentrate in winning the House back in the fall.

AJM: Yeah. The point of me bringing up that 52 % of Americans believe that he’s a socialist is that message is finally starting to resonate with the general population.

DH: Well yeah. I think it’s fairly clear that tracking Obama’s record on his government programs is like tracking a wounded elephant in the snow. I think it’s been very easy to tell which direction he’s headed.

DH: (laughs) Yeah. Well that’s true. Let’s not use the wounded elephant. We’re the wounded elephant.

AJM: Exactly. And even your old friend Newt came out a couple days ago in the papers and said that the Obama Administration is the most radical, leftwing Administration in US history. Do you agree?

AJM: I guess so, he was pushing Obama’s education plans last I checked. But our mission is in front of us.

DH: Yes, it is. And our mission is to energize the American people. And produce victories in these swing districts, these marginal districts, and take back the House. That will help stem the bleeding until 2012.

AJM: Absolutely. Some of your conservative former colleagues still in the House – Michele Bachmann comes to mind, and even old John Boehner – have said that if we win in 2010, they are going to starve the beast. In other words they are not going to fund ObamaCare. Do you think that is a good message to run on?

DH: Certainly! I think ANYTHING they can do to stop this socializing of the medical system is a good thing. And a practical way for a Republican congress to accomplish that is to cut off money for every single one of Obama’s steps towards socialism. And his medical takeover is his biggest step, so far.

AJM: Absolutely. Oh, I had a 3rd thing about Arizona. One of their committees just passed a law, or rather passed a bill out of committee with 45 or so cosponsors, that going forward, every presidential candidate needs to produce absolute proof of natural born citizen status.

AJM: Arizona is one of 7 or 8 states that are actually considering this law. And I’m guessing you know why they did it?

DH: Personally, I wouldn’t care if Obama came from the moon if his policies didn’t come from Stalingrad.

DH: In seriousness, the United States expended a lot of lives and deployed troops in a lot of difficult and dangerous places over the last hundred years to retain our freedom, to protect our freedom, to defend our constitution, and the idea that we have ‘voluntarily’ given up such huge chunks of that freedom as a function of the last election is a tragedy. A genuine tragedy.

AJM: That’s why I feel a little better today. Did you see any TV yesterday? There were Tea Parties from coast to coast – small towns, medium sized towns, capitols – I think in San Jose or someplace near there they had 10,000 people. I think they had several hundred thousand people in the DC. So something is in the air, and knock on wood, it is pointing to a conservative victory in 2010.

DH: Yeah. Hopefully. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us. That is why I’m working hard with great conservative candidates like Jesse Kelly in Arizona, Greg Popaditch here in San Diego County…..

AJM: Well, let’s just wrap this up for today since we have a bad connection. I just wanted to quickly follow up on your quip that you wouldn’t care if Obama was from the moon as long as his politics weren’t from Stalingrad- which was very clever, by the way. But you started saying something else, and I lost most of the words.

AJM: It was the most brilliant thing you’ve ever said! (laughs) It sure sounded good, the little bits and pieces I’m getting.

AJM: On that same subject though, there’s been a lot of research, from myself included, that Obama does not meet the constitutional qualifications.

DH: I think to some degree that it reflects the frustration of a conservative electorate which has itself to blame, partially, for the democrat takeover of Congress and the Presidency. In some places we had an extremely low turnout. And that frustration is manifested in grumbling about Obama’s birth place, and that he still convinced a majority of Americans to vote for him over the Republican candidate. It’s too late to grumble whether Obama met Constitutional muster in 2008. But it is not too late win the Congress back in 2010, and that is what we need to be concentrating on. People who spent days wringing their hands over his birth place could have been registering voters and helping people they know to get out and vote. Let’s say Obama hadn’t won, and old Hillary Clinton had won the nomination. With the same Republican turnout, she would have become president, with precisely the same policies.

AJM: Yep, that’s probably true. And I’m going to tell you why, at least from my perspective. His name is John McCain. I know literally dozens of conservatives, mostly conservative Republicans, who would not vote for him. We can’t repeat that kind of mistake again. I think we discussed this before: We need Reaganite, not a watered down, ‘what side of the issue will he come down on’ type of Republican. That’s why we lost. It didn’t help that Bush had become unpopular to start with.

Anyway, the point I was making about Arizona’s law – yeah its water under the bridge for 2008 – but Arizona and other states are going to hopefully make it a requirement going forward. Not counting on it eliminating him, but there is a chance. From the research I’ve done and seen, his birth circumstances are pretty iffy.

DH: Yeah. I don’t know of anyone who has made it conclusive, or who has conclusively followed that trail of investigation. It could happen, but you can’t depend on it happening. But I do know that elections are won and lost by purposeful people who turnout to support good candidates.

DH: Well, let’s look at that argument. The first big battle the liberals lost in the Republican Party was the battle between Barry Goldwater and Rockefeller in 1964. It culminated in the battle at the Cow Palace in California at the nominating convention. The liberals abandoned the Republican ticket, and Goldwater lost overwhelmingly. Then when Reagan won, and basically defeated more moderate Republican candidates in the nominating process of 1980, the Republican Party united, liberals and conservatives. And we won the presidency. And as you noted, in overwhelming victories. And we did the same thing against a liberal opponent, Mondale, in the 2nd Reagan term. How many states did Mondale actually win, he won a couple….

DH: Yeah. So the idea that we are going to take the ball and go home, as conservatives, if we don’t get our guy nominated, through a legitimate nominating process is a problem. I ran against McCain; on the other hand, McCain won. So we ask liberals to stick with the team though their man lost, and in the last Reagan elections they did. And the Republican Party needs to be unified going into this next set of elections.

I think we are going to have a conservative Republican candidate, but I don’t believe in the efficacy of ‘grumble politics’. If you grumble that you got the wrong guy who won the nomination of your party, so you sit on your hands, and you let an extreme liberal ruin the country as a result of that.

AJM: And I understand your position because you are a Republican of stature, have been a member of that party all of your life basically and are deeply involved…

AJM: (laughing) But what I think you are seeing manifested in the Tea Parties is you are seeing almost as many signs to get rid of the RINOs.

DH: That may be true, but let me tell you a liberals dream. A liberals dream is to turn the tea party folks into a counterpart to the Ralph Nader candidacy for the presidency. Where you have a split, and you replicate situations like the Bob Dornan race in Orange County where Dornan lost to liberal democrat Loretta Sanchez by less than 300 votes. And the Libertarian candidate, if I recall correctly, took 5000 votes in that race. So that’s probably why you are seeing people like Minnick, Minnick’s campaign, elicit support from the a so-called Tea Party leader, hoping to see that organization develop into a de facto third party thereby locking in the democrat candidates. While they may fall below a majority, will be able to take on and defeat a divided Republican Party. I think we should resist the idea of dividing the Republican Party, there is not enough of us to get divided up.

AJM: But here is my point: The majority, or I should say a healthy chunk of the Tea Party people, are actually independents. They are not Republicans.

DH: No, no, I understand that; the point is they are conservatives. And if you are a Democrat strategist right now, your strategy is to formalize the Tea Party movement into a separate party. If the Tea Party movement had someone on the ballot as a Tea Party candidate, if it formalizes into a 3rd Party, then you are going to have ballots which will have a Democrat candidate versus a Republican candidate, and a libertarian candidate, and a Tea Party candidate. You will end up with the Libertarian and the Tea Party members taking away the margin of victory from the Republican candidate.

Now the point I just made to you about the Dornan race in California where Bob Dornan lost by a couple hundred votes to Loretta Sanchez, a liberal Democrat, the Libertarian took 5000 votes. So in an effort to elect somebody they thought was more conservative than Bob Dornan, though I think that’d be very, very difficult to do (chuckles), they ensconced a liberal Democrat in that position.

AJM: The Libertarians are a long established party of mostly goofballs, and occasionally they do just what happened to Dornan. They pick off enough votes, like Ralph Nader does sometimes against liberals, to make us lose a race. And that’s been going on for a while now.

DH: What I’m telling you very simply though, is that the strategists from the other side would like nothing better than to see the Tea Party formalize into a separate party with separate candidates on the ballot, thereby splitting off the Republican voters such that Democrat candidates, as unpopular as they are, win the races with pluralities rather than majorities.

We have to fight against that! If that happens then we got the Tea party, unfortunately and tragically, maintaining the same liberal democrats in office that they energized to defeat, that they intended to defeat!

AJM: Yes. And my response to that is, yes, what you are saying is about 98 percent correct, but so many in the Tea Party movement, including myself and including generally many of the staunchest conservative members of society, is that they blame the Republicans for a fair amount of the nation’s grief.

Just on the TARP alone, 75 percent of the country, 80 percent of the country was against TARP, and here was the leadership of the Republican Party, YOU excluded I might add, telling us how damn important this worthless pile of garbage was, and force feeding it to Americans. That’s when people first started getting angry again. They do not want to see slow Republican socialism anymore than they want to see Obama’s fast track socialism!

DH: I don’t either, but the answer to that is: You want to exert your influence in terms of maintaining the Republican Party as the conservative party, and when it strays from that position, forcibly moving it back.

The effect of these split offs is that you actually end up damaging two things, if you split off and formalize an additional party, you end up handing the election to your adversaries, the liberal democrats. You hand them the election on a silver platter. At the same time, by taking your energy and resources away from the Republican Party and taking it to a third party, you debilitate the conservative core of the Republican Party and you allow the liberals to have a greater hand in determining the direction of the GOP. You weaken the conservative backbone of the Republican Party by abandoning it.

DH: So there’s a double dynamic there that accrues to the detriment of conservatives. If conservatives want a good result, they need to strengthen the Republican Party, strengthen and add to that conservative core of the Republican Party, and win some elections.

That was the genius of Ronald Reagan. He was able to oppose liberals in the party, beat them back as he did in these nominating processes, but then unite them in the general election. He did that because we were all Republicans.

AJM: That’s true. But it takes a Reaganite. And a John McCain cannot do it. He just can’t.

DH: Well, so what are you complaining about? You can’t simply say I’m not going to support the party unless I get a guy like this guy who comes around about once in a century! (laughs)

DH: You may not be able to expect to live that long, Jim!(laughs) Well listen, I’m coming up on another canyon, so let’s have another conversation in the next couple days.

DH: Hey, you’re a great American and I’ll get back to you with the name of that guy who is running up in Washington.

AJM: Excellent. I want to finish this conversation because I think it is an important one.

AJM: Great. Last time we talked you were going through a canyon so it cut our conversation short a little bit, so I want to revisit….

DH: (laughs) We’ve gone through a lot of canyons over the last several months.

AJM: (laughs) Well first of all, before we even get into the old stuff, I think you’ve become aware of the raging controversy – quote, unquote – about Arizona passing their tough anti-illegal alien law.

DH: Of course, but what are the latest details on the law, I only saw what was in the papers.

AJM: The law says that if they reason to believe you might be illegal, for example they pulled you over for some reason, and the police have the suspicion you might be illegal, they will ask you to produce your papers or documentation that you are legally in country. It’s not just rounding them up either. It’s questioning them when they are involved in the commission of some other disturbance or violation or police interface. So any times the cops have an incident, they are authorized to check on immigration status.

And as you know, Arizona has a very high population of illegal aliens. It’s basically what Maricopa County has been doing under Sheriff Arpaio for years.

DH: So they are authorized to check on immigration status then report them or deliver them to the Border Patrol if in fact they are illegals?

AJM: If in fact they are illegals, they’ll arrest them and hand them over to ICE or the Border Patrol.

DH: What is the status? Is it Law at this point? Last I heard it was sent to the governor.

AJM: It was signed into law by Jan Brewer, Governor Brewer, last Friday or Saturday, I believe. But goes into effect in 3 months. All the Border Control advocates have given her praise – in fact 70 to 75% of Arizonans are in favor of it. But you’d never know that from the unhinged proclamations from Obama, Napolitano – hell, even Jeb Bush came out against it. All the open borders queens are showing their slips.

DH: Well first, it’s been traditional practice, a traditional and necessary practice for state and local law enforcement officers to refer offenders of federal law, or those who have broken federal law, to the feds in carrying out their law enforcement exercises on a daily basis. If you arrest someone for drunken driving locally, and you become aware of the fact that the person has also committed a federal crime in another state or in that state, you hand them over to the federal prosecutorial chain for disposition.

Now that’s been the traditional practice. It’s also a necessary practice of this country. And it works in reverse also in that people who are apprehended by the feds for violating federal law and are found to be in violation of a state law, that information is transferred to the state prosecutors. This way, both jurisdictions have the opportunity to deal with people who violated their laws.

The exception or avoidance of that practice has been historically immigration law. This is the once place where, thanks to the bleeding hearts, where this practice has often been ignored. I remember several decades ago, the mayor of San Diego, California had a written directive to the San Diego Police Department NOT to turn over illegal Aliens!

DH: He instructed them not to turn over illegal aliens apprehended under city statutes. It became a Sanctuary City where they didn’t turn over illegal aliens to the feds for prosecution or deportation. It was a direct order not to do so. So that was an example of the “exception”.

But my point is, in other areas of law, that’s always been the rule to hand over the criminals to the right authorities. It’s proper and necessary. It reflects the best of federalism; that is the cooperation between the state and federal jurisdictions!

So it is strange, yet not too surprising, that the federal government would object to that. You’d think that if they had someone guilty of drug smuggling under federal law or some other violation of federal statutes, you’d think Obama and Napalitano would appreciate the local jurisdiction turning that person over for prosecution. If the person is simply an illegal alien you’d think, instead of squawking, they’d also appreciate that since the federal government has NOT carried out its obligation to secure the borders!!

AJM: No doubt! The thing that has been common, I would say, if they find someone who is an illegal alien through some minor infraction like a tail light being out, that’s normally a fine, right? They’ve been letting them go!

DH: Well listen, lots of people who have violated fairly high level of law, who participated in severe violations of federal law, have been apprehended initially due to some minor infraction. Or identified or caught when they violated some minor law.

DH: So detaining illegal aliens, regardless of the violation, is in the best interests of Arizona and the country.

DH: Listen, I’ve just had guests come in. I’ve got to sign off, Jim (laughs). One of my best buddies just came in the door here. I haven’t seen him for a long time. I think I owe him money. I’ve got to hang up and answer (laughter in backround).

DH: But I’m glad we got that one nailed down. I think that apprehending and turning over illegal aliens, that reciprocity between jurisdictions in terms turning over violators is the best of federal practices. There is nothing abhorrent, strange or unusual about it! So good for Arizona for continuing the tradition.

AJM: The thing I think that Arizona did in the verbiage of the law that has the liberals and amnesty queens in a lather is; the way they allowed the police to arrest them regardless of the violation, they made it against the law in Arizona to be an illegal alien in the state and….

DH: In other words they made state law on illegal aliens consistent with federal law! Good.

AJM: Yep, it’s a darn good thing. OK. I’ll talk to you in a couple hours and we’ll revisit the old stuff.

AJM: OK. I wanted to wrap up what we were talking about a week and a half a go or so. I’ll remind you what that was. We were talking about the tea parties, and how one of their characters came out and endorsed Democrat Walt Minnick, and that led to a conversation about how the Republicans should interact with the Tea Party movement. You’ve stated before that the tea parties were not only good, but they were “necessary”.

DH: Exactly. The House Republicans, the conservative members have been going to a bunch of the Tea Party rallies and in fact have been the guest speakers at most of them. There’s not a cleavage between the Tea Parties and the Republican members of the House, most whom have been very solid.

My point was that the fondest dreams of the Democrats is that the Tea Party would become a political party and have a separate line on the ballot, thereby splitting the conservative vote allowing the leftists to remain in office. That’s their fondest dream and I’m sure Minnick orchestrated getting a Tea Party member, which would probably not be hard, to get a single member of a Tea Party group to say he’s a good guy. As you know, he’s a square peg in a round hole in that particular district in Idaho.

I wonder what he would have done if that same Tea Party member had asked him not to vote for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker?

AJM: I hear ya. If I’m not mistaken, I think I saw a blurb about your son, Duncan, being at a Tea Party rally in California, as was Gunny Pop.

DH: Well yeah, sure. But all over the nation a lot of the House Republican members have orchestrated or helped to lead Tea Party rallies, or have been major parts of it. And a lot of the inspiration for the Tea Parties has come from their strong stances and rhetoric against the Democrat’s socialist agenda.

You know what Jui-jitsu is? Jui-jitso is when your adversary comes at you with a certain momentum, and instead of stopping that momentum, you grab hold of the guy, and use your adversary’s own momentum to continue him forward and put him on his back. And the fondest hopes of the Democrat strategists is to use the momentum of the Tea Party to foster a separate party and lay the Republicans out, by having that 2nd conservative line on the ballot. They’d like to see a replication of the Orange County district where conservative Bob Dornan lost to liberal Democrat Loretta Sanchez by 250 votes, while the Libertarian party, which most assuredly would never have voted Sanchez, had 5000 votes for the Libertarian candidate, allowing the liberal to slip into office. That’s the fondest dream of the deep thinkers on the Democratic side.

They are trying to use the momentum of the Tea Parties not to oust Nancy Pelosi, but to strongly embed her.

AJM: I don’t think there is a lot of potential for that because, by and large, the Tea Partiers are a little wiser than that.

DH: Well, a lot of people thought the “conservatives” on the Libertarian side were wiser than to go about placing their own line on the ballot. And that ended up electing, in the case of Loretta Sanchez and others, liberal Democrats to office. When you ask a Libertarian about that after they’ve railed against the leftwing politics, and you point that out, you end up getting a blank stare from them; because they really have no answer to that. They have essentially sent liberal democrats into office.

AJM: That’s true. But I want to temper that with the notion – and I’ve been involved and I know lots of people who are Tea Partiers, that by and large, they have no intention to start another party, and the leadership has no intention of doing that now. There might be a few that do, but not many.

DH: I think that is true. The vast majority don’t want to. But if you have 500,000 people in a movement, you’ll have a few, of course, that have different ideas. It’s human nature. But I’m NOT saying that is something that is imminent; not at all. What I am saying is that it’s the passionate dreams of Democrat strategists, that the movement results in another line on the ballot and splits the conservative vote, allowing more socialists to sail into office.

Regarding the Minnick thing, you ought to call the Tea Party endorser and interview him for your internet news. And ask him how they think that Minnick’s vote for guys like John Conyers as chairman of judiciary, Charlie Rangel for Ways and Means, and Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House with her ‘no drilling’ on oil, ‘abortion now’, weak defense, and state-owned heretofore private enterprise!! Ask how that is supported by Minnick’s vote when he cast his vote for Speaker. You might ask if that person has received a promise from Minnick not to vote for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker again in January after the 2010 elections. Why don’t you call and ask him?

DH: The endorsement of Minnick may have been a contrived deal. It may not have been, ‘cause many 1000s of people who don’t like the way the government is being handled have joined the Tea Party movement.

Even though Minnick has voted with Republicans on a number of bills, he’s been one of the people who Nancy Pelosi has allowed to hang back on a vote which was going to pass overwhelmingly anyway – for re-election purposes.

AJM: That is true. This led us into the conversation regarding the ‘Kennedy wing of the party’, so to speak. There are two goals that I can decipher from talking to folks in the Tea Party and reading everything I get my hands on. The two main goals are Constitutionalism, and bringing the Republican Party back to its Reagan roots. Those are two prime objectives of the Tea Partiers. Even you said , last time, that when the Republicans go astray, it’s up to conservatives to pull them back to the conservative principles.

DH: That’s true. But the way we’ve done that is by selecting the right leader. I don’t know if you’ve studied the convention of 64 when we basically had the Goldwater wing versus the Rockefeller wing. The shootout they had at the Cow Palace in San Francisco in which Goldwater got the nomination for the party. That was a time of coming back. The Reagan nomination in 1980 was a time of coming back. So the retrieval is usually accomplished through the nomination and the presidential election.

That is something we need to be working for right now. And obviously, it would be greatly helped if we pull the majority back for the Republicans in the House and Senate in the midterms. I don’t know what the prospects are for the Senate, but it’s certainly doable in the House, if a lot of things fall in place.

DH: But if guys like Walt Minnick keep their seats, we won’t win the majority.

DH: The Republican Party has to be smart enough – I know that’s asking a lot – not to fall prey to a few democratic conservative votes that Nancy Pelosi allowed these square pegs to make.

AJM: I agree with that. I think we are on the same page. Where there is some distance between us is what to do with the primaries. I want to see us use the primaries to take out some of the more liberal Republican incumbents. That’s where the rub is between the RNC, the NRSC, and the party apparatus versus the Tea Parties. The Tea Parties want to yank some of these SOBs out by the roots. So not only in these ‘open’ seats are we seeing contested primaries, but, like in John McCain’s case, you have a sitting incumbent, and you see a lot of conservatives trying to take him out.

DH: Yeah. But let me tell you one thing McCain did. When the Senate was as limp as a dishrag on a rack, McCain hung in there. And with all of his other shaky positions, mainly on illegals and the border, that are inconsistent with the conservative movement, that effort was key to winning in Iraq.

You didn’t have two strong Republicans to rub together in the Senate. They were falling like wet noodles. In fact, one of the very few Senators that stood up for Iraq was Lieberman, who has a very liberal voting record on social issues and was sitting as a Democrat. But Lieberman hung in there. My point is that I haven’t seen a perfect politician yet. And every time I get mad at McCain for one of his nutty positions, I’m reminded of his strong stance in Iraq that was key to making the turn in 07 and 08.

The other thing is, obviously JD is great on the border. He’s got a great position on that, much more consistent with my views. And Arizonans will vote accordingly.

But if you are looking for a red hot lefty, who is against the right to keep and bear arms, pro-abortion, weak on defense, and weak on the border - that’s four different dimensions. So my point is, you have to use a sense of balance and a sense of the big mission.

Let me give you an example. When we were faced with the first Falluja, right after the US contractors bodies were hung off the bridge, in the tough Sunni town of Falluja, Bremer who was the civilian presidential envoy – essentially the governor of Iraq during the occupation - was a State Department type and not a military type. He determined that we had to go into Falluja, guns blazing, to avenge those hangings on the bridge. The Marines, who were professional fighters said, ‘well wait a minute, we’re going to have a lot of collateral damage, meaning a lot of civilians were going to be hit, no matter how hard you try to keep the focus on the enemy’ – that happens in war. They said ‘you are going to end up turning the Sunni tribes against us. Al Jazeera will be running wall to wall coverage of injured civilians, that will be plastered all over the arab world. We may end up getting some of the people that strung up the contractors, but in the long run we’ll set ourselves back’. That was the US Marine position from the guys that actually had to go in and fight. The civilians said no, that they wanted an immediate, hardline, front page, top of the news reaction. So we went into Falluja hard. And immediately you had pictures flooding the airwaves of injured civilians and young people. And essentially you had the start of what is known as the ‘Sunni Wars’, which we ultimately won, but after we lost a lot of Marines.

So my point is, just saying we are going to cleanse the party of anybody who has ever voted on the liberal side on a single issue, can end up being a self defeating policy, a self defeating philosophy.

And I’m reminded of my race with Van Deerlin, as a Republican in a 2 to 1 Democrat district, I had to sell my house to run because I couldn’t raise any money from the Republican Party. But in the next door district, they were fighting a GOP primary and they spent millions. So a few of those dollars that would have allowed us to take a Democrat seat and turn it into a Republican seat, instead the party spent millions of dollars arguing over who was going to get the sure fire Republican seat next door.

So we have to have a sense of strategy and have to keep your eye on the big mission.

AJM: I agree with most of that, because I am a conservative who generally votes Republican, but more and more folks are considering themselves independent conservatives. Not to form another party necessarily, but their idea is to keep the flame to the feet of the GOP. If the GOP wins the House back, for example – a lot of these up and comers and even the last class of GOP freshman, including your son, they are mostly pretty staunchly conservative.

But if the GOP manages to just win seats in the Senate, and the Senate is still the type of guys that have been in there for year and years, they are going to be proposing cap and trade, working with Obama on that stuff, and doing all kinds of crap like they’ve done over the years! Some of these ideas and policies we are just trying to rip out by the roots. And I think that is why you see the excitement for some of these challengers – and I’m not talking just about McCain. There are a lot of challenges going on against incumbents. Bennett in Utah, just an awful senator. He’s got a strong, conservative challenger in his primary.

DH: Well listen, that’s fine. To each his own. Everybody in politics is an independent contractor and has the right to do whatever they want to do. I don’t begrudge anybody their prerogative to enter a Republican Primary and try to win that primary, whether it is an open seat or a seat held by an incumbent. That’s perfectly legitimate.

But me, myself, I’ve got, as we all have, a limited amount of talent, time and resources to put into this thing we call American politics. When I shoot my ammo in a midterm election, I want to fire at the Democrats, not my own guys.

Another thing, when you say we’ve got to cleanse or purge the Republican Party, the guys who have won big have been guys who have kept their conservative principles, and attracted people to come in, persuaded people to come in from varying philosophies and back them up.

You know one of the great sayings that Abraham Lincoln said was, when asked why he didn’t destroy his enemies, he said “I do destroy them, I make them my friends”. Ronald Reagan had a lot of guys that voted for him that didn’t call themselves conservatives, although he was very conservative.

AJM: And when we are talking presidential elections, that’s going to matter, like in 2012. Like I told you in our last conversation, I truly believe it’s actually going to take a real Reaganite to unite the party.

AJM: If we get another McCain or a Romney or some guy that talks a conservative game now to get elected but when you look back on their record, they stink to high heaven.

DH: Well, listen. You know what that means? That means we’ve got to get out there and work hard to make it a reality. So get out there and work hard!

But listen, I have to turn my attention elsewhere right now. We just walked into the Denny’s restaurant. We gotta order up for my big boy here.

AJM: Oh, great. Well, I’ll let you go, I really appreciate all the time you’ve given.

AJM: Oh yeah. Conservatism first, Republicanism second, but constitutionalism always. Also with your admonishment to keep our eye on the ball for 2010, I will continue forward.

We’ll keep pushing you out into the limelight too. After this 2010 elections, which we’re gonna win, we are going to need you out there in the public eye as much as we can get you.

I’ll try to see you when I get up to Idaho on one of these pushes for Vaughn Ward.

AJM: Absolutely, and you also have to give me the name of the gentleman that called your wife. Was he running for a House seat or Senator?

DH: Yeah, she gave it to me the other day, but I didn’t keep it in my notes here. But I’ll get it next time. I think it was a hispanic name. Anyway, Lynne doesn’t remember either, but we’ll get it for you next time.