A Vanity to Hannity on Reagan, Rove and the GOP Establishment

I have watched Sean Hannity for a number of years and listened to his radio show. (I will admit at the outset that my tastes run more in the direction of Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh, and I know the three of them are good friends.)

To be blunt, the continued appearance of Karl Rove on his show is an affront to anyone who is serious about creating a new and permanent conservative majority. When I see Rove appear, I change the channel. I certainly have no problem with frankly liberal guests like Juan Williams, Bob Beckel and Ed Rendell among others. I think he features Dana Perino and Nicolle Wallace far too often and rarely does a genuine conservative like Jedidiah Bila or Craig Shirley show up on anything other than his "Great American Panel".

Yet Rove appears night after night. I have noticed many Freepers are tuning Hannity out and I am one of them. (I myself listen to Mark Levin instead of Hannity since he happens to come on in Hannity's 9 p.m. EST time) slot. Hannity, who styles himself a "Ronald Reagan conservative", is the premier conservative program on television as I write this, and I am writing to appeal to Hannity to distance himself from Rove and others of his confreres (Tucker Carlson was guest hosting for him last night) who are in the camp of the GOP Establishment for two reasons. First, your association with Rove is going to hurt your ratings if it has not already.

Second, since I take him at his word that he is a Reagan conservative, I recommend that Sean Hannity read pages 21-23 of Rendezvous with Destiny, the great history of the 1980 Reagan campaign in which author Craig Shirley quotes heavily from Reagan's speech to CPAC in 1977:

"Reagan's method of taking on the status quo was different from Carter's. In the opening months of 1977, he addressed important conservative organizations to explain his vision for a "New Republican Party"...Reagan told his young listeners [at CPAC] to look beyond the simple math of the two parties and instead to focus on the disparity between self identified conservatives and liberals.. During his CPAC address he noted that...by a 43-19 plurality those polled by Harris said they would prefer to see the country move in a more conservative direction than liberal one.

Reagan called for bringing into the Republican fold those Democrats concerned with "social issues---law and order, abortion, busing, quota systems--[that]are usually associated with the blue collar, ethnic, and religious groups." In short he proposed a fusion between those mercantile and economic interests long associated with the GOP, who were mostly concerned with government regulations, and social conservatives, who believed the fabric of society was also threatened by big, intrusive government...

Then Reagan took on the GOP, telling his CPAC audience that the party "cannot be limited to the country club, big business image that ...it is burdened with today. The 'New Republican Party' I am speaking about is going to have room for the man and woman in the factories, for the farmer, for the cop on the beat."

"Reagan received a standing ovation from the young conservatives gathered at CPAC. The "True Believers" understood Reagan's call. The former governor was not only taking on the established order in Washington, he was also continuing the fight against the dug-in and hostile interests within the GOP. His followers understood that Reagan believed in a "natural aristocracy" of men who climbed to their highest ambitions without the heavy handed aid of nobility or government connections. He was defining a new ideology of optimistic and enlightened conservatism that was unsettling to the powers-that-be that ran the Republican party. They didn't understand it, so how could they possibly support it?"

Two observations about this excerpt, which was quoted verbatim by Mark Levin the other night:

I believe the fault line between Reagan, and his true heirs in the Emerging Conservative Majority, on the one hand, and the Establishment are the social issues such as abortion and gay marriage, which are font and center in our society. The Establishment treats those issues with timidity and embarrassment, preferring to de-emphasize such cultural issues in favor of the "mercantile issues" such as taxes and spending. Where Reagan saw a FUSION of the social issues with the mercantile, or economic issues, Rove and his Establishment friends recommend an AMPUTATION of the social issues (and the constituencies which support them) from the so-called GOP Big Tent. At best, they will tolerate such issues but never emphasize or highlight them. In other words, they recommend that we give the huge constituency which supports social conservatism as little reason as possible to join the new Republican Party which Reagan envisioned. If they like Democrat economics, these social conservatives will go ahead and vote for the Democrat. More likely, they will not vote at all, and the GOP will have a turnout problem. 2010 is a case in point.

Unfortunately, the attempt to run the election on purely economic issues without regard to social issues likely cost the GOP some close seats, both in the House as well as Colorado and Nevada, and possibly Alaska. In Alaska, for example, Joe Miller won the primary with the aid of a heavy turnout of Right to Life Voters, since there was a parental consent abortion issue on the ballot. With the exception of a commercial by Jim Demint highlighting Lisa Murkowski's pro-abortion record, there was little discussion of abortion in the general election, although Miller was the only pro-life candidate in a three way race. Had Miller made abortion the centerpiece of his campaign, using Palin early and often on the issue, in effect treating this as a "base election", he surely would be in a different position that the one he finds himself in now.

The point is that Reagan saw the GOP as a "both, and" party. Rove and the Establishment, too embarrassed by abortion and to afraid of the cries of racism and intolerance from the La Raza and the Log Cabin Republicans, see the GOP as an "either, or" party. While Reagan wanted the Party to be a robust entity breathing in both its social and economic lungs, Rove and the Establishment want to return us to the pre-1980 days when GOP limped along on only its economic leg. Alas, too many conservatives (like Miller) appear to have drunk this kool-aid and stand to pay a price for it.

The dug-in and hostile elites in the GOP, which Reagan battled throughout his career are exemplified by Rove, the NRSC and the Delaware and Alaska party apparatchiks, among others, who sabotaged conservative candidates coast to coast. It is beyond outrageous that Sean Hannity continues to give a prominent platform to Rove, who is the most egregious offender of all.

To Hannity, I say one thing: If you are serious about remaking the GOP in Ronald Reagan's image, there are two very simple things you can do. You can begin to promote both the socially conservative component of the GOP coalition (principally the right to life) as BOLDLY as you promote its economic agenda. (Warning: This may subject you to ridicule on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, among the Peggy Noonans and the Kathleen Parkers). This is what Reagan would do. And he would do it both because it is the right thing to do and because it is the politically savvy thing to do.

Second, stop giving such a prominent platform to those within the GOP (like Rove) who not only are unsettled by the "New Republican Party" envisioned by Reagan, but are overtly hostile to it. Trust me, that view is amply represented by the Kathleen Parkers, the Peggy Noonans and the Joe Scarboroughs on the other networks. If you occasionally have someone of Rove's ilk on, invite a conservative to rebut them. There are no shortage of great conservatives, real Reagan conservatives like Jeffrey Lord and Craig Shirley (not to mention Levin and Rush), who could be called upon for commentary, and they could both educate you and debunk some of the political fairy tales Rove and company are peddling.

Until you make some changes such as the above, your audience is going to be shrinking as fast as Rove's "Big Tent."

As for this vanity, well, it sucks....AND...Let me guess, you're sitting at home alone at your computer and want some company..............if that's the case then get yourself a blowup doll.

Great insight into what the OP is saying.

You post like an eight year old, but guess not since you have been posting your "words of wisdom" for over 10 years.

Well said. Hear! Hear!

I also loathe and despise the toad-like toe sucker - even more than I am repulsed by Rove — and I knew Tony Snow and Dana Perino is no Tony Snow — let alone is a conservative.

And this evening, November 17, 2010, Hannity, had one of FoxNews’ repulsive little inhouse liberal creeps on with Miss Coulter, who was not permitted to utter three consecutive words without being talked over.

The suggestion is ludicrous and insults ones intelligence that FoxNews — or come to that any of the Murdoch empire’s world-wide scores of totalitarian-top-heavy Left-Wing media outlets — is “conservative” or “leans Republican.”

To again flog a dead analogy, I know conservatives and Republicans — and FoxNews is yellow-press-TV-Watcher fodder. And so is its every headliner and its every loss-leader weekend creep.

Hannity was talkingover a guest? He drives me crazy when he does that. I find myself yelling at the TV “Shut up and let them finish!!!”

When he was on with Colmes, and a guest was responding to a question from Colmes, you could always hear Hannity in the background saying the guest’s name over and over to interrupt. Very annoying.

The person doing the talking over was one of FoxNews’ creepy little in-house Lanny-Davis-like liberal lightweights: Peter Johnson.

Hannity, who is, as the consequence, over, for me, was encouraging the pathetic little basta*d’s incessant yapping.

FoxNews has jumped the shark.

Not a big one as online news-gathering is an involved, interactive exercise and allows one to do ones own fact-checking.

“Interesting, you know also that Reagan was the guy who ordered us out of Beruit, instead of ordering us to go in and get the stinking little bastards with napalm and carpet bombing.”

Reagan wasn’t a fool who would put retaliation over strategic interest.

OK
Those ‘strategic interests’ worked out really well, didn’t it?

Beruit was the second defeat of America by Muslims. The first was Iran.

The withdrawal only taught the Muslims that if they make a big enough explosion, kill enough people, America will run away, duck and hide. It was part of the beginning of modern Islamic terrorism.

Don’t get me wrong. I liked RR. But this was a mistake of massive proportions.

So far, their analysis has been correct.

“So far, their analysis has been correct.”

Thus spoke Zarathustra? Or is that your cogent analysis?

We don’t get the chance to replay history in order to learn whether our strategic interests would have ended in disaster had Reagan followed your advice. But Reagan didn’t have the luxury of simply deciding to flex American muscle in order to send a message to Islamic terrorists, assuming we could have decided which group was responsible and where they were gathered. Reagan had a much bigger worry in the form of the Soviet Union which was very active in backing Arab terrorist groups. That was a strategic interest of the first order, and the Soviets would have been more than happy to get us enmeshed in a proxy war to waste our resources. Reagan was a serious man surrounded by advisers like Cap Weinberger whose experience went back to his days as Gen MacArthur’s intelligence officer. Somehow I suspect that their decision to withdraw rates higher at the War College than hubristic fantasies of teaching the Arabs a lesson.

They already have ‘ended in disaster’. That is the current world we live in.

Stand up or shutup, we either do it or we don’t.

There is no way to be “sort of” pregnant.

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